Category Archives: Conflict

This year, the editor of my Ronin Trilogy gave me an incredible compliment: “In Spirit of the Ronin, every scene does exactly what you intend it to do.” On a day when I was dreadfully worried about whether the newly finished draft of the novel was any good, this came at the perfect time.

I’ll quickly avert my gaze from the implication that apparently I didn’t quite hit that mark every time in previous books. Chalk it up to the learning process.

A lot of know-how about writing scenes is packed into this one sentence, and it comes in levels and/or number of trunk novels.

Level 1 (Chum/Sharkbait, 0 novels): “What’s a scene?”

A scene represents a discrete chunk of a narrative’s time wherein a mix of stuff appears: character interactions, things happening, background information delivery. Changing scenes is useful for switching characters, locations, or time. Shakespeare divided his plays up into acts and scenes, and even numbered his scenes, so I should have scenes, too.

Level 2 (Remora, 1 trunk novel): “I understand that scenes are a dramatically useful way of dividing up a story, but what do you mean you can use them to propel the plot?”

Scenes can propel the plot along if you can end them at compelling moments. Cliffhangers are the most obvious example of this, but not every situation is appropriate for them. Some scenes are more introspective, reactive. Sometimes in a scene, Things Happen. Sometimes, the Character Reacts to Things That Happened.

At this point, think of it this way. To propel the plot forward, end every scene with either a “Yes, but…” or a “No! And moreover…”

To build dramatic tension, the protagonist must be constantly striving and failing against the antagonist, who should always have the upper hand, until the final climactic moment when Everything Hangs in the Balance. You can have the protagonist occasionally succeed at some dramatic moment, but their success should be thwarted or minimized in some way by a worsening of the situation. This represents a “Yes, but …”

Every time the protagonist fails, the antagonist’s advantage is strengthened. Protagonist tries, fails… and then things get even worse. This is the “No, and moreover…”

The reader should leave every scene with a major dramatic question. This question makes them hunger to know what happens next.

Credit goes to Odyssey Writing Workshop’s Jeanne Cavelos for this wisdom.

Level 3 (Tiger Shark, 2 trunk novels): “I understand how to set up scenes with cliffhangers or dramatic questions at the end of each one, but what do you mean scenes have structure?”

The vast majority of stories in the Western storytelling paradigm are structured in three acts. Just like stories, scenes have a Three-Act Structure. Movies, novels, short stories, all have a Three-Act Structure (the nature of this is a whole other topic). For our purposes here, we can break scenes down into mini-acts, each representing the Beginning, Middle, and End of the scene.

Each scene follows one of two patterns.

Goal (what the character is trying to achieve is established at the beginning of a scene)
Conflict (the things against which the character struggles in the middle)
Disaster (the way everything goes to hell at the end of the scene, the cliffhanger)

Reaction (at the beginning of this scene, character reacts to how things went to hell in the previous scene)
Dilemma (in the middle of the scene, the character is placed in an even worse situation)
Decision (at the end of the scene, the character chooses how to move forward)

This pattern is often called Scene and Sequel—a potentially confusing choice of jargon—developed by Dwight Swain in his book Techniques of the Selling Writer. This is not the same kind of scene as Level 1, nor does sequel mean the next movie in a series. Use of Scene & Sequel has become relatively widespread or at least familiar to most professionals.

Level 4 (Hammerhead, 3 trunk novels): “I understand how each scene needs to have a beginning, middle, and end, but do you mean each scene needs a purpose?”

During the revision process—not the composition process—ask the question: What is this scene for? What do I want it to accomplish? I say during the revision process because this is the kind of thinking that is not always helpful when you’re trying to open up your subconscious and let the story bubble out. This is too much thinking, not enough feeling. You may be skilled enough that it happens naturally, un-self-consciously, but if not, this is for the polishing phase.

An effective scene requires it to do at least three things from this list.

Advance the plot
Develop character
Develop the story’s world
Pique the reader’s interest for the next scene

If you’ve managed the previous levels, #4 is pretty much built in, so you only have to worry about the other three.

And if you can hit all four, every time, that makes you a Literary Effing Great White, and you’ve either passed beyond the Trunk Novel Stage to some serious publication—or you soon will.

Unlocking Levels Beyond

There are doubtless higher skill levels. Becoming a better writer is a lifetime pursuit of excellence. I have not yet unlocked the Mythical Megalodon and Literary Leviathan levels so I don’t know what revelations they contain. I am only vaguely aware of their existence, in the way I was only vaguely aware of the higher realms when I was Level 1 Chum.

One of the hardest parts of writing is not knowing—really not knowing—whether your work is any good. You have to believe it is, even if it might not be—and when you’re shown it isn’t that good, to find a way past this particularly hard knock and keep striving to get better. Keep studying. Keep practicing. Keep learning. It’s all any of us can ever do.

