But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

Where we are from... [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.

Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.