Choice is a word we bandy about a lot in modern times, especially in catchy little “thought-leader” quotes on social media. Over the weekend, someone posted this little nugget of wisdom:

Some uncomfortable math:

Your bank account is a record of your decisions

Your body is a record of your habits

Your relationships are a record of your priorities

None of this is luck. All of this is compounding.

Social Media Know-It-All I Shan’t Name

IMO, this post isn’t about “uncomfortable math,” it’s moral laundering. Decisions don’t exist in a vacuum. Systems, illness, caretaking, instability and plain bad frigging luck all shape the ledger. This is true in life, but even more true in fiction.

See, the weird thing about choice, is it is an inherently human conundrum. Unlike animals guided solely by instinct, we humans possess the concept of a “self.”

We have an ego or id or whatever it is that makes us apex drama queens. It is that conscious self that permits self-reflection, which I am a huge fan of…so long as we at least flirt with a little bit of reality.

Life is not binary or clearly marked with signage.

I get why folks post these passive-aggressive snipes labeled “life lessons.” With a surface read, they feel true.

It’s easy to get folks clapping like seals, heads bobbing as if they’ve ever faced a binary world in their lives. Life is virtually never a choice between one terrible, stupid, reckless option versus the sane, level-headed, adult one.

I’d even venture to say that 99% of life is choosing the least crappy decision out of a list of horrible options while gambling the fallout is something we can handle.

Ideally later.

If LIFE is life like this, and fiction is really LIFE in distillate, what kind of choice are you offering your characters?

NO Choice

If you want to know how professional writers turn out a book or two or ten a year? Whether they’re a plotter, pantser or something in between, they understand story structure.

Deeply.

If we pan back and look at what great storytelling is, it is all about choice. And our characters must have agency. Pretty words alone are not enough. No reader is solely there for our decision to use “cerulean” instead of “blue”. They want a story with stakes.

Big ones.

If our characters keep going from thing to thing and place to place out of no volition of their own? They’re not a character. They’re flotsam. Maybe jetsam. Depends on whether we threw our character overboard or churned them up from the sea bed.

What choice did your character make to get where they are?

Choices are Rarely Obvious or Simple

If this is true in life, then why the hell are we holding the reader’s hands and taking away the very reason they want to read fiction?

First, let’s pause a brief minute and ponder a half a minute as to why anyone, in a world with TikTok and Netflix, would want to read your book? Or mine? Reading is hard, brain intensive and requires focused concentration.

So why are people reading?

For the same reason we hop on roller coasters. We want a safe place for catharsis. To teeter at the edge of the abyss…while strapped in safely in a seat that’s passed nine hundred separate inspections. Yet, don’t we also forget that while we are on the ride believing we’ll surely DIE?

Our audience already understands how life works because—DUH—they’re living one. They also smell bull sprinkles from a mile away. Sure, maybe there are some genres where there is a bit more coddling. I’m not going to pretend that The Baby-Sitters Club has anything remotely in common with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as far as genre and tone. But what do they both actually share?

CHOICES.

Sticky ones.

If I can give y’all any writing advice at all, it’s this. Learn to be hard on your characters. Then get harder and meaner. Hurl everything they believe they love through the metaphorical wood chipper, or (like Fargo) an actual one.

Choice should never be binary, A or B? It needs to be A, B, C left town, D is shacking up with Q, and S wants child support for X, Y & Z.

Life and Fiction is About Sticky Compromise

How many times in life do we get a break? Really? As in real, breathing people? Life is just one decision after another and that has only gotten exponentially worse in the Information Age.

We actually now have a word for the crappy way we feel at the end of the day, when we will happily eat cereal for dinner because we’re cooked (well done, of course).

Decision fatigue.

Do you think people get decision fatigue because life is a pretty path of petals?

Send the email now or wait and hope for better options? Fix the AC or get a new washer and dryer? Tell your partner you love them but also if they don’t stop snoring you might have to find an awesome expensive defense attorney?

Nothing easy.

Ever.

