A Cluttered Desk & an Organized Mind

I wonder who first said a cluttered desk is a sign of an organized mind. If that old saying is true, my mind must be organized indeed! Case in point? Here's a photo of my desk. It's a mess, isn't it? Each and every item, though, connects to a writing project I've got going on in my mind--and on paper. Let's a take a tour and you'll see what I mean.

First, front and center is my laptop. That's Misha's recent blog post on the screen. My desk would look pretty empty without my laptop and I bet yours would, too. That laptop is Grand Central Station for my entire day. My day job and my personal life are both connected to it. And of course, so is my writing life. My new series featuring Jamie Sinclair, a private investigator with nerves of steel and a shattered heart, is a December Random House release and this laptop played a vital role helping me reach that milestone.

To the left of my laptop, you'll see my huge coffee mug. Of course, the mug changes daily if not sooner. Hey, I'm cluttered, but I'm not icky! More often than not, though, there's a glass of water in that spot. Water is important to the health and well-being of your entire body, but especially to your brain. I try to stay hydrated because I need my brain to write. I may need it for other things too, but I'm a girl with priorities!

Moving on, you'll see a blue notebook behind the coffee mug. That notebook holds all kinds of tidbits related to the any story I'm working on currently. If you took a peek inside, you'd find a list of turning points for The Kill List: A Jamie Sinclair Novel as well as an entire string of juicy conflicts for the next books in the series. You just might find notes for other series, too. Hmmm...

And that green pen? The rest of the Eight know it well! That's my critiquing pen. I also use it when I move through line edits from my editor. The green ink is a signal to myself that I've seen a requested change and addressed it in the new, digital file I'm creating for her.

The background of the photo is stacked high with books. Admittedly, not all of them are mine. I share space with Mr. Christoff and he's got some bookish pursuits of his own. Sharing space can be a challenge, but I'd rather share space with him than have a room full of desks to myself.

So, now that you've seen my cluttered desk, tell me about yours. Is it cluttered? And is it the sign of your organized mind? The Eight and I would love to know!

Muppets and More: Childhood and the Stories Grown-Ups Crave

Kermit the Frog is the reason I became a broadcaster. In his tan trench coat, with his microphone in his long, green fingers, Kermit popped up all over Sesame Street, getting to the bottom of stories such as Humpty Dumpty’s demise. And on The Muppet Show, Kermit kept his cast of Muppets from galloping toward chaos as the ultimate stage manager, producer, and director.

As a result, my brother and I made up our own radio broadcasts and styled our own variety shows, recording our work on a General Electric tape recorder that was so old, Ray Dolby’s ideas about noise reduction and chrome alloy cassettes were a distant dream to us.

When I was five, one of my mother’s friends gave me my very own Muppet. I can’t remember his name, but he was purple and he wore a striped sweater and he came in a box. He came with a wardrobe of facial features, too, that stuck to his face with Velcro. I loved his glasses and his squishy orange nose. Soon, he began starring in the variety shows we recorded on those old GE cassettes which, come to think of it, were a lot like the tapes Mr. Rogers later showcased on his show and in the recent PBS video, “Garden of Your Mind.”

With all this, then, is it any wonder that I’m a veteran of broadcast news or that the heroine in my latest novel wears glasses?

Nope!

In fact, the books, songs, movies, and TV shows that touched us when we were kids continue to shape us as adults, too. They influence what we value in the stories we encounter today. But to paraphrase LeVar Burton of that childhood staple, Reading Rainbow, you don’t have to take my word for it. Chris Carter, creator of the 1990s runaway hit, The X-Files, said he wanted that show to recreate the feelings he had a as a kid in California when he watched Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Kolchak quit investigating the weird and the wonderful in 1975, but during the height of The X-Files’ popularity, a short-lived reincarnation starring Stuart Townsend and Gabrielle Union came to life and you could even catch the original episodes on some cable channels. Sure, those old episodes seem a little campy by today’s standards, but to a child of the ’70s, they were probably as thrilling as The Twilight Zone was in the ’60s or Fringe has been recently.

 

The bottom line is that Carter carried Kolchak with him into adulthood--and into what it means to have a great story. And I've carried the Muppets, Mr. Rogers, Nancy Drew, and even Remington Steele with me. With that said, I'm excited to see what stories may come from generations moved by Veronica Mars, Firefly, or Pretty Little Liars.

And I'd love to know what favorite childhood books, songs, movies, or TV shows have stayed with you. Which ones taught you what to look for in a story today?

