In fiction, creating conflict is key in producing a great story, one that readers will find difficult, if not impossible, to put down. Described as a crash between at least two sides, or a struggle for power, property or something else, conflict reaps drama.  Without drama there is no interest.  My goal and the goal of most writers is to ultimately change the world or an aspect of it in some way.  By connecting with readers one by one to change how they feel or think – for  the better- which dominoes outward, spreading across society faster than a cold virus during the dead of winter, we reach that goal.  And yes, we write to entertain and perhaps ultimately make some money, but that comes later.

Aristotle said that ” the idea is to create emotion and then catharsis, thus making our audience better citizens”.  By creating inner conflict that the readers relate to or sympathize with, we attain that.

In James Scott Bell’s book ” Conflict and Suspense”, he discusses this idea of Parent / Adult and Child roles as tools to help us create conflict in our dialogue.  “We tend to occupy three primary roles in life and relationships: Parent, Adult and Child (PAC).   THE PARENT is the seat of authority, the one who can “lay down the law”.  He  (or she- a’hem ) has the raw strength, from position or otherwise, to rule and then enforce his rulings.” ( Or at least in my case, to try our best!)

He continues with “THE ADULT is the objective one, the one who sees things rationally and is therefore the best one to analyze a situation. Finally, there is the CHILD.  Not rational, and not without any real power.  So what” he asks ” does the child do? Reacts emotionally. Throws tantrums to try to get his way.  Even an adult can do this”.

What Mr. Bell is so eloquently trying to say is that the writer must figure out which role each of his characters is going to play in each scene.  How are they actually acting versus how they see themselves as acting.  How will they act in order to accomplish their goals ?  He explains that writers must work that into the dialogue so that each character is assertive in that role.  But he reminds us that we must keep it tight and natural while moving our story forward.

In life, don’t we all take on each of these roles at different times, jumping from one role to another depending on the situation. Sometimes remaining in one role for a longer duration?  How many times have we gotten ourselves tangled up emotionally because of someone else taking on the child role, throwing a tantrum ( arguing irrationally, withdrawing from us, not communicating ,withholding something or a piece of themselves, etc) or even worse, because we have taken on that role of a child ourselves.

Drama comes from conflict and we have all created it or reacted to it in some way at some point capitulating us into a tragedy or  new strength or possibly both.  Personally, I have always believed strongly in  the saying “What does not kill us will make us stronger”.  This applies to our characters as well.  Conflict may lead our character to her  death, whether physical, psychological or professional, or it may make her stronger if she is victorious in her struggle , but at the very least by the end of the story the conflict will leave the reader feeling affected. And we can only hope it will be for the better, spreading quickly.

A yearning is a desire for something that you do not have and until you acquire  it your life feels incomplete.  In James Scott Bell’s book “Conflict and Suspense”, he talks about how important it is to make your lead character come to the book with a yearning that predates the story. “The Lead brings this to the tale from her past.  What this does is enable you to hit the ground running when you start your novel.  The character already has trouble inside her, in the form of yearning unfulfilled’.

Creating a yearning allows for character actions that are unpredictable which engages the reader’s interest from the start and through out the rest of the story.  Bell continues to explain that ” Some people say that what you wanted to be when you were twelve is where your true yearning lies’.  That is the truth for me.  I have always wanted to be a writer (and teacher) since I was old enough to read and write.  Through out all the different endeavors I have engaged in that yearning has stayed with me like a shadow pressed to my side, loyal and faithful, forever unfaltering.  Yet life (family, the need to pay my bills, and other responsibilities ) always seemed to get in the way.

This yearning inside your character should become a source of inner conflict.  Bell says ” Don’t ignore this soil for conflict.  It’s your chance to pay amateur psychologist with your lead character and make him all  the richer because of it’.  Touching our reader’s emotions with our stories must come from our understanding of what drives a person to do the things she does or does not do and yearning is usually mixed up in that motivation somewhere.  Creating conflict by developing obstacles that prevents the lead character from obtaining the object of  her yearning is one of the many ways to keep the reader hooked enough to say ” I couldn’t put it down’.  And to hear that statement -to me as to any writer-  is  truly a yearning fulfilled!

