What's the Most Inspiring Character Trait of All?

I think it's resilience, and I'll tell you why.

I never really hit it off with Steinbeck; I tried reading The Grapes of Wrath and found it too bleak, too dusty, so I approached Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell with some anxiety, as both novels deal with the hopeless lives of downtrodden white communities in the neighbouring states of Oklahoma and Missouri.

I needn't have worried.  I was bowled over by Winter's Bone, which tells the story of Ree, a teenage girl fending for her family in the Missouri Badlands, where her rogue father has mysteriously disappeared.

This is how Ree describes her forebears,

"...kin who had so many bones that broke, broke and mended, broke and mended wrong, so they limped through life on the bad-mend bones for year upon year until falling dead in a single evening from something that sounded wet in the lungs.  The men came to mind as mostly idle between nights of running wild or time in the pen, cooking moon and gathering around the spout, with ears chewed, fingers chopped, arms shot away, and no apologies grunted ever.  The women came to mind bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can't, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and Ree nodded yup.  Yup."

It is against this background that her quest to find her father and protect her family unfolds. Woodrell takes Ree (and us) to some dark places indeed, but what makes the book luminous rather than depressing is the way in which Ree's spirit burns with a bright and unquenchable light.  No matter what trials and setbacks she encounters, she remains unbowed. This, coupled with prose that is so rich you can taste it in your mouth, makes for heady reading; it makes for a good lesson in writing too. It's a fantastic example of what an attractive and aspirational quality resilience is. Reading about someone behaving indomitably at some level encourages us to do likewise, it's uplifting and inspiring - emotions all of us should be aiming to kindle in our readers.

Resilience is  a vital quality for writers too.  You need it to cope with the hard knocks and the disappointments; you need it to underpin the workings of your imagination.