 

Conflict: The Building Block of Compelling Fiction

Photo Credit: 123RF 

On Saturday, author of The Taker Trilogy, Alma Katsu, spoke to Washington Romance Writers about one of the building blocks of any story--conflict. Katsu, who earned a Masters’ degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University, equipped writers in attendance with tools to analyze and fix their own fiction when it falls flat--whether they’re writing literary fiction or genre fiction.

While we’re all programmed to avoid conflict, however, it's the tension created by conflict that is the driving force that creates a page-turner for your readers. Katsu argued that conflict is not the straight, steep uphill climb writers have been taught, but a jagged up-and-down ascent that moves upward until the climax and dénouement.

Conflict is every barrier that keeps a protagonist (or character) from obtaining their goal and can be either internal or external. We should use conflict to develop plot as well as reveal character and it applies to all characters, but it’s not the same as story or plot. Conflict is multi-layered. It drives your story forward and it adds dimension to your characters.

Katsu identified four types of conflict that are in every good story: central conflict; underlying, or chronic conflict; internal conflict; and transient conflict. If you’re finding your scene flat, you should analyze each scene, identifying the conflict. One or more of these four types of conflict should be in every scene. You need to ask yourself, "Do events resolve too easily?" If the answer is yes, then ask a second question: "What’s the worst thing that could happen here." Then make it happen.

Each step of progress your character makes should be met with opposition and setbacks in some form. By charting out your character’s goals and progress through the story, you can also see if you’ve inserted enough opposition to create the conflict and tension you need to keep your readers interested and reading.

The workshop provided excellent information and tools for any writer to improve their craft. Katsu is hoping to present a variation of this workshop at RWA Nationals in San Antonio next July. I’d recommend that you catch her talk wherever you can. For a list of her upcoming events, see below.

She’s a great teacher with a different angle on conflict that gives any writer concrete, actionable steps to adding conflict to every single scene of their books. You don’t want to miss her practical wisdom because conflict is the bedrock of your fiction writing!

Find Alma on her website at: http://www.almakatsu.com/

Books: http://www.almakatsu.com/books.php

Events: http://www.almakatsu.com/events.php


Blog Question: So what's your experience with conflict in your fiction? Is it hard or easy for you to see and build in? And who have you found does it really well?

The Road to Success from Atlanta RWA 2013

It’s taken me almost a week to recover from the RWA national conference in Atlanta. The conference was amazing. The speakers were awesome. And the opportunities for networking were astounding. I had a great time and I learned a lot. While I came away exhausted--because the days were long and the nights were short--I also came away recharged and encouraged about the book industry and my place in it. Maybe it’s because I went into this year’s conference with a different energy and expectation that I got more out of it. But I think it was more than that, too.

R8 Members: Evie, Me, Lisa, and Keely

The landscape is entirely different than it was even a year ago. The most popular workshops seemed to be those directed at learning about indie publishing. There were still our old favorites: regular spotlights on traditional publishing, craft-oriented workshops for beginner to pro, an arena sized book signing for traditionally published authors, PAN workshops, pitch sessions, and networking parties. But this year RWA shifted the focus slightly and allowed indie publishing to take a place at the table. Successful indie authors shared their secrets about their success and RWA sponsored a book signing & giveaway for indie authors. The energy was high, and the mood was collaborative and positive.

The clear message? This is the best time to be a writer because of all the options available to us. We can traditionally publish, we can publish with a small press, we can publish with an e-publisher, we can indie publish, we can hold our digital rights and sell our print rights, and so on and so on. Or, we can be a hybrid author who does all of the above. If we want. We have choices. Writers hold the power card.

The trick is knowing what you want. What brings you the validation that you require to continue writing what you want to write? Is it seeing your book in print? Knowing that readers are reading it? The distribution? Is it being able to make a living from your book sales? There’s a lot of self-discovery necessary these days to make your way in the book industry. You need to know what you want and why you want it. But if you’re honest with yourself and willing to work hard and write, write, write, there are no limits, and there’s no single pathway to success.

 

 Have you thought about what success looks like for you? When will you know you've arrived?

If you attended RWA Nationals in Atlanta this year, what was your favorite part?

Scratch and Sift

How familiar is this? You attend yet another writer's conference, and the keynote speaker has just regaled the audience on how she wrote her breakout first novel, which of course not only became a bestseller, but also launched a movie franchise. She tells us that she'd never written before, except maybe a sweet little article for a parenting magazine. But one morning, after a pitiful night's sleep due to 3 sick children and a dog that ate her husband's socks, she awakened with the entire plot for the book. Complete with sparkly skin. And she's never read books about leprechauns, either.

It had just come to her.

Maybe she was also down on her luck, living on food stamps, and one dream later, she's wearing Prada to walk the dog. She demurs, she giggles, she tells us we just have to pay attention to our dreams because an absolute fabbie story is just waiting to pop out with the morning bowl of cornflakes.