And that is life, not fiction. In stories the problems are grand, stakes are massive, failure is not an option.

In life, problems are grand, stakes are massive, and we experience actual failure all the frigging time. We don’t find true love, land the dream job, take out the evil HR Empire. This is why we read fiction. Messy but with a satisfactory ending…not some fresh toke on a fire hose.

Enjoy the RIDE!

With rollercoasters, have all the twists and turns you want, but design must play along with the laws of physics or things go terribly wrong.

Same in stories.

Additionally, just like rides have a clear beginning and clear destination, so should our stories. It’s the how we take the rider reader from beginning to the end that makes all the difference.

Which is weird because most of the time, we know how stories will end, don’t we? Well, kind of. We know the good guys will likely win, just aren’t exactly sure how. And that is what makes us tense, where we storytellers can strip away control.

How many of you sat at the edge of your seats when Frodo and Samwise finally stepped into Mordor? Did you worry when the spider tried to make Frodo into a snack? Wonder if Samwise would get there in time? I mean actually worry?

No.

WHY?

We “worried”, sure. Yet we all knew on some level they’d be successful (unlike life). If Tolkien had just let everyone fail pointlessly to illustrate some existential morass…we’d have Russian Lit. If they made that into a movie—once the reader revolts subsided—we wouldn’t have one of the most iconic movies of the modern age.

We’d have a French film.

And everyone died. The end.

Yet, somehow Tolkien threaded between Dostoevsky and Sundance’s latest rave and gave audiences movies they never tire of rewatching even though we all know the Ring is destroyed. How did Tolkien/Peter Jackson manage this tension?

Choice.

Or rather, the illusion of having one.

See this is where choices—particularly messy choices—make the difference. Once our story starts becoming predictable, we leave a nice convenient place to put a bookmark.

In our business, BOOKMARKS=DEATH.

Never, ever leave a logical place to stop reading your stories. The only acceptable place to leave your story needs to be at the end, when the reader is giddy, breathless, shaken and can’t wait to do it again.

Now Use Your AI

Obviously, this is a personal decision. Once you have your log-line (your story in ONE sentence), feel free to riff from there. Though I, personally, don’t like outlining every detail of my story, I do begin with at least a general idea where I’m going.

This starts truncating choices from there into an increasingly narrower decision tree.

We let the reader “know” a vague idea of how our story ends (true love, happily for now, business saved, family restored, babysitter club in tact, justice served); we just don’t explain how we intend on getting them there.

Every scene begins with a GOAL (external or internal). In the scene, there are three options: win, lose, draw.

Our MC should get hammered most of the book (mostly lose and draw with a rare win), but this is where we need to be careful. This is where sticky choices can help. Messy “good enough considering” choices keep our characters out of The Land of Too Stupid to Live.

Instead of obvious good and bad choices, we should mirror life, then amplify the hell out of it.

AI can actually be an excellent soundboard. When your MC hits a choke (choice) point, what is the obvious good decision? Now scrap that. Also the obvious bad one. Brainstorm until you drill down into maybe the MC’s third or tenth choice.

If we get the reader’s the adrenaline pumping, that’s awesome because stress narrows focus. They might “see” the first couple sane options but if we dig down and serve up the less obvious? It won’t make sense until after the ride is over.

And retrospectively, they’ll see it wasn’t merely brilliant but inevitable, which is why they’ll tell all their friends and preorder our next book.

Stories Have a Clear Finish Line (Ending)

So does life, but that is beyond the scope of this blog. I want y’all to imagine your reader. Then answer WHY your book? Why spend limited money and time they don’t believe they have to engage in an activity most people rate alongside doing their taxes?

Most people don’t read because they believe reading is boring. But, for those who do read or who will read…WHY?

We have desires that may or may not come to fruition in life. Stories offer a place where the underdog wins, right and wrong matter, characters defy all the odds and WIN. Stories give us respite from reality long enough to reignite what makes us utterly human.

Belief.

What Are Your Thoughts?

I LOVE hearing from you!