Imagine that!  You are a mother.  You are a wife or ex-wife or partner!  You are an employer, employee, boss or entrepreneur.  You are a daughter, sister, friend, co-worker, neighbor, step mother, god mother, friend of a best friend’s daughter… Whatever you are you are some wonderful person who has or had dreams to be somebody special one day.  Now, you are thinking those dreams are forgotten and locked away like old childhood toys in the attic never again to see the light of day and you are just .. well.. simply one of the above with a job to do, house to run and kids to raise.  BUT stop!  To be one of the above is amazing.  To be even one of those, and I will bet you are more than one, means you ARE amazing and have done something amazing with your life!

In Mridu Khullar Relph’s Writer Magazine August 2014 article ” The Finishing Touch”, she talks about “removing herself from her life and going to a B&B or Inn to finish her book.  “The peace and quiet combined with stepping out of my real life and into the lives of my characters not only makes the writing quicker, but lends a propulsive quality to my books,” she says.  When I first read this I felt envious and even angry.  Who gets to do that?  What mother or any of above can just slip away and escape into the artistic world of writing or any other artistic world for that matter.  What husband will allow it, let alone boss, partner, child (and I have grown sons who would never allow it.. and yes they are still my children who want to feel comforted and safe knowing their mother is there for them!)?  Lets face it, Ms. Relph, its just not that easy…

YET, she does have a point.  Okay, maybe we can not all go off to a B&B or Inn somewhere by ourselves, but couldn’t we at least squeeze in an hour or two or even a few minutes from our busy week to ourselves as a sort of escape.  To dabble in our passion, day dreams or fantasies for just a few minutes… or more.  What would be so terrible for those of us who have dreams to take just a little time off for ourselves so that we could ignite the fires of our passions, to paint, play music or write.   So that all of the admirers of art or music or photography and all of our readers of good fiction and non fiction will have the opportunity to explore, find and enjoy ART in its most natural form…

If we can not remove ourselves from our lives (I know you are thinking ‘fat chance since we do have bills to pay and kids to feed’… I know… I know..) and escape into the land of artistic creation, regardless of religion or politics, to explore and expose human behavior and thinking, then we are nothing more than the mindless followers of satan and all that is bad in the world created centuries ago who waste the gifts we have been given rather than embrace them.

So, go ahead and remove yourself from your life.. explore… ask, ….. find out.. and be… Enrich and teach.. spread the word through words or whatever artistic ability you have.  But no matter what, never give in to the silence that suppresses you.  After all, you made it this far so you must be someone special.  Now hold onto your seats as we fire up this outdated square box contraption that imprisons us and eject ourselves outside the walls that confine us and on toward the world of freedom, possibilities and opportunities.

A good story should reflect human nature as it is: flawed, corrupt, tormented, hateful, judgmental…. heroic, generous, compassionate, caring, curious, courageous, and so much more.  “Human beings are subtle, complex and unpredictable” Fred White explains in his July/ August 2014 Writer’s Digest article. “and one of the challenges of art is to capture that subtlety, complexity and unpredictability while still adhering to story design.  To be a good writer of fiction, one should be a student of human behavior, to be ever curious about what makes people do what they do, or fail to do what they long to do.”

Human Beings ARE complex and within that complexity lay frustration, contradiction and fear.  The process of writing good fiction, and of reading good fiction, draws this complexity out like good medicine drawing out infection.  It enables our readers to vicariously experience life through the various different psyches of people, who although may be different from one another share enough of these complex characteristics or dilemmas to be able to identify with them.  By observing and studying human psychology or behavior, we provide our readers with the opportunity to undergo a cathartic therapy just as we fictionalized our own before they ever met us at the first chapter.  Our readers become our characters or at the very least feel empathy, seeking their own redemption or answers, because we writers took something universal and found a creative and entertaining way to make it personal.  And for the reader, that is good fiction at its best.

