I was sitting on the couch of a Very Famous Novelist, interviewing her about her upcoming book for our local newspaper. “I love coming up with new ways to torment my characters,” she said, with unfettered delight in her eyes. She spoke with relish about dreaming up fresh perils and pitfalls for her heroines to face. “I never want my readers to be bored,” she added.
Her words were a revelation to me. Torment! Peril! These were levels of drama I never rose to in my writing. No wonder I’ll never be a Very Famous Novelist, I thought to myself. Writing: I’m doing it wrong.
“You have to really make your main character suffer,” came back the beta reader notes on one of my first drafts of what would become Between Two Skies. “Throw every obstacle you can in her way.” I imagined calamities: car crashes? Fist fights? That didn’t feel true to my story or to my character. “More tension!” another reader demanded.
According to every personality test I’ve ever taken, I’m the peacemaker, the mediator, the one who values harmony. Let’s work it out is my default over let’s duke it out. When I heard the words conflict, tension and suffering, all I could think of were big, dramatic elements: painful deaths and villainous plots. But I write stories that are a bit more down to earth. Let’s face it, I thought, novels are about conflict. Without a sustained series of setbacks, a novel isn’t a novel. Given who I am, should I even be trying to write a novel?, I wondered. Read more here.