What choice in your story scares you to make, and why?

Where in your current project is your character avoiding the hardest decision, even though it’s the one that would change everything?

Have you ever realized mid-draft that your character had no real agency—just motion? If so, what did you change to fix it?

What’s the messiest, least satisfying choice you’ve forced a character to make, and how did it affect the story?

Have you ever used AI to brainstorm story decisions or turning points? Did it help you uncover a less obvious option you hadn’t considered?

The post Why Choice—Not Talent—Drives Great Stories appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Stakes, bizarrely enough, are a key ingredient missing in many stories. If the characters don’t have skin in the game, why would the audience? The bigger the stakes the better the page turner. Whether on the page or on the screen, what keeps audiences enraptured the most? What makes us spend an entire weekend inhaling a book, a series, or binging that Netflix series?

We want to have to know…what happens.

How does the MC react to a certain problem? Can they recover? Do they win? At what cost? Ultimately, we have to know how it all turns out.

That is the beauty of stories and why we humans love them so much. Real life has stakes but little to no assurances that everything will work out for the better.

Life has plenty of stakes but little to no closure. It is no coincidence that one of the first “matchmaking” sites on the internet was Classmates.com. So many of us, new to the shiny internet, finally had a way of looking up people we once went to school with to see what happened.

Did the Homecoming Court really go on and lead the same charmed life they seemed to enjoy in high school? What about the bully? The smart kid? How about that crush we never quite had the courage to talk to? Did we miss out on a gem or dodge a bullet?

Stakes are the fuel that fires our need for closure. This is critical for any story. Read a book to a five-year-old and try to stop halfway through. Even kids won’t let us off easy. Because of the rising stakes, they’ll want to know, “How does it end?”

Stakes and Structure

Last post, we discussed agency and we took an aerial tour of plot structure. We toured all the major sections of plot, what they do, and how one section should feed into the next.

Now before you guys get the vapors and think I’m boxing you into some rigid format that will ruin your creativity, nothing could be further from the truth.

Plot (storytelling) is about elements, those things that go into the mix of making a good story even better.

Structure is about timing—where in the mix those elements go.

When you read a novel that isn’t quite grabbing you, the reason is probably structure. Even though it may have good characters, snappy dialogue, and intriguing settings, the story isn’t unfolding in the optimum fashion. ~James Scott Bell from Plot and Structure.

Structure holds stories together and helps them make sense and flow in such a way so as to maximize the emotional impact by the end of the tale. How we keep ratcheting emotions is we layer on higher and higher stakes.

If structure is the recipe for a fine meal, the stakes are how, and when we apply the heat. We can buy all the fanciest ingredients for a French meal. Have all the expensive doo-dads. We can measure out every ingredient to the milligram but what happens if we never turn on the heat? Or, conversely, we cook everything on the highest heat possible?

While we DO need to look at how to add the ingredients, timing how we heat the story makes the difference between a masterpiece and a mess.

The Micro-Scale of Story Structure

We’re going to first ZOOM IN and place the novel under a literary electron microscope.

The most fundamental basics of a novel are cause and effect. Super basic. An entire novel can be broken down into cause-effect-cause-effect-cause-effect (yes, even literary works). All effects must have a cause and all causes eventually must have an effect (or a good explanation).

I know that in life random things happen and people die for no reason. While life often IS stranger than fiction, fiction ain’t life.

So if a character drops dead from a massive heart attack, that seed needs to be planted ahead of time.

Villains don’t just have their heart explode because we need them to die so we can end our book. Our MC can’t suddenly discover a journal that EXPLAINS EVERYTHING in the middle of Act Two because we failed to properly plot an actual story and painted ourselves in a literary corner.

Now, all these little causes and effects clump together to form the next two building blocks we’ll discuss—the scene & the sequel (per Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure). Many times these will clump together to form your ‘chapters.’

Whenever I edit or teach writing, I have a mantra: “Never leave a logical place to put a bookmark.”