A good story should reflect human nature as it is: flawed, corrupt, tormented, hateful, judgmental…. heroic, generous, compassionate, caring, curious, courageous, and so much more.  “Human beings are subtle, complex and unpredictable” Fred White explains in his July/ August 2014 Writer’s Digest article. “and one of the challenges of art is to capture that subtlety, complexity and unpredictability while still adhering to story design.  To be a good writer of fiction, one should be a student of human behavior, to be ever curious about what makes people do what they do, or fail to do what they long to do.”

Human Beings ARE complex and within that complexity lay frustration, contradiction and fear.  The process of writing good fiction, and of reading good fiction, draws this complexity out like good medicine drawing out infection.  It enables our readers to vicariously experience life through the various different psyches of people, who although may be different from one another share enough of these complex characteristics or dilemmas to be able to identify with them.  By observing and studying human psychology or behavior, we provide our readers with the opportunity to undergo a cathartic therapy just as we fictionalized our own before they ever met us at the first chapter.  Our readers become our characters or at the very least feel empathy, seeking their own redemption or answers, because we writers took something universal and found a creative and entertaining way to make it personal.  And for the reader, that is good fiction at its best.

“If you can’t explain it simply,you don’t understand it well enough.” Albert Einstein said and he was one hundred percent on the mark, in my humble opinion at least. Did you ever try to explain something to someone, whether a recipe or your take on the latest political crisis (and these days there are many of those!) and suddenly you get stuck like a back tire going round and round in the mud – not budging a single inch? Then you realize that perhaps you need to re-check that old recipe card or clarify that what you heard from this morning’s main stream media newscast about the latest Israeli / Hamas attacks was actually accurate before you say one more word.

It’s sort of like that in writing.

If you feel compelled to write with big words or phrases such as “in light of the fact that” instead of simply “because”, perhaps you are really trying to cover up the fact that you really don’t know what you are talking about but want to make it appear that you do.

In Jack Hamann’s article in the June 2014 “The Writer” he says that very thing:

” My drafts were clogged with phrases such as “in light of the fact that…” instead of simply “because; “with the exception of” instead of “except”; “at the present time” instead of “now”. Paragraphs were peppered with prepositional phrases (ah- don’t you just love those two words.. prepositional phrases…), passive verbs and circumlocutions. Sentences were stuffed with mumbo -jumbo: heretofore and whereas. And circumlocution.”

His article is titled “Less Legal” yet it applies to writing in general. Law Professor Megan McAlpin stated ” I think there is a desire to sound smart, but you actually sound smarter if you can take something complex and make it clear to anybody.”

We can all look up fancy words and plug them into our prose but it is a lot more difficult and ‘talented’ to be able to choose NOT to use those big words so that ALL of your readers will understand your piece and even more importantly, walk away with the very message you meant them to receive.

Writers need not be knitters, says Rachel Randall, a Managing Editor at Writer’s Digest, but they do need to seek out those things that energize them creatively. In the July/ August 2014 edition of Writer’s Digest, Ms. Randall explains how important it is to take time to refuel. Whether you are a writer, like me, or like Rachel Randall, or not, you must have your own goals or dreams lingering around in your head. I will guess that some of you , well most of you probably, actually have talent laying dormant inside you waiting to erupt, yet either you don’t believe it, think you have other “more important things to do.. like feeding your kids, or just haven’t been able to tap into it yet.
Writing is not just about writing itself.. its about finding those tasks that allow us to open the flood gate of ideas to come forward, just as Rachel Randall says in her article:
” We need to find tasks that relax us- be they gardening, cooking or hiking- to encourage and foster creative thought. We need to train our minds to recognize inspiration in even the most ordinary details of our lives, and we need to give ourselves the license to just play with our writing, to unleash our wildest notions on the page.”
Ms. Randall makes a very valid point.
As in everything we do, from cooking to wall-papering a nursery, its the ideas that fuel us, that empower us and give us confidence to put it out there. Without the seed, the flower will not grow and without the idea, the story will not bloom.

