This week, for the past week or so, I haven’t been writing. It’s not that I don’t have the time. I have two books that I’m working on at the same time, and I don’t know which one to concentrate on, so I decide to not work on either.<\/p>\n
At this point, what’s got me stuck is the indecision of what to work on.<\/p>\n
I pulled open both books and noticed I had stopped in the middle of a scene, which Hemingway always did, to spur me on to the next scene. Problem was, I forgot what I was writing. Again, stuck.<\/p>\n
When I’m stuck, I blow something up. Or as Chandler put it, “When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”<\/p>\n
I realized the power of this when I wrote a collaborative story a few years ago. My character, Rusty, was doing something boring. The characters around him weren’t doing anything much, either. I blew up the dock Rusty worked in, and it was on. \u00a0The story picked up, things moved.<\/p>\n
Exposition is well and good; internal navel gazing is important to the protagonist; but conflict, action, making things happen–that’s the meat of the story, what the readers really want. \u00a0It might sound like I’m writing Chandler-esque stories: books that are there for the action, and not much else.\u00a0It’s a hard balancing act to have story–characters, world–and the conflict. Anybody can throw a bomb into a room, but there has to be a why, even if it’s explained after the fact.<\/p>\n
So, I opened up Dark Prison<\/em>, my newest War Mage novel that I’m working on, and introduced a man with a gun. It’s like putting gas directly in the carburetor; it’s a jump start, but not something you want to do as a rule, or the shock value will fade. The gun could be anything from a real gun to a new reveal, something that would create a conflict for the protagonist, or even for a secondary character to develop a subplot. Even during introductions, throw in a “gun” to make things move.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week, for the past week or so, I haven’t been writing. It’s not that I don’t have the time. I have two books that I’m working on at the same time, and I don’t know which one to concentrate … Continue reading