Scene & Sequel & Stakes

Word order matters, or we end up with confusion.

Structure’s two main components, as I said earlier, are the scene and the sequel.

The scene is a fundamental building block of fiction. It is physical. Something tangible is happening. The scene has three parts (again per Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure, which I recommend every writer buy and read and study).

• Statement of the goal
• Introduction and development of conflict
• Failure of the character to reach his goal, a tactical disaster (raise the stakes)

Goal –> Conflict –> Disaster

The sequel is the other fundamental building block and is the emotional thread. The sequel often begins at the end of a scene when the viewpoint character has to process the unanticipated but logical disaster that happened at the end of your scene.

Emotion–> Thought–> Decision–> Action

Link scenes and sequels together and flesh over a narrative structure and you will have a novel readers will enjoy.

Oh but Kristen you are hedging me in to this formulaic writing and I want to be creative.

Understanding structure is not formulaic writing. It is a story delivery system that makes sense on a fundamental level.

Formulaic writing refers to the execution of story structure. It’s a reflection of skill, or rather, lack thereof. So relax, structure is your friend. It will make writing and finishing books easier, and it comes with the added bonus of not confusing the bejeezus out of the readers.

This little recipe also helps us slowly (and later quickly) turn up the heat on our characters.

Skin in the Game

One of the biggest mistakes I see, particularly with new writers, is we can be too nice. There is a good reason normal people (code for “readers”) eye us writers with a deserved degree of suspicion. It takes a certain level of sadism to write great stories. When any mere boring mortal would want to back away from pressure or explain away a problem, we writers must plunge ahead and let the characters and (by proxy) the readers suffer.

The more they suffer, the better.

Why do you think A Game of Thrones was such a worldwide phenomenon? Huge, huge stakes! Global and personal. We, the audience, learned pretty quickly not to get too attached to any one character because they were likely to not only die, but die horribly.

So long as the HBO writers stuck with that recipe, global audiences couldn’t get enough. The minute they rushed the story, broke the rules and took away the stakes? The series imploded into a disaster.

Refer to post: A Game of Thrones: A Song of ‘I Literally Can’t Even’

A major reason the HBO series devolved into disaster is they’d done an incredible job of raising global and personal stakes. Stakes drove audiences to forgive major delays in later seasons. We were all biting our nails to the quick, our nerves shredded…then the characters all got a magical pass.

Spoiler Alert: Ice Zombies no big deal and winter never came.

How Vested are Your Characters?

When we craft any story, we must ask ourselves, “What do they have to lose?”

I love pretty prose probably far more than the next person, but using cerulean instead of blue is not what makes audiences care. We aren’t there for the wordsmithery, yet it is very easy for us writers to fixate on a new way of saying green instead of focusing on the bits that matter.

If you go look at most of the authors who are guaranteed to sell a lot of books, usually the prose is fairly plain. These authors understand it is the story that matters most. Stakes are what will stake our reader in place and refuse to let them go until THE END.

Thus, ask yourself:

What happens if my MC fails?

Who suffers if my MC fails?

How does their world change for the worse if the MC fails?

If nothing changes, we are missing a key ingredient to our story. As the story progresses, the challenges will get harder physically and emotionally. Our characters need a compelling reason to keep going.

Upping the Stakes

Going back to my recipe metaphor, there is a time and place to up the stakes and to back off a bit.

Have you ever been to an action movie that was just fight scene after chase scene after fight scene? You never got a chance to take a breath and walked away needing a nap…or a drink?

Here is an instance of the writers either making the sequels too short in duration or not having enough overall. The sequel is the breather where the characters process and act/react to what’s happening. If our sequels are missing or underdeveloped, this can make our characters come across as one-dimensional.

Audiences don’t care deeply about those kinds of characters.

Then we have the opposite. Sometimes filmmakers try to take stories that are excellent on the page—because audiences have the window into what the characters are thinking via the narrative—and put it on film.