A story is like a painting; it’s the culmination of talent put forth on a blank slate- whether paper or canvas (or digital screen these days…) with the purpose to:
1. convey an emotion or dream or desire or thought
2. to please or affect its admirer, skeptic or critic in some way (entertain, interest, teach, guide, prove right or wrong, …) and finally
3. to release something inside the artist whether it is to cleanse herself, heal herself or share her experience.
And all the while, it is a meeting ground between an author and a reader.
In Meagan Kaplon’s interview with Jean Kwok in June 2014 The Writer magazine, she questions Ms. Kwok about how she would describe herself as a writer. “I want to communicate with people. ” she continues ” It’s this meeting ground between an author and the reader. It’s a two way street. What you put out there are objects for the reader to interact with and to make their own.” Ms. Kwok explains that she is always aware of the reader walking with her through the story and she says ” It’s like when you’re having a conversation, and you wonder if you are droning on and on. Are they falling asleep?… Just as when I write I’m always thinking: Is my reader still with me? Is she being entertained while she is hopefully learning something interesting? ”
For me, its important to express what I am feeling or thinking about while entertaining and subconsciously helping my readers get through their own experiences that may be similar to my own or someone else’s, while teaching those readers something new or perhaps while delivering a lesson or moral.
For example, perhaps my reader is having problems with her faith; questioning it, doubting it, because she just lost her cherished parent or has recently been widowed, or worse: lost her child. She wants to believe in God and Jesus and Heaven, if not for her loved one, but for her own desire to see him or her again. Struggling with her own demons, she picks up my story with hope to find answers and if not answers, then at the very least similar questions and doubts to her own so that she does not have to feel so alone in the world anymore.
If I could meet with that reader and comfort her with my story, sharing my own doubts with her while I subtly install some hope in her heart and mind, wouldn’t that be wonderful? Yet, it is not physically possible for me to meet one on one with all of the potential people out there who go through traumatic situations and therefore, sharing a story could possibly serve nearly the same purpose. The story IS a meeting ground between an author and a reader and the only thing missing is perhaps a shared pot of tea and some biscuits.

The heart and soul of story revolves around the characters: how they suffer, how they succeed, how they overcome obstacles, how they learn forgiveness and redemption, how they plough forward through life.
In Nancy Lamb’s “The Art and Craft of Storytelling”, we learn that “all powerful stories contain an essential core of personal truth- some essence drawn from real life that connects fictional awareness (how cool is that phrase- ‘fictional awareness’) with a writer’s direct or secondhand experience. This truth needn’t mirror the concrete world. Perhaps it is an emotional truth, a spiritual one, that resonates with the writer and forms the core of a story. Or perhaps this truth is an unconscious one, an association and motivation not fully understood at the beginning.”
I write my blogs to convey not only a deeper understanding and appreciation of the art of writing, but also to connect the world of fiction to the world of reality that we all live- day to day. Over the course of my studies of writing, I have learned that to be a good writer one must pay close attention to the details of day to day living- listening to conversations, studying the sounds of nature, turning up the focus dial to high so that even the faint cracks in the sidewalk stand out along our evening or early morning jogs. We writers learn that those details may one day come in handy as long as we recognize the opportunity to appreciate them when they come up, and store them in our ‘writer’s tool box’. In other words, we must live in the “now”, in the moment -for our readers. This way we can bring that ‘now’ or life lesson to those readers when they most need them….. in the form of a well crafted story.
“It is fiction that has the capacity to illuminate, to touch a reader on not only an intellectual level but a visceral one. It is that truth- deep and layered and passionate- that great storytellers express. And it is the uncovering of this truth- the search, the investigation, the examination- that makes a story compelling.” Nancy Lamb tells us this in her comprehensive guide to classic writing techniques.
Without the ability to create character, to enable him to acknowledge his challenge, then overcome it, we could not weave together a story that has the power to unveil a lesson, while simultaneoulsy drawing our reader deep inside. The fictional awareness we inspire allows our readers to look inside themselves or conversely, at the world around them, to see more clearly the things that once lay hidden from them.
By connecting the reader to our characters, tying her to her emotion- we enable her to grasp a fact or a lesson about war, suffering or the flaws in society, or whatever lesson she seeks, in a way that will affect her most deeply.
It is, after all, the ‘compelling story’ that we craft that delivers her sought- after lesson and it is our duty as writers to dig through the piles of life’s issues, plucking the lessons out from the waste that surrounds them so that our readers do not have to.