Comments on: Conflict on Every Page

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:48:01 +0000

Darcy- I’ve recently come across your website and am finding it very helpful. Thank you for your posts!

If you are interested, I’ve tagged you for a meme:
http://art-words-life.blogspot.com/2007/12/ive-been-what.html

Best,
Jennifer

By: darcy

darcy — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 20:21:17 +0000

Oh, I’m all for anacondas! Internal and external.

But in the story I was reading, it seemed to me that the anaconda served no purpose except to artificially raise the conflict; when it was resolved, I felt like I’d been cheated, because the child was never in any real danger.

The conflict has to be appropriate for the story.

Darcy

By: Clive

Clive — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 12:23:34 +0000

Conflict on every page is exactly right. These are the beats of the story, the very lifeblood of our characters. But I will say we need the anaconda in our stories, punctuated with the ‘internal’ anaconda throughout (balance between the two depends on the genre/style we take on).

By: Tony Abbott

Tony Abbott — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:05:00 +0000

Darcy: I suspect that one new piece of guilty business people can do these days is to Google themselves and their creations. I happened to find your thoughtful comments on Firegirl, and I wanted to, first, thank you for them, but also to say that I’ve never come across the notion of conflict on every page. It’s intriguing. As writers, we can’t, of course, keep that sort of thing in our heads as we write, since the bigger story should somehow dictate the flow of action that can’t be so methodically portioned out. And yet there is something behind it, and you’re right to think that it’s in revision that it can come a little more up toward consciousness. Anyway, just rambling. Thanks for mentioning the book. And good luck with your own writing.
Best wishes,
Tony Abbott