Problem is, you have to cast really, and I mean really superlative actors to pull it off…and even then *yawns*

These are frequently the artsy films that seem to never take off. All the stakes are internal, existential and…meta. While critics might love them, usually these films are a flop with regular audiences.

In fact, any time I see the phrase “a visual masterpiece” I know the movie is likely to suck.

Do both these “genres” have a fan base? Sure.

There will always be people who will go to the next Mission Impossible move just like there will always be folks, pinkies outstretched, who loooove anything at Cannes. Yet, those are the fringes and, if we want to reach the biggest audience, the fat middle part of the bell curve is a better bet.

The Goldilocks Zone

When it comes to most genre fiction, we should look to the scenes and sequels for cues as to where, how and how much to raise or lower the stakes.

If we go back to our example last week with LOTR (Lord of the Rings). When Frodo and Samwise set off from the Shire WE the audience know they are eventually going to have to destroy the ring in Mount Doom…but they don’t. Had Tolkien started off with that, Gandalf would never have pried the Hobbits from under the bed.

On each leg of the adventure, there is a resting period and then Tolkien ups the heat. He makes the invading armies closer than they realized, bigger than they imagined, and he progressively shortens the ticking clock.

What if we aren’t writing epic high fantasy?

Genre and Stakes

I have a post where y’all can go check out the different genres. We need to know what genre we are writing so we know what the rules are. And yes, we need to follow the rules. We need to know the rules to break the rules. That is art. Breaking rules we don’t know is just called being a hack.

If I am writing a mystery, then I know my story needs to open with a crime and that the entire point of the story is figuring out whodunit (And Then There Were None). Writing a thriller? A big bad thing happens at the beginning…and it is a race against time to stop way bigger bad thing from happening (Jurassic Park).

On and on. Look at your story’s genre and see what the reader expectations are…then feel free to break rules to deliver what they wanted but never expected in that way (Gone Girl).

Stake Sizzlers

What are some ways we can organically up the stakes in our story? Remember to Be a Secret Keeper. Resist the urge to explain. Audiences, in large part, are hanging on because they want to find OUT some piece of information. This is why flashbacks, by and large, are a no-no.

If we know WHY Eric Northman (in True Blood) is dark and brooding the first time we see him, it kills the thrill. Yes he is a vampire and they are a notoriously emo bunch, but why is he uniquely emo? Unlike (IMO the tedious Bill Compton) Eric Northman was far more interesting because we didn’t get all this backstory right out of the gate.

He remained a mystery longer, which was why I felt he was a far more powerful driver for the series.

Hold off on self-actualization. Characters who are too sane, too evolved and too emotionally healthy are a fiction snooze fest. The trick is that they are likely to believe they have their sh!t together…when that is far from the case. OR, if they know they’re a mess, they will vastly underrate their faults, over magnify their virtues or completely miss what their issues are altogether.

The story then, should be designed to peel away their self-delusion and make them face their darkness so they can change for the better.

The MC must be sympathetic and redeemable. Before anyone shouts me down, I get this has a lot of latitude. Antiheroes and anti villains are becoming increasingly popular. That said, there are certain lines we cannot cross with most audiences. Feel free to join in the thirteen-year-long argument on my post What Went Wrong with the Star Wars Prequels?

Anakin Skywalker is a little kid killer. Never redeemable. Ever. The end.

What are your thoughts?

Do you struggle with being too nice to your characters? I know I still do. Often I have to go back and write in some mess ups to keep the tension going. Are you bad about over sharing? Over explaining? Can you see some tricks in here to keep audiences wanting more?

I love hearing from you! Anything you’d like to add? Maybe books, series or movies that handled stakes really well? Do you have any questions? Topics you’d like for me to explore in future blogs?

And remember, my perennial author branding book, Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World and my mystery thriller The Devil’s Dance are both on sale on Kindle right now for only .99.

Whether it is comments, shares, sales, or reviews, these are the things that keep us content producers (and authors) going and able to keep delivering. I always appreciate your support and love being able to keep doing this for you!

