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Fall Back 2022
An extra hour to sleep this weekend? ⏳ I’ll take it. 😴🛌🏼💤
🎼Tradition!🎶 🎻🏡
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition. ~Henry James
No matter how you fall on the issue of whether we still need Daylight Savings Time, it rolls into town tomorrow morning at 2am.
It’s well known that Daylight Savings Time dates back to Benjamin Franklin, so a lot of people tend to write it off as an inconvenient anachronism.
The original intent was to make the most of available daylight to conserve on artificial lighting sources. Such resources were more difficult to create and distribute in the Eighteenth Century.
Now that we have ubiquitous electricity and run it all day for refrigerators, computers and climate controls, the idea of concerning ourselves with efficient use of daylight hours is fairly irrelevant.
As a happy denizen of the Twenty-first Century, such considerations are not currently applicable.
In the unfortunate instance of a power outage, I’d have no idea what time it is anyway. Most, if not all, of my household clocks are electrical. No power, no time. Oh well.
Regardless of savings time or normal time, I literally have no freaking time at any time of day.
Holy crap, am I busy!!!
I dented my To-Do list this week, but I don’t know that I truly completed any of the items in need of doing.
Bah Humbug!
It’s now the weekend and time to crack on with Merry 🔔 Bells.
Yes, More Music 🎶 To Stimulate Writing ✍🏼
Sweet November Jazz ☕ Delicate Fall Jazz & Bossa Nova Music for Work, Study and Relax
So, I had a pretty good run last weekend. 3000 words each on Saturday and Sunday. Not too much progress on Monday.
I’ll be trying to top that this weekend because I’m only written up to December 3rd so far.
Things are proceeding interestingly so far. I had no idea any of this would transpire based on the point of departure.
That’s the exciting part of being a “discovery writer” or “pantser“. I’m as surprised by what happens in the story as you eventually will be.
In any case, I have quite a bit left to write to finish this year’s Holiday Season Serial Romance, so that’s the big To-Do for the weekend.
That’s What They Call 🎭 Conflict
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. ~George Bernard Shaw
In a light-hearted story such as my Holiday Season Serial Romances, it’s hard to come up with the kind of dramatic conflict that writers are known for inflicting on their characters. «Squints at George R. R. Martin.»
But that’s the essence of contemporary fiction. We’re encouraged to come up with conflict in order to build the tension that will keep readers hooked.
So, what’s the essence of dramatic conflict? It’s a circumstance that impedes the main character or current focus character from attaining an intended outcome.
That’s it in a nutshell.
The thing is, in order to build interest, you have to dial up the conflict.
If I want to go to the kitchen and top off my coffee, I can just do it. There is no conflict.
If the coffee pot is empty and I have to wait for my coffee maker to brew some more, now there’s a bit of conflict.
If I have to leave or if I have a pending meeting that starts before the pot of coffee is ready, there’s even more conflict.
If there was a door between me and the kitchen, there’s more conflict but not that much.
If there was a locked door between me and the kitchen and I couldn’t find the key, finally getting through the door only to find that the pot is empty and I haven’t time to brew another before I have to do something else that I can’t put off gives us fairly palpable tension.
All this for a cup of coffee? That’s dramatic conflict in action.
Typically, in a RomCom, the conflict comes from mismatched love interests, conflicting goals or farcical difficulties.
Typically, in an action story, the conflict comes from people violently attacking the viewpoint character.
In other genres, the conflict is contingent on the circumstances of the story.
Hard sci-fi often deals with conflicts of disease, pollution or an invention that needs to be created to resolve a societal issue.
Political thrillers deal with conflicts of national interests, personal agendas and malfeasance of officeholders or the ramifications of policy failures.
Conflict is frequently interpersonal, but (as with my coffee example above) it can be environmental, psychological, spiritual or circumstantial.
It can be as benign as a kid trying to pass a pop quiz or as daunting as trying to survive a plane crash and the subsequent journey to safety.
Peace and quiet may be a goal for those of us in the real world, but it doesn’t make for a particularly fascinating read.
Ultimately, a story boils down to a character, group or society wanting to achieve something and having to overcome some form of opposition in order to accomplish the desired goal.
In some cases, the conflict might not seem like a conflict at first glance. If the goal is to be able to feed your village, you might not have to battle hordes of barbarians, fend off a pack of wolves or battle a raging prairie fire. You might just need to figure out how to farm more effectively to maximize your harvest.
Granted, that might be a tad boring if you don’t include some of those other elements that I mentioned, that’s not the only sort of conflict that can be dialed up to generate interest in the story.
If we restrict ourselves to the scope of feeding the village without bombastic invasions or environmental catastrophe, we might deal with the sociological and interpersonal implications of not being able to harvest enough food to feed everyone.
Having food is fairly low on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, so a lack of nutrition undermines your ability to experience and actualize the subsequent tiers of need. Tempers flare, people are blamed, illness sets in, society begins to shred.
Depending on the society in this village, a leader might be removed from office procedurally, violently or ceremonially.
If the viewpoint character is the leader, the stress of being undermined at every turn and blamed for widespread hunger can be a gutwrenching crawl through self-doubt, stress with family and friends while seeing a life of dedicated service fall to pieces.
If the viewpoint character is someone who has a valid idea for improving the food situation but has no power to enact them, they might have to deal with the stress of trying to convince people to listen to and engage in a new way of farming. They might be actively repressed by entrenched leadership. They might be ignored, shamed or shunned.
No barbarians, wolves or prairie fires in the story but there’s plenty of conflict, friction, tension and obstacles to achieving the desired outcome. Our seemingly bland story about a hungry village suddenly becomes gripping on several levels.
If you have difficulty trying to build conflict in your story, try to look at what obstacles can be reasonably placed in your character’s path.
If you’re writing a Western, there probably won’t be blood-sucking space mutants but there could be desperados, war bands, rail barons and their ruthless minions or even a thundering horde of bison bearing down on you.
Taking away violence, you can have survival issues such as finding water in Death Valley, keeping warm crossing a mountain pass into California, stopping for a night’s sleep in a town with a cholera outbreak.
Taking away life and death struggles of violence or survival, you might run into issues of bigotry, corrupt public officials or simply trying to find work in a tight-knit frontier community.
There are so many kinds of conflict that you can employ to build interest in your story. In order to make progress, you need a little friction. It might seem like you’re being mean to your characters, but if you don’t add some conflict for dramatic interest you’re being mean to your readers.
That’s the weekend for you. I hope you’re getting some lovely R&R and enjoying some Pumpkin 🎃 Spice while the season lasts.