Category Archives: Conflict

I think it’s because I come from a small town. Growing up, there were about 1,500 people in Niverville, Manitoba. As I’ve grown into adulthood, my hometown seems to have grown with me, to the point where the population now is just shy of 5,000. By most everyone’s definition, however, even after this lightning quick population boom, we are tiny. A mote of dust in the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s eye.

The truth is, I like it that way.

When I attended college, I packed my bags and moved to the nearest city: Winnipeg. It is now, as it was then, about 750,000 persons strong. A city of moderate size, and hugely spread out. You’d be hard-pressed to find another city anywhere, much less a regional capital, with such low density. After college, I lived for a couple of years in Huntsville, Alabama, home to a mere 450,000. Winnipeg was larger than I liked, and Huntsville, while just about right in terms of population, was most enjoyable for me when I relocated to its most distant suburb.

So it should come as no great surprise that I eventually returned to little ol’ Niverville. Recently, in fact, I doubled down and purchased property here. For the time being, barring some unforeseen life changes, this will be home.

It’s an interesting thing, but the fact that the town doubled in size during my time away has profoundly changed my experience of it. When I was a kid, I knew everyone. If you showed me a face, I could tell you who they were, or at least who they were related to or where they worked or where they went to church. Now? More than half of my friends from high school have moved away, and the people who’ve taken their places are largely unfamiliar. Somehow a lot of strangers have decided that this town is perfect for them.

I no longer know all their names and faces, and more often than not they aren’t related to anyone I know. Because I work from home, I often don’t know where people work, and I certainly don’t know where they go to church (probably because I myself don’t go to church anymore).

In short, 5,000 may seem small to you—but the difference between 1,500 and 5,000 is pretty big.

Why am I going on and on about the populations of the communities I’ve called home? Because I think it has a strong bearing on the kinds of communities represented in my fiction.

My books aren’t very urban. In The Watchers Chronicle, the characters visit a number of cities, but it’s a travelogue, so most of the time the characters are in smaller, quieter locales or travelling through countryside and otherwise empty spaces.

My more recent stories take me to (1) a tiny and insulated Martian colony, (2) a small ship of cryogenically frozen interstellar travelers, (3) a generational space vessel, and (4) a future Earth overrun by wilderness and devoid of human life.

These are the settings that resonate to me, the ones I gravitate to. They’re very intimate, with a relatively small number of characters who are often incapable of getting very far away from each other in a pinch.

The whole “write what you know” mantra totally applies. It’s funny, because logic dictates that you’d need to squint to see the similarities between Niverville, Manitoba and a little dome of civilization on the Martian plain. But really, they are much more alike than you’d think—including in temperature, sometimes, but I won’t go there.

Everyone knows everyone else, for better or worse (often for worse). People’s lives are deeply tied to their pasts, to their reputations. A small number of larger-than-life personalities can wield a disproportionate amount of power and influence. The family you were born to, or marry into, carries big significance. It can be hard to outrun your problems, and really hard to hide from your mistakes. Life lived on a small stage, ultimately, is subject to greater exposure. (You know what they say about life in a fishbowl, right?)

This is what I know—and frankly, it can lend itself to some stellar drama.

Evan Braun is an author and editor who has been writing books for more than ten years. He is the author of The Watchers Chronicle, a completed trilogy. In addition to writing both hard and soft science fiction, he is the managing editor of The Niverville Citizen. He lives in Niverville, Manitoba.

The Dark Side of my Brain

February 15, 2016

Kim May

Author's Perspective Conflict Craft & Skills Kim May 1 Comment

Back in college I took a creative writing class. I expected it to be a novel writing class that would allow me to really start to hone my craft. I found out on the first day class that the course catalogue was a bit misleading. Yes, it was a creative writing class but we would be writing poetry. All freaking term.

I hate writing poetry.

I really do. Not because I’m bad at it. I’m actually pretty good — and no, I’m not exaggerating my skills. I won a poetry contest in 2013 with a haiku. I simply hate writing poetry. I also hate being forced to listen to poetry that a Vogon would be proud of. One of my classmates, a 40-year-old woman with no grasp for prose, only wrote about one thing the entire term:

It was like being imprisoned in a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.

Now what does this have to do with the dark side of my brain? Well, other than the murderous rage that rose every time this woman read her work aloud in class, if I didn’t I want to inflict the same torture on my readers I needed to make sure that everything wasn’t rainbows and kittens.

There’s nothing wrong with rainbows, or kittens, or unicorns, or even Trapper Keepers, and by themselves none of them are torturous. But when a tale is nothing but fluffy Trapper Keeper unicorns frolicking in a rainbow then there’s a problem. Once the LSD wears off it’s easy to see that this is why the “torture your characters” rule exists. Not only is a story more believable when there’s a major conflict, it’s more palatable too.

However, becoming comfortable doing all sorts of horrible nasty things to your characters can make you feel like a sociopath. That’s normal. And for heaven’s sake don’t shy away from it. Embrace your dark side, your inner Emperor Palpatine. Not only will it help you take your stories to the next level (by amping up the danger in new and interesting ways) but you can also get a better understanding of yourself. It can be a therapy of sorts. And after unicorn poetry we could all use some therapy.

photo credit

A Game of Horns

February 7, 2016

mary

Conflict Mary Pletsch Superstars Writing Seminars No Comments

If you’re one of our newer readers, you might not know that the Fictorians were formed at the first Superstars Writing Seminar in 2010, or that our regular members are all alumni of the course.

