"just telling the tale" - does this work?
I know (I think) many stories that have a point they want to present to the audience.
However, I wanted to focus on the excitement of the adventure first. The result always seems to devolve into a dry style as though reading a manual. On the other hand, focusing too much on "proving a point" comes off more as preaching to the audience, and ends up muddying the story.
Should I be aiming for a happy middle ground between the two, or is it possible to write a satisfying story that revolves around the characters rather than, say, a moral?
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Stories are not about proving points. A novelist may have a point they want to push, but if the point overwhelms the story than the result can only appeal to the people who already agree with the author's point. The great novelists who had a point they wanted to make (Steinbeck, Dickens) told a story about people oppressed by the institutions they opposed and by and large left the reader to draw their own conclusions. They created an experience with sympathetic characters and in so doing won the sympathies of many who might otherwise have been indifferent.
But the real question you have to face here is what makes a story exciting? It is not a catalogue of incidents happening for no discernible reason to people you don't care about. Just telling the tale, in the sense of just relating the incidents of the plot, does not work because it does not create engagement.
Between the plot and the point, there must be a character arc. At the heart of the character arc is a moral question that the character must face. By moral question I mean simply that it is a question about values for the character. It does not have to mean the the writer is advocating for one moral system over another. But it is the moral question that the character faces, how they face it, and how they decide that provides the core of the excitement for the reader.
Will Rick remain the guy who won't stick his neck out for anyone? Will he get on the plane with Ingrid Bergman? Or will he decide the the problems of two small people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world? Will Louis let Major Strasser arrest Rick for letting Laslo escape or will he to join the resistance? These are all moral choices that the characters do not want to have to face, but are forced into facing by events. That is where you find the excitement in a story.
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