I don't know about you, but I find these inspirational stories kinda depressing, and more likely to send me to the gentle comfort of cheesecake and vodka than to my notebook. Because Ima Bess Eller didn't mention the seven drafts that she went through or the edits her editor demanded just to make the book saleable. No, as far as I know, that best seller was birthed from her forehead like Athena springing from Zeus. And perfectionist that I can be, I don't want to start something that doesn't arrive fully written.

This week, I signed up for a design class taught by WeeksRingle. In the intro, she mentioned Twyla Tharpe's book, The Creative Habit, and shared Ms Tharpe's idea of "scratching". Chickens walk through the yard - at least the free range ones do  - scratching for corn. They don't know for sure if there is grain. Sometimes they pluck up a pebble or stone. But they still continue to scratch and sample, seeking all day long for something tasty.

Like chickens, artists, choreographers and yes, even writers, must learn to be continuous scratchers, living in the expectation of the spark of an idea. And then not to be bound to that idea, either, because sometimes an idea is simply the doorway to the next one. 

Back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in high school, my creative writing teacher had us read. All the time. To see how other writers handled words, conveyed ideas. We looked at theme and cadence, at conflict and arc. Then we would do writing exercises. My writing teacher had no expectation of any story or poem arriving fully formed. Nor was every idea that we scratched about with meant to become a completed story. I can't tell you where the transition was made in my mind. Perhaps my procrastination forced my perfectionism's hand, or vice versa. But I love the freedom in trial and error, even if I haven't the patience always for gathering and trying and drafting and thinking. But I think my writing will only get better if I allow myself to just scratch about and see where an idea might carry me. 

Hardwired: Creatures of Story - Part I

Books, movies, TV, songs. They’re all prevalent vehicles of popular storytelling. When we experience story, we allow ourselves to be swept away on a journey orchestrated by the storyteller. So whether it’s Katy Perry’s Wide Awake, the television series Justified, the animal cruelty commercial overlaid with Sarah McLaughlin’s music, a sports caster providing pre-game commentary, the local evening news, or the latest best-selling novel or blockbuster at the box office, much of how we relate to the world and process information comes through story. But why?

Jonathan Gottschall in his book The Storytellying Animal: How Stories Make Us Human sums up the problem, “Fiction, fantasies, dreams--these are . . . a kind of sacred preserve. They are the last bastion of magic. They are the one place where science cannot--should not--penetrate, reducing ancient mysteries to electrochemical storms in the brain or the timeless warfare among selfish genes. … [S]tories--from TV commercials to daydreams to the burlesque spectacle of professional wrestling--saturate our lives. It’s about deep patterns in the happy mayhem of children’s make-believe and what they reveal about story’s prehistoric origins. It’s about how fiction subtly shapes our beliefs, behaviors, ethics--how it powerfully modifies culture and history. It’s about the ancient riddle of the psychotically creative night stories we call dreams. It’s about how a set of brain circuits . . . force narrative structure on the chaos of our lives. It’s also about fiction’s uncertain present and hopeful future. Above all, it’s about the deep mysteriousness of story. Why are humans addicted to Neverland? How did we become the storytelling animal?”

When stories are told well, we cannot resist their pull. We’re instantly tugged into an alternate reality where we live out the story the narrator is telling. But we are active participants. We fill in the gaps and provide much of the true working detail in the scene. Gottschall says, “[A]uthors trick readers into doing most of the imaginative work. Reading is often seen as a passive act: we lie back and let writers pipe joy into our brains. But this is wrong. When we experience a story, our minds are churning, working hard. … Our minds supply most of the information in the scene--most of the color, shading, texture.”

Story invades every area of our lives, awake and sleeping--yes, we even dream in story--so how did we become such creatures of story? And why do we tell stories at all? There are many theories out there. Gottschall argues that fiction (storytelling) “confronts the problems of the human condition head-on.”

So as writers, what do we do with that? And how can we use that information as we craft our own stories?

Lisa Cron in Wired for Story helps us understand it this way: “Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to. Story is what enabled us to imagine what might happen in the future, and so prepare for it. … Story is what makes us human, not just metaphorically but literally. Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience reveal that our brain is hardwired to respond to story; the pleasure we derive from a tale well told is nature’s way of seducing us into paying attention to it.” We become intoxicated by story, but not just for the joy of it, but in order for it to teach us something more, something bigger, something beyond our own experience. By understanding story, we can better understand the world around us. We learn about life through the stories we read and watch.