There are lots of writing courses out there. I took a creative writing course in university, which was a great way to explore new ideas, work outside my previous comfort zone, and receive feedback from both my fellow students and my course instructor. But this course didn’t do anything to teach me how to sell the stories that I had written.

Superstars is not a course on how to write. It is a course on how to write as a career.

The best way to learn career craft – how to get an agent, how to read a contract, how royalties work, how to present yourself, how to create buzz about your work, how to turn your hobby into a career – is from the people who do it for a living. That’s what Superstars is all about. The instructors are not making a living from instructing; they’re making a living from writing.

Superstars Writing Seminars took me from a fanfic writer with a desire to publish original fiction, to a multi-published short story writer who now has a book contract.

I was able to go thanks to the generosity of those who helped me afford the trip. We know that not everyone is able to afford the tuition fee, and not everyone is lucky enough to have people in their lives who are able, or willing, to help.

That’s why WordFire Press and Superstars Writing Seminars, with Lisa Mangum as editor, launched the Unicorn Anthologies. Inspired by a quote from Kevin J. Anderson – “if you agree to write a purple unicorn story, write the best purple unicorn story you can; that’s professionalism” – the proceeds from these anthologies goes towards a scholarship fund, named for Superstars alumnus Don Hodge, to assist writers who want to go to the seminar and need help affording the tuition.

One Horn to Rule Them All: A Purple Unicorn Anthology was the first. Now A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology is available!

The second anthology focuses on stories involving strong conflicts. Red is the colour of war; the colour of blood; the colour of passion and will. Conflict is an essential aspect of plot. It drives the story forward; it takes place when characters confront obstacles.

My contribution, Queen of the Hidden Way, is the story of Anpu, a royal daughter whose kingdom is under another’s rule. A third player wants to take the throne by capturing and ensorcelling a karkadann, a desert unicorn. With death and treachery all around, Anpu must choose her conflicts wisely, and in the end, decide what battles are truly worth fighting.

You can pick up A Game of Horns on Amazon in either paperback or ebook. Proceeds will help provide Don Hodge Memorial Scholarships for future Superstars attendees in financial need, and provide you with a showcase of the excellent talent of the Superstars.

The Unconscious Autobiography

February 4, 2016

Leigh Galbreath

Character Conflict Craft & Skills Ideas & Plotting Leigh Galbreath Self-Awareness Tropes & Archetypes World-building 3 Comments

It’s been said, and I’m sure you’ve heard it before, that all characters in a story have a bit of the author in them. Everything you write is colored by your personal preconceptions, observations, experiences, and random thoughts about life and your place in it. In a very real way, who we are leaks into the text whether we want it to or not. I don’t know if I’m the only one who has had this happen, but I find it interesting, and sometimes unsettling, when I realize something about a situation or a character is actually something about myself that I had not realized until I saw it on the page. In a very real way, our characters are our reflections, though sometimes distorted ones. Their experiences and reactions to those experiences are deeply colored by our own.

Now, this doesn’t mean that one could use a piece of fiction as a case study of the author. Authors don’t directly translate themselves onto the page. Most of the time this is an unconscious phenomenon.

In fact, this happens so often and with so little thought that it’s almost impossible not to write what we know. Our subconscious does it for us. When we need a scent, we pull one from memory. When we need to show an emotional reaction, we look at how our own bodies might feel in the same situation. If the character experiences something that we never have, we might find an analogous experience to inform what is on the page. While in most cases writing fiction is writing stories about other people, we cannot help but write about ourselves at the same time.

On some level, writing what you know comes without thinking. But notice the “without thinking” part.

The difficulty comes when we let our own experiences limit what we can and do show in a story. It’s extremely easy to fall back on our own point of view. For example, I find that my characters can sometimes be reserved, even repressed, about their emotions. As a result, I often find it difficult to push the emotional dial up to full for an explosive moment of conflict. That comes from me. I’m a pretty laid back person who doesn’t feel all that comfortable when people around me are really emotional. While I can bring tension, sometimes just bringing tension isn’t enough for a big scene. I’ve seen and heard about other writers who will actually skip hugely important scenes in their books because they themselves have no reference point, or their own beliefs or view of the world make it difficult to face what their characters have to do.

And of course, there’s that ever present failure when an author writes a gross generalization or something just flat out wrong that is deeply insulting to an entire group of people because said author didn’t look outside their own point of view.

For instance, I once knew a real young man whose personality was so over the top that he seemed almost like a caricature. At the time, I thought he’d make a great character in a book, but part of what made him utterly ridiculous was intrinsically bound to an entire group of people who are mostly not ridiculous at all. That character isn’t showing up anywhere in my work as a result. Some might think, to avoid this, one should steer clear of any type of character that is not like them. Sometimes this might be the right call, but limiting oneself to just the familiar often leads to boring characters and lackluster plots. Variety is, after all, the spice of life.

My point here is simply to be mindful of what is going into the mixing pot that is your story. Pay attention to those moments when a character trait or bit of setting or what-have-you relies a little too much on what you know. Look for those opportunities when something different can strengthen and deepen what you’re working on.

Who knows, your characters might rub off on you for a change.