Apparently, unbeknownst to myself, something clicked with Spirit of the Ronin, and my editor saw it. Having someone point it out to you is like ambrosia on the parched soul. There wasn’t anything specific that I learned, or studied. My only explanation is that study and practice came together.

The hardest part is wondering when it will happen again.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Travis Heermann’s latest novel Spirit of the Ronin, was published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, roustabout, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind, The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including content for the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and EVE Online.

He lives in New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and a burning desire to claim Hobbiton as his own.

You can find him on…

Twitter
Facebook
Wattpad
Goodreads
Blog
Website

Mixing Horror With Other Genres

October 26, 2015

fictorians

Conflict Horror Petra Klarbrunn No Comments

Guest Post by Petra Klarbrunn

Horror is more than just a genre on a tiny shelf at your local bookstore. Horror is an emotion, a revulsion, a reaction to something that triggers the baser instincts. After you read something that got under your skin, you have physical reactions. Your heart rate increases, your breathing quickens, and you might even get some goosebumps. Every sense is heightened, to the point where you hear things such as the house settling, where you see little shadows out of the corner of your eye, where your mouth gets dry, and when your skin feels oddly chilled. They’re caused by your natural instincts ramping up to a possible threat.

It’s this reaction that separates horror from other genres. Romance, with its chocolate-like endorphin rushes, comes in at a distant second place. Some even say horror and romance are the flip sides of the same coin, but I’m not that cynical to declare it true, perhaps because I’m a hopeless romantic.

Horror and romance also have something in common — they can be used within any other genre. There are arguments that the movie Alien is a horror movie first and foremost. It certainly has all the hallmarks — life and death struggles with an unknown monster that just won’t die, people who disappear, shocking events and revelations caused by man’s inhumanity towards mankind. Many folks liked the sequel, Aliens. More of the same, plus add in a kid in trouble and wave after wave of monsters attacking. The folks who saw the movies in the theatre probably left exhausted from having their bodies in a two hour fight-or-flight state, plus the ultimate shock at seeing how much a popcorn and soda would cost for each member of the family.

One can mix in horror or romance to shift the tone of the book. Romance can be used sparingly to build tension, such as the creepy love triangle between Luke, Leia, and Han Solo. Be careful not to let it derail the plot. If you’re writing a western, make sure westerny things go on while the characters woo each other. The same goes for horror. One can mix horrific things into the plot to build tension, to raise the stakes for the protagonist, or to even show how desperate some of the characters are.

“I don’t think we should unleash the world-devouring creature because your rival king made a remark about your nose, Sire.”

Releasing the Kracken should be reserved when all seems lost, and you want to add in one straw to your camel’s overburdened back at the end of the novel. Of course, make sure your heroine also has a way to defeat it, even if it means they fall in love…but that drifts off into hentai territory, which you should think long and hard about before venturing there.

No matter what genre you write, horror is something that can change the dynamic of your story. If your protagonist’s opposing army general too blah? Have the leader send in some assassins equipped with poisoned arrows — to kill the heroines love interest. Have the general unleash a paranormal entity that can’t be stopped. Those will push the general up the “evil villain” scale and certainly ramp up the tension for the heroine we’ve all come to love over the last 200 pages.

And if you really want to cause panic, add in a romance to the middle of your seven-volume military hard sci-fi epic. That should scare most of your readers to death.

Using What Scares You

October 8, 2015

Leigh Galbreath

Action & Adventure Conflict Craft & Skills Fantasy Genres Horror Leigh Galbreath Narrative Voice Romance & Erotica Science Fiction Self-Awareness Social Combat Subtle Confict The Writing Process No Comments

I went to a publishing conference in New York some years ago, and an agent said that a great author is a great storyteller. You can have all the craft and technique in the world, but if you aren’t a good storyteller, you won’t become a true success. Alternately, you can have the worst craft and know nothing of technique and be the next huge star of the publishing world. Yet, she could not define what made a good storyteller, like it’s some nebulous thing that cannot be truly understood. She was in the “you can’t learn it, you just have to be born with it” camp, a believer in which I am not.

But what is good storytelling if it’s not the expert use of craft and technique? I’ve been puzzling over it for years and I think I finally figured out a rather large component—a good storyteller is one who can tap into emotion with every word.

We humans, above all else, are creatures of emotion. We like to think we are creatures of intellect and reason and morality, but these things are constructs we’ve created to put limitations and controls over the nasty, hind-brain, instinctual animal side that is human emotion. Emotion motivates us in pretty much everything we do. Our desire to feel happiness, love, safety, pleasure all shape our choices. Our desire to not feel pain, sorrow, grief, all push us to move in a particular direction, even if it’s subconsciouly. Every choice we make is rooted in our emotional health, or lack thereof. Our need to feel one emotion over another.

