I was recently at my mother’s reading a magazine with the title, How to increase Conflict. My mom looked at me with a strange expression and I realized how the title must look to the non-writer. Who wants to increase conflict? Of all the self-help books on the market, I doubt any of them have that title.
Most of our lives we try and avoid conflict and tense situations, but then we have to turn around and create them. This was a major issue that came up for me in my substantive edit: my main character was avoiding conflict. In a good-humoured way, my mentor did say she sees this a lot. Writers tend to avoid conflict in their own personal lives, and then do the same on the page. The good writers realize that’s where to get it all out, all the conflict they’ve been avoiding.
So my major re-write has me focusing on creating the right amount of conflict and tension in my novel. How much is too much? Depends on the story and the reader. Ultimately, there is no one answer. It’s a balancing act known as pacing, and only the reader will tell us if we get it right. And each reader is looking for something different.
But there are some guideposts to follow.
Do you journal? I do. I first learned to write by reading Natalie Golberg’s, Writing Down the Bones and utilizing her method of free writing. Not long after was Julia Cameron’s, The Artist’s Way, and her practice of writing three pages every day. These were my beginning teachers and these are the lessons that still keep me connected to writing even in the most hectic times and some of my hardest times.
One of the most challenging aspects to novel writing is getting your pacing right. I knew I was struggling with mine, it lagged in places and people weren’t accepting it for publication. Which meant my worst fears were true, something was off. And that something has to do with how I’ve structured my novel.
Every word I’ve written has taken the slaying of a dragon to get to the page. The dragon is my resistance to writing that rears its ugly head each and every time I try to fool myself that I can write, or that I should write instead of the multitude of other tasks that lie undone. I don’t know what it’s like for other writers, how many face this resistance, but I know there’s a few of us.
