What’s the worst that could happen?

Learning new skills usually require learning things in the right order. It’s kind of pointless learning how to differentiate a mathematical equation if you don’t know algebra. It’s fruitless to learn how to form a subjunctive clause in a new language if you don’t know how simple verbs work.

It happens when you learn how stories work, too.

I had a revelation about stories the other day. I haven’t been doing much writing in the last year. A big part of that is that I’ve simply been living (I live on my own, well, with my cat), but another important reason is that I’ve been a bit frustrated at my inability to put a story together. There’s a reason this blog is called “Just Add Story”, after all.

Back to my revelation. I read a couple of webcomics on a nearly daily basis. One of them is Schlock Mercenary, a science-fiction action comedy set a few hundred years in the future. And the current point in the current story arc could best be described as “things go horribly wrong“. Up until this point, the toughs were doing something fairly tame. No-one was getting shot at, for instance. They were retrieving artifacts for some grumpy scientists and trying to appease a local alien race whose world they’re, well, plundering. Except these aliens have just now out-smarted the heros and have begun causing them a certain amount of chaos.

This happens fairly regularly in this webcomic. A large part of the reason is that the main characters running the show are not the sharpest crayons in the box – a fact frequently mentioned, but rarely successfully mitigated against. Thus we have all the things to Make A Good Story Happen.

How have I not noticed this before? Well, I have, but I wasn’t ready to learn it. What happens is the writer goes “what’s the worst thing that could happen?” – and then proceeds to do pretty much exactly this. It’s not a new concept. I’ve seen it mentioned a few times by writers and readers on my Twitter feed in the last month. But now I was ready to learn it.

My current novel has languished for a long time. Some of the reason is time – but that’s actually no excuse because I often do find time to do what I want to do. So why was I not interested in writing? Because it was getting boring.

That’s when I had my revelation. The protagonist in my writing has lost his farm, his village and his livelihood. He’s been thrown into (and out of) a city he doesn’t know and doesn’t understand. Now he’s following someone else who he doesn’t know well and who also doesn’t know what’s going on. However, he has his pregnant wife with him. She’s important to the larger story because she’s pregnant – but that isn’t so important right now. In fact, it’s kind of getting in the way. Meanwhile, our hero doesn’t have a direction in the story – he’s flailing around with nothing to do. And that’s makes for a story that isn’t going anywhere.

I’m guessing that experienced writers will probably say at this point: take the wife off him. And that’s the key. Do that and now he has something to do (get her back) vnd has to canvass help from a range of new acquaintances to figure out how to do it.

Basically, why would I give the hero a wife if I’m not going to take her off him?

 

Let there be conflict.

There are many pieces of potted advice given out to writers. This is the sort of two or three sentence idea that is intended to address a specific problem. Or sometimes a favourite observation. Or just a favourite response.

Not that they can’t be helpful. One reasonably common one is that every scene needs a conflict.

Usually when people hear the word “conflict” they think of two people in strong disagreement, perhaps so strong as to warrant a physical altercation. Trench warfare is a conflict. Armed robbery is a conflict. Domestic violence is a conflict. But so is a mild difference of opinion. In writing, the term seems to have a unique definition.

Of course, a lot of conflict will be heated and/or violent. In writing, this is where weapons often come out and characters can be injured or killed. In real life that tends to bring down the force of the law on to you in the first world (not always, I’ll admit). In fantasy writing, you often find out who is quicker or more accurate with a sword or crossbow. Or who is just luckier.

But conflict in writing can and will take many forms. There is a conflict if someone has incomplete information and says something that betrays that. That could lead to another conflict if they don’t want to be corrected, but it could also be a process of gaining understand that involved a to-and-fro as they grasp it. There could be a conflict of motive, where two people want to achieve the same task for entirely different reasons. At first they could work well together, but because of the difference of motive there is a chance that this will devolve as they approach completion.

Sometimes the conflict itself can be mis-characterised. This might happen if one person sees two points of conflict whilst the other sees just one. You’ve probably seen this in real life where two people disagree over a fact, and then one makes it personal, which is rarely helpful and they don’t always realize they’ve done that. Now we have more than one conflict in play.

Writing conflict is not easy for me. I do not have a good physical reaction to the stress associated with high-levels of conflict and I struggle to not take verbal conflict personally. So writing scenes where this is needed can be stressful all by itself. Oddly enough, writing armed conflict is easier, as is a simple transfer-of-knowledge scene.

Still, that’s what learning to write is all about:  figuring out where your weaknesses are and bettering the skills. I know enough to realize that when a scene is not working it is because there is no “conflict” hinging the interaction.