Celebrating Independent Authors
Orphaned as a child, Irisi became a mercenary to survive. Captured by the Egyptian army and made the spoils of war, she finds herself drawn to their commander. Though the attraction is mutual even he can’t save her from enslavement and she’s forced to fight in the ring for entertainment. In a desperate attempt to regain her freedom she throws herself on the mercy of the Gods, only to discover that her fate is written in prophecy…
Servant of the Gods is available from Amazon.
I used to teach writing workshops for kids who, in some cases, had lived through things I can barely imagine. And, as I have mentioned, honesty is the cornerstone of great writing as far as I am concerned. I was working, and writing, with people who had some really, really intense shit to draw upon. I had three rules. Three very, very important rules.
Whether your fiction is plot- or character-driven, what’s really sitting behind the wheel of this bus is the conflict. Without conflict, your story will flop around like a quivering lump of protoplasm, kind of like Jabba the Hutt without the charm. Conflict drives story. It drives your characters to get off their asses and do something about the things that have been bothering them.
To keep the conflict in the forefront of my squirmy writer brain, I keep asking myself, “What does this character want?” Okay, right now one of my protagonists wants chocolate and a shoulder rub. Lovely aims, but hardly enough to make a reader stick around for three hundred pages. The conflict is too easily resolved. She can go to the store to buy chocolate, or pay a massage therapist to tend to her aching muscles. BUT… what if she is driven to the point of obsession to create the most sinfully delicious chocolate on the planet because her mother died in a freak chocolate fountain accident before she could realize her dream of being the next Willy Wonka? What if she is so hideously deformed that all of humankind recoils from her, except for the nice guy down the street…who is marrying a total bee-yotch next Saturday, and our gal is contemplating nefarious behavior involving rat poison and a bear trap?
Now there’s some conflict.
Continue reading “Conflict and Why You Need Some”
Entertainment to suit the age
We seem to live in a sensationalist age, when things come to our notice only when they have become famous… or notorious. Celebrity-watching is super popular, and books seem to become instantly famous if they contain some controversy that brings them to the notice of the reporting and investigative media, more than literary critics or literary supplements.
Why is this? What is happening really? Are people losing interest in themselves in favour of celebrities? Are books becoming mere channels for discussion and debate? Perhaps this is simply a fashion or fad. It certainly has been going on for some time. There is a morbid interest among the general public for things that contain some sort of controversy. Continue reading “Entertainment to suit the age”