Writers hold a great power in their hands. A well-told story can rewire a reader’s brain. It can move someone with a strong bias to empathy. We can give a reader a glimpse into a life they might otherwise never have experienced. Cron says writers play an important role. “They can transport readers to place they’ve never been, catapult them into situations they’ve only dreamed of, and reveal subtle universal truths that just might alter their entire perception of reality. In ways large and small, writers help people make it through the night.”

However, in order to captivate a reader’s imagination, a writer must meet a reader’s hardwired expectations at every point, leaving crumbs along the story trail to guide them. This isn’t easy. And dissecting story is hard. Understanding what readers want from stories is like trying to perform a complicated algorithm to solve a mathematical problem that’s just beyond our skill set. Cron believes this is “[b]ecause of the ease with which we surrender to the stories we read tends to cloud our understanding of stories we write.” We easily recognize a good story when we hear it. So we believe we should be able write one just as easily. When we can’t, we get frustrated.

So unless we write stories that meet the hardwired expectations of our readers, we’ll never find the success we desire. Our brains are hardwired for story. It’s how we make sense of the world around us and it helps us find meaning from everything that’s happened to us. Cron says, “Story is the language of experience, whether it’s ours, someone else’s, or that of fictional characters. Other people’s stories are as important as the stories we tell ourselves. Because if all we ever had to go on was our own experience, we wouldn’t make it out of onesies.” Through story, we can experience intense situations without the danger of living them. It’s a way we can explore our own thinking and imagine future possibilities that help us survive both physically and socially.

Now that you’re beginning to understand why we’re such story creatures, join me here in May for “Hardwired: Creatures of Story - Part II,” where I’ll lay out Cron’s explanation of those elusive reader expectations writers need to meet to capture the hearts and imaginations of their readers.

What’s in your closet?

The Rockville 8 is proud to welcome Diane L. Kowalyshyn as guest blogger this week. Diane writes heart-hammering, tall-stake adventures—romantic suspense novels that run on high-voltage action, intrigue and intimacy. She is a daughter, sister, wife, mother, aunt, friend, and Seton Hill WPF MFA graduate, who in perpetuity, survives in Toronto, Canada. There’s only one skeleton left in her closet. Visit her at http://www.dianelkowalyshyn.com/.

Writers write.

We punch keyboards. We mutter or shout to ourselves or inanimate objects. With head-down diligence, we work to decipher and expand our fictitious worlds as they unfold.

If you’ve been writing for any length of time you have skeletons in your closet.

You know what I’m talking about. They’re the manuscripts you’ve locked away. You haven’t touched them in days, weeks, months, maybe even years. They gather dust because you’ve lost interest—maybe you couldn’t find them a home. They hang, untouched, because you can’t get rid of them. They’re an integral part of you. They mark your journey on this uphill climb and define you as a writer. They’re the carrion you’ve left behind.

Here’s the challenge. Don’t hide these bone-racks. Harvest them.

Time is on your side. Inactivity and separation have returned your objectivity. I guarantee your story is nothing like you remember. It’s much, much worse. But here’s the thing. There is no better way to affirm your growth as a writer than to revise a previous work. Everything you’ve learned is put to the test. My nemesis is grammar and I’ve found Claire Kehrwald Cook’s Line by Line to be a solid reference. She’s compiled great information on everything from modifiers, to conjunctions, to punctuation—she’s even attached a handy glossary of usage.

Shake those bones to make sure they still hold together. Revision tones flabby, drooping flesh into muscle. And muscle supports and fortifies the skeletal system. I use my own method to make sure the plot is solid. It’s called the Writer’s GPS—a tool I devised based on Deb Dixon’s GMC: Goal, Motivation & Conflict. Another good reference is James Scott Bell’s Revision & Self Editing. He breaks fiction down into a simple formula: CONCEPT + CHARACTERS x CONFLICT = NOVEL , and provides a process to sustain this formula. He calls it the LOCK system—lead (character), objective, confrontation, and knockout. If style books make you want to run and hide, or if you only have room for one revision book in your arsenal, I would recommend Renne Browne and Dave King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. It’s the bible of all revision books. Seriously. I love it because not only does it show, it tells.

Add new flesh to those bones. There’s a reason you let them molder. If you were tired with the story concept then, no doubt you will be now, but not if you inject new life into the existing framework. Weave a fresh sub-plot throughout the story to get the creative juices flowing again. It will be the vascular connection that feeds the muscles and keeps those bones in motion. It will make the old concept new again.

Persevere. You’ll want to throw in the towel every single day and your muse won’t play fairly. She’ll interrupt you with various other more appealing story ideas and try to lead you astray. Don’t let her. Jot down those new ideas in a separate folder and get back to revising.

