Conflict can be internal, external, psychological, physical, spiritual, and probably some other things ending in ‘-al’ that we can’t think of right now.But if you look at your story in close up, you’ll probably find more layers of conflict than you realised were there. Those internal battles are what gives your protagonist nuance and depth, and we can learn much more about a character by their inward reactions than their outward behaviours.Ĭonflict can be many things – and when you’re considering your novel from the classic three-act structure point of view, with plot points and inciting incidents and high dramatic peaks, you may miss some of the subtler nuances. And as we all know, conflict comes in a gazillion different forms, from passive-aggressively ‘forgetting’ to put sugar in your sister-in-law’s tea, to finding a photograph of the person you thought was your sister sitting in a hospital bed holding you as a newborn, to deleting your a voicemail message on your partner’s phone to stop them from making a decision you disagree with, to engaging in a war of attrition over who’s going to finally clean the bathroom.Īnd, to be honest, those little, intimate, personal conflicts are often far more important in terms of developing character than the big, loud events that we usually associate with ‘action’. So when you’re writing a story that’s a little more focused on character development rather than helicopters and giant robots, defining the ‘action’ can be tricky, and sometimes it can seem as if there’s just not enough going on.įear not, brave lit fic writer! ‘Action’ doesn’t have to mean actual literal action.
#Fiction things to write about movie
We have to deal with a whole load of feelings and backstory and themes that a Michael Bay movie just doesn’t really need to bother with. But when it comes to novel writing – particularly literary fiction – things usually aren’t quite so simple. Jumping from one exciting plot point to another is arguably more straightforward in, say, an action film, where the plot involves lots of running, jumping, fighting and blowing shit up. The tl dr answer is: You probably already have everything you need – you just need to think about ‘action’ in a different way…. Here’s a question we get a lot: “I’m writing literary fiction and nothing really happens – my characters are mostly just standing around talking to each other and thinking about the past – how do I inject a bit of action?”
AKA how conflict doesn’t have to be all FIGHTING AND EXPLOSIONS!
0 kommentar(er)