The crazy thing is, everyone human being past, present, or future feels the same emotions. Emotion is the one, true universal language. It is the one thing we all as a species, share, and no emotion is more familiar to us all than fear. Writing our fear, more than any other emotion, can truly raise a writer’s prose to new heights.

There’s two ways of writing what frightens us, and both are equally beneficial. The first is the obvious definition—if we want our audience to fear something, start with what we, ourselves, are the most afraid of. J.K. Rowling once said that she decided to put giant spiders in the Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter and Chamber of Secrets because she herself was afraid of spiders. Similarly, Peter Jackson’s rendering of Shelob in the Return of the King was built off his personal arachnophobia. Think of it as a mind hack. It’s easier to write what we know, how we personally feel about a particular thing or situation when we write about something that makes us feel the emotion we want to invoke. It’s easy to make spiders terrifying if the author is terrified of the creepy bastards, but harder to make a horse frightening if they make the author all warm and fuzzy on the inside.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a monster. It can be a fear of rejection, a fear of success, a fear of fear itself. It’s making the fear personal that’s the key, no matter what genre or sub-genre we are writing. Every genre deals with some sort of fear, and the more we make that fear our own, the easier it is to make the reader feel it with us.

The second way of looking at writing what one fears isn’t so obvious, and it’s something we all face at one point or another. It’s taking on those scenes that make us cringe. You know those scenes, the ones that make us uncomfortable or leave us at a loss. Wether its fight scenes or sex scenes or scenes of moral uncertainty, we all have a scene somewhere that tempts us to just skip it and have it happen off screen. After all, the worst fear of any writer is that an important, necessary scene will suck and bring the whole piece down.

But nine times out of ten, that seemingly impossible scene will become one of the more powerful moments in a story. Dan Wells once said that a scene in I Am Not a Serial Killer, where the protagonist draws a knife on his mother, was an especially difficult scene to write, but the final product is one of the most emotionally impactful moments in the book. Alternately, I have a friend who kept skipping over scenes where people were fighting (verbally or physically) because he wasn’t comfortable with violence, but it left his work lacking conflict and the story suffered because of it.

Part of why this is so effective, I think, is that the struggle to get the scene written and fear that it won’t work makes us slow down and take a long, hard look at what we’re doing, much more so than a scene that just plops itself down on the page. Difficult scenes force us to pull out all the stops, to dig deep and give it our all, thereby forcing us to put our best work on the page because anything less would just prolong the torture. Also, fear is conflict, and whether it’s felt by the character or just subconsciously by the author, it puts an edge, an undercurrent in the scene that can lift it above simple prose. It’s always the scenes I didn’t want to write, the ones that kick my ass, that I always end up the most satisfied with, and I think it’s because of the fear. If I wasn’t afraid of what I was writing, the writing would not be as good. Period.

Use the fear, share it. It won’t be easy, but more likely than not, your readers will feel it, and what they feel is what will stay with the reader long after they finish the story.

Why I Write What I Do

July 27, 2015

fictorians

Author's Perspective Character Doing Good in the World Interacting With Fans Life Philosophies Monique Bucheger Reader Investment & Empathy Social Combat The Writing Life No Comments

A Guest Post by Monique Bucheger

The theme of the Fictorian blog this month is “Moments Of Inspiration In Life: Our experiences as people influences our writing.” Which made me ponder: Why do I write what I write? And why do I keep doing it? The answer comes from my individual journey through life.

When I was 12, two of my friends from school were physically abused at home by their parents. I knew they needed help, but since I was also a kid, I didn’t know how to help them. That feeling of helplessness stuck with me for many years—so I decided to do something about it.

Soon after we married, my husband and I applied to be foster parents and were licensed. Through the years we have cared for over 100 foster kids as well as our own 12 children. The feeling of helplessness lessened, though the guilt for not being able to help my abused friends never went away.

When I was pregnant with our youngest child, I started writing again—something I did all the time as a teen—but had put on hold to raise our family. I had intended to write one book about a quirky, spunky 12-year-old girl named Ginnie West to keep a promise to my high school creative writing teacher.

Instead, it has turned into a four book middle grade series with at least three more books to go.

The series features half-orphaned Ginnie West and her best friend, Tillie. Ginnie’s mom died in an accident when Ginnie was three. Tillie’s dad abandoned his family six years before the start of book one (The Secret Sisters Club) after abusing Tillie and her mom.

Tillie’s parents have been divorced for four years. Now, Ginnie and Tillie want to be sisters—for very different reasons—and since Ginnie’s dad and Tillie’s mom aren’t dating other people, the girls decide to nudge them toward each other.

