Writing is about Fighting
Conflict isn’t important for what it is but for what it tells us about your characters. Your character isn’t what you tell us they think or feel. Your character is what they do. Action is character: what they do shows us who they are. A lot of writers make the mistake of trying to tell us who their characters are, when 100% of the time they would be better of sticking them in a tricky situation and showing the reader how they get out of it.
So, what does conflict mean, and how do we right good conflict?
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Our Book for September/October is The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
Charmaine sees an advertisement for a project called Positron that promises you a job, a place to live, a bed to sleep in – imagine how appealing that would be if you were working in a dive bar and sleeping in your car. The only catch is that once you’re in there, you can’t get out.
You’ll notice an important change – we’ve switched from a book a month to a book every two months, responding to feedback (including from me) that it was difficult to keep on top of the reading. So the deadline for your feedback is October 31st!
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“Write what you know” is one of the most common and misleading pieces of advice given to writers. It is often taken to mean that your writing should stick close to your own life and first-hand experiences. It sounds like good common sense – a way to avoid making and idiot of yourself and bring realism to your work. But, in the words of Admiral Akbar, it’s a trap.
Writing what you know is intended to make your writing believable. You were a police officer, so your story about a police officer will ring true. Straying too far from what you know threatens inauthenticity, and readers disengaging because what you are writing isn’t true.
Unfortunately, this interpretation of “write what you know” misses an essential fact about all good writing. Good writing is about discovery and imagination. If you only write what you know, your stories will be flat, sad, and uninteresting – because you have discovered nothing and underused your imagination. So, what do we do if we can’t just write what we know?
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Link :Amazon, Goodreads, Price: £9.99
Our protagonist’s life has ground to his halt: his wife has divorced him after having an affair, his business is grinding to a halt as the friend with whom he founded it steadily succumbs to alcoholism, and his best friend Rat disappeared years ago – only occasionally sending bizarre, non-sequitur letters containing money or more recently a picture of some sheep.
This picture becomes important, however, because it contains the image of a sheep with the mark of a star – a sheep that is of great interest to the shadowy right-wing organisation that have controlled Japan for years. An organisation that will pay him a great deal of money to find that sheep – or destroy him if he does not.
Spurred on by his new girlfriend and her magical ears, this man with no motivation finds himself on a quest to find a single lost sheep on a mountainside in a country full of mountains. What he finds will make all that seem relatively normal.
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Girl next door Brooke Knight is building a new life for herself in Michigan. There she meets Calvin Jones, successful owner of a coffee shop and a gym, who looks great in a tight t-shirt. When the two sweethearts fall swiftly and madly in love, it seems like everything is coming up roses. But a dark secret from Brooke’s past is coming to tear it all apart.
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