Why bother? Because you’ll get a return on all you put in. With your unfinished business fully fleshed out, you’ll be sitting pretty, ready to set off in search of that elusive Shangri-La—publication.

Guest Blog: Sherry Lewis on Conflict, Part II

Welcome to Week Two with our guest blogger, author Sherry Lewis.

Sherry’s career path toward being an author didn't exactly follow a straight line. Sherry has worked such prestigious jobs as manager of a convenience store, Christmas tree decorator, poinsettia dresser, keyboard player/vocalist in a band, secretary in an insurance office, secretary in a bank, and finally secretary and administrative assistant for an attorney who eventually became a federal judge. In late 1993, Sherry sold her first three books to Berkley Prime Crime. By early 1994, she'd sold her first book to Harlequin Superromance. CALL ME MOM was published in January 1995, with NO PLACE FOR SECRETS following in July. In 1996, Sherry gleefully left the court to pursue a full-time writing career.

Still as much in love with books as ever, Sherry writes for Berkley and Harlequin. She’s a long-time member of Romance Writers of America, where she served for four years on the Board of Directors, including one year as President. She's also a member of Novelists Inc., KOD, and Sisters in Crime, and is a deliriously happy grandmother.
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External conflict should rear its ugly head for the first time at the beginning of your story. Readers want to be in on the trouble from the beginning. If the trouble’s been going on for a while, your readers will probably feel cheated and wonder why you’re bothering them with it.

Maybe you’re writing about a woman who grew up poor. Maybe about a woman who was left at the altar by her fiancé. Maybe you’re writing about a man who found his wife in bed with his best friend. Or about a woman whose best friend was killed in an accident. Maybe your hero went through a particularly bitter divorce. There are infinite possibilities, but readers won’t really care about the past unless there’s some real connection to the present.

Readers really begin to care about the character’s past when they perceive a threat of the past being repeated. Growing up poor doesn’t matter much unless your protagonist suddenly finds herself in desperate need of money or she starts to fall in love with a wealthy man. . . or a poor one. Her financial background isn’t really an issue unless the current conflict makes it one.

Likewise, with internal conflict, timing is everything. Your heroine who has sworn off men completely isn’t likely to spot that hot hero and suddenly start worrying about the fact that he lives in L.A. and she lives in Paris. The idea that they live on opposite sides of the world doesn’t even become an issue until later, after she’s resolved some of her internal conflicts so they can develop some kind of relationship.

As I start planning layers of conflict, I ask myself a couple of questions repeatedly: “What if this conflict were resolved? What would keep my hero and heroine from getting together (or my protagonist from achieving his goal) then?” If my protagonist is searching for the kidnapped scientist and the missing formula for a biological weapon, what will keep my protagonist from saving the day if he finds the professor on page 150? Either I need a new conflict to arise at that point, or I need a twist on the original conflict. And if that conflict is resolved on page 200? Again, I need either a new conflict or another twist.

The more layers of conflict you can find to torment your characters, the less chance you have of running into saggy middle problems or endlessly repeating yourself. Each book will be different, of course. In one book it may work best to introduce the conflicts during the first part of the book and resolve them at the end. In another book, some conflicts may only arise after another is resolved.

Figuring out how and when to introduce, heighten, and then resolve your conflicts is a function of your internal editor—that much maligned, but endlessly useful part of ourselves that we too often try to keep chained up and out of the way.

Your internal editor understands the necessity of logic in a way that your creative self doesn’t, and faulty logic can be the death of an otherwise remarkable piece of fiction. Your characters might be brilliantly drawn, your setting painted beautifully, your voice crisp and unique, and your plot well thought out, but you can kill all of that with illogical actions/reactions, by introducing goals and forgetting to let your characters actually pursue them, or by creating “conflict” that sounds good but never actually creates a problem for the character.

Your logical internal editor is crucial to conflict resolution because the key to believable conflict resolution lies in being able to think through the conflict logically from beginning to end. Once you understand the steps you must take to resolve the conflict successfully, then you can plan in advance how you’ll work those steps into your novel, or you can write your first draft and revise afterward to make sure the conflict has followed those logical steps to eventual resolution.

Remember that in your book:

• There must be at least one problem that must be solved. If the resolution doesn’t matter, none of the conflict you make up for your character will matter, either.
• Your viewpoint character(s) should be the only one(s) who can solve the problem. If someone else can or should do it, readers aren’t likely to care much about your character’s efforts.
• Your viewpoint character(s) must take active steps toward solving the problem as the book progresses and the forces working against them (whether internal or external) must increase in strength and/or urgency.
• Actual conflict is always stronger and more interesting than anticipated conflict or remembered conflict.