The post Stakes: How to Hook an Audience All the Way to THE END appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

What is the one ingredient we MUST include to have great fiction? CONFLICT. No conflict, no story. One of the biggest stumbling blocks I see in new writers is that they fail to understand the difference between authentic conflict versus a bad situation. Bad situations do not make good fiction. Bad situations are boring and probably the largest source of melodrama. Today I am going to give you tools to make sure your fiction grabs the reader and doesn’t let go. The best way to ensure your reader is your captive is to have conflict on every page.

The most important component to creating loads of conflict is that our protagonist must have an active and tangible goal.

Conflict is relative. If we have no idea of the objective, then bad events are just bad events. Bad events must become setbacks. How can we transform bad luck to a setback? Give a hint of the end goal.

Want to know one of the quickest ways to get a reader on the edge of her seat? Show a glimpse of the mountain summit, then throw rocks at the characters and knock them off every cliff. If they get to a nice place for a breather, there better be at least a small rockslide to knock them back a 1000 feet. Yet, these setbacks will mean nothing if the observer doesn’t see the end goal.

Too many new writers do not present the story goal, or the goal is passive. Passive goals suck. Passive goals are like “containing Communism.” Guess what? Didn’t work in Vietnam, and it won’t work in our story either.

In my Warrior Writer Boot Camp (inspired by Bob Mayer), every participant MUST tell us what her story is about in ONE sentence. I recommend you check out this earlier blog for a more detailed explication.

ONE SENTENCE?

Yes. ONE sentence, and the number of the counting should be ONE. Not three, not two. FIVE????…is right out! But the number of the counting shall be ONE. Then thou shalt cast off thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch and blow thine enemies to teeny tiny….

Oops. Got sidetracked. Okay. ONE sentence. That sentence needs your protagonist, the antagonist, and an active goal.

Recently one of my WWBC participants sent in this log-line.

A teenager must protect the princess of Atlantis from an angry grief-stricken scientist who wants to take her power which will unknowingly release Chaos into the world.

Um, all righty. What is the goal? Protection. This is a passive goal. This is “containing Communism.” It sounds kind of interesting, but do we really get a picture of what this story is about? For all we know the entire story could be an Atlantean Princess stuffed in a human-size hamster ball with the protag guarding her with a shotgun. Not very interesting fiction.

Protection is one of those things that is kind of implied. I recently edited a book for a friend, and her protag’s main goal was “to survive.”

Okay, don’t know about you guys, but survival is my goal every day. In fact, when I wake up each morning, probably my biggest objective for the day is, “Don’t get killed.” It’s why I don’t blow dry my hair in the tub or lick light sockets. It’s why I wear a seatbelt and don’t run through my house with knives.

Duh! Unless we are suicidal, EVERYONE’S goal is survival. Fiction is only interesting when characters have goals that are special and unique, and since most of the world’s population has the goal to stay ALIVE…survival is BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRING!

A main goal to protect or survive is IMPLIED. When Frodo and Samwise set out with the Ring of Power, I guarantee you that they want to protect the Ring. I also guarantee you they want to survive, but these two goals are not what make The Lord of the Rings interesting. What makes it interesting is that they MUST protect the Ring long enough, and stay ALIVE long enough to toss the evil ring into the fires of MOUNT DOOM.

Okay…volcanoes are interesting. Volcanoes named Mount DOOM are super interesting.

So my little writer had a passive goal with his “protecting the Princess.” Boring!  After a sound thrashing from the Death Star as my students fondly call me, the participant came up with THIS…

A popular computer geek and the princess of Atlantis must find the last remaining time machine in order to prevent an idealistic Guardian from stealing her power and controlling Atlantis.

Awesome! Now we have a GOAL. The protagonist and allies must make it to a time machine before the bad guys do or BAD THINGS HAPPEN. Those bad things that must be prevented are called STAKES. Great books have HIGH STAKES.

YES, I HAVE HAD A LOT OF COFFEE TODAY AND I AM USING THE CAPS A LOT.

STAKES ARE INTERESTING.