Mostly the series is about friendship, BFFs, horses, finding out who you are, changing what you don’t like, and belonging—important things to kids aged 8-14, as well as everyone else.

My Ginnie West Adventure series also deals with surviving the ripples of child abuse, defining who you are, being okay with who you are, accepting other people within safe parameters, going outside your comfort zone to do the right things and not defining yourself by other people’s weaknesses—among many other things.

It is also a fun, funny, wholesome series set on a modern day farm where kids “candle” eggs they gather and milk ornery goats. Where family is defined by people you choose to associate with as well as by those you are born to. Where kids concoct schemes that often backfire—resulting in both humorous and not-so-funny opportunities to solve problems and mature in unexpected ways.

In short, I write contemporary realistic fiction with humor. Helping kids (and adults) navigate the murky waters of pre-adolescence in what I hope is an empowering way.

Kids may not be able to change certain realities in their world but I want them to know they get to choose how they think about themselves and and their reality. If there is something they don’t like, they can make changes. If there is something they do like—I want them to embrace their uniqueness.

Middle grade is the time when kids start realizing that the world (and themselves) are full of possibilities. It is also when peer pressure begins—in both positive and negative ways. Kids hear and embrace certain messages about themselves—and they believe them.

This can work equally as a benefit as well as a detriment. When kids live in a safe home and have good self images, they flourish. When life experiences haven’t been so kind, kids believe the worst about themselves or other peoples’ bad opinions of them.

Because of my background as a foster parent, overcoming child abuse and other hardships are themes in my books. Even if a person wasn’t or isn’t a victim of child abuse, we all know people who were or are.

Bruises on the body heal and disappear, bruises on the soul linger and color lives in unexpected ways—often resulting in poor choices that complicate life unnecessarily.

Child abuse and its effects are not something people want to talk about, but something way too many people live with or were wounded by, and something that affects how people make decisions for the rest of their lives. When you are the victim of child abuse, you want to know why—and you want it to stop.

Sometimes I wonder if the time spent writing my books would be better used doing something else. Then I hear from someone who has read one or more of my books and lets me know that the book or story line helped them deal with something they were struggling with in their life.

Before I was published, a lady I’ll call Lily, messaged me one day and told me that she had read all of my books on our critique site. She had grown up in an extremely abusive home—her mother locked her and her sister in closets for days on end-not feeding them, beating them, allowing boyfriends to have their way with her daughters.

In short, Lily grew up with horrific, vile, damaging experiences. She told me that she couldn’t believe that any family could be so loving as the West family, but it was healing to her that such a family could exist. She told me that reading about how the West family helped kids like her comforted the abused little girl inside her—and gave her hope for other kids like her.

Lily’s story encouraged me to pursue publication—not an easy journey as people familiar with the process can attest. However, since my series has been published, I have heard from many other adults who lived with an abusive parent who have found peace and strength in my series.

Adults who weren’t abused (many teachers and parents) have told me they welcome an opportunity to read an age appropriate series with their kids so they can have open discussions that deal with the ripples of child abuse (poor self image, wrongly thinking they deserve to be abused, feeling powerless to change things).

I have been pleasantly surprised to find my books resonate with kids and adults alike—one of my biggest fans is a 72-year old man. Last year several tween and teenage girls rushed over to my table at a book signing, wanting my newest release, Being West Is Best. They were fully invested in Ginnie and Tillie, and wanted to find out what happened next.

My main character, Ginnie, is a spunky, courageous girl with a strong sense of loyalty and adventure. She loves trying new things and while she doesn’t often outright break “the rules”—there are often piles of twisted and bent rules in her wake.

Her BFF, Tillie, is more timid—but no doormat. In each successive book, Tillie realizes that she can overcome her rough beginnings and that she is worthy of being treated well. Together, they give each other strength and permission to explore this thing called life and make their own definitions of who they are.

Like Ginnie’s great-uncle is fond of saying: “You may not be able to help the whole world, but you can do your part to help your corner of it.”

Empowering kids and adults to overcome bad experiences and to find courage to redefine their world and how they view it—in effect to become superheroes in their own lives—is why I continue to write the Ginnie West series.

About the Author:
When Monique Bucheger isn’t writing, you can find her playing taxi driver to one or more of her 12 children, plotting her next novel, scrapbooking, or being the “Mamarazzi” at any number of child-oriented events. Even though she realizes there will never be enough hours in any given day, Monique tries very hard to enjoy the journey that is her life. She is the author of the middle-grade Ginnie West Adventure series, a picture book titled “Popcorn,” and in the process of releasing two new series in the near future-a family drama and a middle-grade fantasy.