There’s no quicker way to kill the tension than to indulge a character’s urge to think endlessly about something that might happen in the future. Even the biggest problem is going to bore your readers to tears if the characters only think about the problem and never actually encounter it. By the same token, the urge to avoid a difficult scene can also deflate tension in the blink of an eye. Some of us take it a step further, by combining the two—a sure way to let the air out of your story’s balloon.

We write scene after scene in which the heroine thinks about what might happen if the hero finds out about her sordid past. The author mistakes these scenes for motivation, believing that all that angst is necessary to explain why the heroine continues to lie to the hero. Finally, just when the reader would rather gouge out her eyes than read another “I can’t tell him or I’ll lose him” monologue, the heroine decides it’s time to come clean.

She squares her shoulders, lifts her chin, and sets off to tell the hero the truth. The scene fades to black, and the next time we see her she’s picking at her Cobb salad over lunch with her best friend. While we struggle to make ourselves care, she regales her friend with the details of her encounter with the hero.

What’s wrong with that you ask? There’s absolutely no tension in the scene. The confrontation is over. The conflict is past. Instead of getting to sit in on the discussion and experiencing the heart-stopping fear when the hero learns the truth, we learn about it after everything’s been decided. Anticipated conflict and remembered conflict are slightly better than no conflict at all, but not by much.

Good conflict is what makes a story worth reading. We need internal and external struggles to create tension and force characters to make choices that matter. If we can provide those, readers will not only keep reading this book, but they’ll come back for more.

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We're having a drawing at Dancing on Coals. Purchase any of our workshop booklets during the month of November and your name will be entered into a drawing for a free copy of "In and Out: Putting Characters in Conflict" coming in December.

Each booklet contains the full text of the Dancing on Coals workshop by the same name. Booklets currently available are:

Mastering Scene and Sequel

Spinning Straw into Gold: The Art and Craft of Revisions

Riding the Emotional Roller-Coaster

Creating Characters with Character

Plotting the Organic Way

Your name will be entered once for each booklet you purchase. For more information, visit us at http://www.dancingoncoals.com/ and click on the "Booklets for Download" button

Guest blog: Sherry Lewis on Conflict

For the next two weeks we have the honor of hosting author Sherry Lewis and the good fortune of having her discuss conflict.

Sherry’s career path toward being an author didn't exactly follow a straight line. Sherry has worked such prestigious jobs as manager of a convenience store, Christmas tree decorator, poinsettia dresser, keyboard player/vocalist in a band, secretary in an insurance office, secretary in a bank, and finally secretary and administrative assistant for an attorney who eventually became a federal judge. In late 1993, Sherry sold her first three books to Berkley Prime Crime. By early 1994, she'd sold her first book to Harlequin Superromance. CALL ME MOM was published in January 1995, with NO PLACE FOR SECRETS following in July. In 1996, Sherry gleefully left the court to pursue a full-time writing career.

Still as much in love with books as ever, Sherry writes for Berkley and Harlequin. She’s a long-time member of Romance Writers of America, where she served for four years on the Board of Directors, including one year as President. She's also a member of Novelists Inc., KOD, and Sisters in Crime, and is a deliriously happy grandmother.

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Thanks for inviting me to visit your blog. I’m excited to be here and to talk about one of the most profound things I’ve learned about writing over the course of my career: Conflict.

Everyone reading this is probably aware that there are two basic types of conflict: internal and external. We hear about them almost from the moment we make the decision to become a writer. In almost every book we write, we’ll probably work with both types of conflict, but getting the mix just right is sometimes tricky.

We all know that internal conflict is a war that takes place within a person, while external conflict is a war that takes place outside the character, on another stage. Both types of conflict should be ongoing, active, and changing as the story progresses.

Every one of us lives through moments of conflict on a daily basis, but they’re rarely interesting enough or strong enough to work in a novel. I might want the prime rib for dinner, but I can really only afford the ground sirloin. Which one to choose? Those shoes are so stinking cute, I’d love to buy them, but if I do that, I can’t pay the water bill. What to do? My daughter and I can’t agree on what to watch on TV or where to go for dinner.

Realistic? Yes. Interesting? Not so much. Compelling enough to keep me glued to the page when the kids are screaming and dinner’s on the stove? Ummm. No.

To craft a strong, compelling novel, we need to carefully select internal and external conflicts that will dovetail as the story progresses and ultimately push the characters to make a choice that’s going to rock their world.

Your romance novel heroine can agonize for 300 pages over whether she’s willing to give her alcoholic mother another chance, but unless she’s facing an external conflict that makes her decision absolutely necessary, nobody’s going to care about your heroine’s angst. Your romance hero might be locked in a competition with his arch-rival for the promotion he wants, but if getting that promotion doesn’t put another area of his life in danger, their competition might just be a big yawn.

Compelling conflict must force the character involved into a decision she really doesn’t want to make. Climb the mountain or risk death in the snow-covered valley. Risk becoming involved in a new relationship or give up forever the dream of having a wife and kids. If the choice won’t change things in a major way, the decision probably isn’t interesting enough to keep readers interested. Go after the promotion that will mean moving to NYC but will also provide the financial stability he’s always longed for, or stay in Portland to be near his daughter.

When you’re making a statement about your character’s internal conflict, make sure you’re forcing them to make a choice:

John wants success in his career and financial stability, but he also wants to stay in Portland to be near Chelsea. Which one will he choose?

Nellie’s fear of heights has paralyzed her for years. Now she’s faced with a choice: climb the mountain or wait at the isolated crash site for someone to find her before she does. Which one will she choose?

David always wanted a traditional family—wife, two kids, and a dog. He even thought the picket fence looked pretty good. But after his fiancée betrayed him, his parents divorced and his older brother cheated on his wife of fifteen years, David’s not sure he believes in marriage anymore. When he falls in love with the pastor’s daughter, David has a choice to make: marry her or lose her.

The choice of the right characters is crucial to making conflict come to life. In David’s case, just meeting a new woman isn’t enough to put him into deep conflict. He must meet and fall in love with a woman for whom it’s marriage or nothing. If David doesn’t have to make the tough choice, his story won’t be nearly compelling enough to keep readers turning the pages.

A common mistake I see is when an author introduces “conflict” that isn’t actually conflict at all. A woman whose ex-husband cheated on her and who has sworn off men is not in conflict—not even when the hot, hunky hero walks into the room. Her distrust of men is simply a statement about her current emotional condition. It’s potentially one-half of a conflict, but it’s not conflict unless there’s something equally strong pulling her in the opposite direction at the same time. Sadly, even the hero’s incredible hunkiness is not sufficiently strong to create a strong, believable conflict for this woman.

Nor is his hotness enough to motivate a woman who’s truly determined to avoid men to seek out the hero and spend time around him.

What would put her in internal conflict? What would motivate her to take a chance?

I’m sure we could come up with countless possibilities, but let’s say this woman is also driven to find the man responsible for destroying her father last year. If she believes that the hero has information that could help her, she’ll seek out the hero and her reasons for doing so will feel realistic and believable to the reader. Once you’ve created a chink in her armor by creating a pull that’s every bit as strong as the push, you can believably motivate the character to take the risk she’d rather avoid.

One of the best places I know of to look for strong conflict is where the character’s childhood teachings are at odds with an adult need. Maybe your heroine longs for children of her own but doesn’t see marriage in her future. Her strong religious beliefs won’t allow her to explore alternative options for conception, so her longing for a baby will compel her to work through her trust issues when the hero moves in next door. Her story isn’t just about the conflict between woman and man it’s also about the conflict between her moral beliefs and her human longing.

Or maybe she has a bit too much to drink one night, has a one-night stand with some guy and finds herself pregnant. Is she in conflict now? In an historical novel, maybe. In a contemporary, not so much ... unless she also has deep-seated beliefs against abortion and adoption and also believes that a child needs both parents to grow up happy and healthy. By itself, the fact that she grew up without a father doesn’t put her in conflict, even after she meets the hero. But if she’s backed into a corner by an unplanned pregnancy, her own needs will be in conflict with the needs of the child.

Maybe your hero chooses to stay in a loveless marriage so his sick wife doesn’t lose her health insurance. His desire for happiness is in conflict with his sense of duty. He can either leave her and find a new love, or he can look himself in the mirror, but he can’t do both.

Or maybe he was taught as a child that compromise is a sign of weakness and now he’s forced to compromise to save someone or something important to him.

Every one of us is carrying beliefs from childhood around with us, and our characters should be no different. Those beliefs are probably a huge part of who you are, whether they’re relatively unimportant like the “right” way to decorate a Christmas tree or something more integral, such as what we believe about religion and spirituality, politics or sex.

Beliefs that come from our childhoods are often so powerfully embedded we continue to believe them even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Even in middle age, the things we were taught as children can hang us up on the paths we’ve chosen as adults.

One of the big mistakes authors make is when we don’t let our characters hold onto their beliefs. We write about people who change life paths because of one conversation with a stranger. About people who abandon the teachings of their youth because of a set of soulful eyes or the touch of a hand. We write about people who throw away everything they believe because their best friend tells them to change things up over chicken salad croissants at lunch.

When you’re creating internal conflicts for your characters, don’t short-change them. Your characters must hold to their belief system just as you cling to your own. It’s the other side of the internal conflict that creates the chink in their armor and allows change to happen—eventually. But even with that chink, they’re going to need something close to an internal earthquake to shake them from their original beliefs. The hero who feels responsible for his wife’s death isn’t likely to go chat up the perky redhead standing by the elevator no matter how green her eyes are—unless he needs something else as badly as he needs to protect himself.

Remember that internal conflict is a two-edged sword. It forces the character to make a difficult choice. We write the story to find out the answers to the questions that arise from those conflicting desires. Readers read the story for the same reasons. Without the questions, there’s no reason for the reader to keep turning pages. Force your characters into a corner and give them a life-changing choice to make—a choice they can’t avoid. If you can do that, your readers will become invested in the character’s journey every time.

Join us next Sunday for Part 2.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We're having a drawing at Dancing on Coals. Purchase any of our workshop booklets during the month of November and your name will be entered into a drawing for a free copy of "In and Out: Putting Characters in Conflict" coming in December.

Each booklet contains the full text of the Dancing on Coals workshop by the same name. Booklets currently available are:

Mastering Scene and Sequel

Spinning Straw into Gold: The Art and Craft of Revisions

Riding the Emotional Roller-Coaster

Creating Characters with Character

Plotting the Organic Way

Your name will be entered once for each booklet you purchase. For more information, visit us at http://www.dancingoncoals.com/ and click on the "Booklets for Download" button

Make Mine Well Done

One topic has kept the Rockville 8 buzzing all week: Stakes.

Global stakes. Personal stakes.
Good novels have both. Juicy stakes enhance characterization, fuel conflict, and keep elements like pace on track. But what I’ve recently realized is, the novels I love embed one stake in the other. And if you and I want readers to sink their teeth into our books, maybe we need to embed one stake, like the personal stake, within the other as well.

Pick a novel. Any novel.
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. Lisa Scottoline’s Dirty Blonde. Patricia Cornwell’s Body Farm. Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. Harlan Coben’s Long Lost. Their authors all know the trick of linking personal stakes to the global ones.

So let’s look at three novels. You’ll see what I mean. If you haven’t read the following books – SPOILER ALERT – consider skipping to the comments section. But better yet, keep reading, pick up these books, and see what you think...

Carl Sagan’s Contact
Influenced by her father who died when she was young, Ellie grows up to be a scientist, searching the skies for signs of intelligent life. She and her colleagues receive an extraterrestrial signal: build a device and the conversation will begin. Talk about a global stake!

But Ellie’s personal stake is tied up in the success or failure of the project. Why? Her father taught her listening to the stars was to listen to those we’ve loved and lost. The grown Ellie knows this can’t be true, but she dares to hope she might speak with her father once again. However, as terrorists threaten the project, both the global stake, and Ellie’s personal one, are at risk and the action is nonstop — because one stake is embedded in the other.

Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me
Global stakes don’t have to be about saving the world from nuclear disaster. But are global stakes compatible with a genre like romance? You betcha! Global stakes apply to the world. Any world.

When we read Bet Me, we watch prickly Min Dobbs reluctantly fall for Cal Morrisey. Min has clear-cut personal stakes. But what is going on in the wider world Min inhabits? Her beloved sister is getting married. And Min’s determined Diana will have the perfect wedding before living happily ever after. That’s quite a global stake.

Every time Diana’s happiness, the global stake, is in jeopardy, Min must accept Cal’s help to make it right. So her personal stake rises in relation to the global stake. Since the stakes are linked, they make for a fun book that stays with the reader.

Kathy Reichs’s Fatal Voyage
For me, Fatal Voyage, more than any other novel, demonstrates the power of connecting personal stakes to global ones. It opens with global stakes. Forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan must identify the cause of a plane crash, otherwise, other travelers may be in jeopardy. That’s a great global stake. But an error in the recovery mission could cost Tempe her job, her reputation, and her career. This has personal stake written all over it, and it’s linked to the global one.

Tempe turns to her lawyer ex-husband for advice, and unfortunately, a night of comfort. Now, he wants to reconcile. When her would-be boyfriend arrives, he ups the global stakes by revealing his partner died in the crash while transporting a witness, and he ups the personal ones.
When the error begins to look like a cover-up to hide a crime, both sets of stakes jump again.

The stakes leapfrog at least one more time before the satisfying ending to this novel. And that ending has stayed with me. Because of the interdependence of the stakes.

Now, I’m determined.
In my own work, when it comes to stakes, I want to make mine well done. Now, the Rockville 8 wants to know... What do the stakes in your favorite books say to you?