In this new log-line, there is a tangible finish line and a goal that is different than the rest of the world. I bet you woke up today wanting to survive. Did you wake up with the sole notion that you would find a time machine???? Okay, you in the back be quiet, and if you find one, let me know.

I might be going out on a limb here, but I would wager that most of us did not wake up this morning with the goal of finding a time machine. It is an interesting goal.The writer has now provided us with a glimpse of the “summit.” We also know bad things will happen if our hero fails. STAKES!

When we do not have a tangible goal for our protagonist, this is like dropping him in the Andes and watching him eat his friends to stay alive. Kind of interesting in a morbid way, but we have nothing to root for. It is different than dropping Pedro and his soccer team in the mountains and they have to make it to THAT mountain…THAT mountain over THERE…because there is a shed full of food and a radio.

Before, our soccer team was just stranded. Every blizzard and rockslide was merely a BAD SITUATION on top of a BAD SITUATION. Yet when Pedro and the Halfbacks set out for a particular mountain the quality of the situation changes. NOW there is a specific objective that we, the observer can SEE. Every avalanche that takes them farther from food, blankets and a radio makes us squirm in our seats and worry if they will make it in time.

But still, as I just said, that is just a Bad Situation layered on a Bad Situation. Not really genuine conflict…yet. To ensure GREAT fiction, we need a CONFLICT LOCK (via Bob Mayer again :D). A conflict lock can only happen when two parties disagree. If you have a scene with only one person, there ain’t conflict. Sorry. Navel-gazing is therapy, not great storytelling.

And don’t try to cheat with the She is her own worst enemy. Who among you LIKE those people let alone want to see them win? Seriously. I know a lot of people who cannot stand prosperity and will sabotage every good thing in their lives. They are annoying. Readers want to follow heroes and heroines…not losers who can’t get their act together.

If you have a scene, there need to be two people (minimum) and they cannot agree…ever. In fact, it really has to get bleak before they can work as a team. I find it so funny that I get all these novels and everyone just works together. No one questions authority. Yeah, right.

Great fiction mirrors life and I can tell you from experience that if you have more than three people with the same goal, they will almost never agree. Go run a committee for ANYTHING and tell me I am wrong.

Fiction is the path of greatest resistance.

Back to the Andes….

If Pedro and Juan are the only two living soccer players, Pedro will want to keep climbing and Juan will want to lie in the snow and die. And the reader will be screaming and hoping that Pedro can convince Juan to keep going…despite the avalanche that just knocked them back 1500 feet down the slope and took their shoes.

Every scene needs a problem that needs to be solved so that protag and allies can make it closer to the goal.

Big Goal: Make it to top of Big Mountain where there is a shed of supplies.

Scene Problem: An avalanche sweeps Pedro and Juan 1500 feet and takes their shoes.

Conflict Lock:

Pedro wants to continue barefoot to the top of Mount X no matter what.

Juan has given up. He wants to lie in the snow and die.

Stakes: If they don’t keep going they will DIE.

Every scene needs a conflict lock, which means every scene needs an antagonist. The scene antagonist is whoever is in opposition with the protagonist. Juan is interfering with the main goal of getting to the shed on Mount X, ergo he is the antagonist. His refusal to be on board with the party plan is what injects genuine conflict into the story. It makes the reader worry. Worried readers can’t quit turning pages until they get relief…the conclusion.

THAT is good fiction.

Why must our characters never agree? Because if they do agree, there is only so much we can throw at them before it is just wash, rinse, repeat. This happens in a lot of bad action movies. We only can endure so many car chases and explosions before we are bored. Same with our stranded soccer players. Great, there have been 12 avalanches. We get it. Oh, but this is a bigger avalanche? Oh, a bigger blizzard? Yeah. Sorry. Really don’t care. That is bad luck, not good fiction.

Remember:

1. Goals must be active and tangible.

2. Bad situations are not enough. Tragedies are not fiction, they are news headlines.

3. Every scene needs a conflict lock.

4. There must be high stakes; either physical or emotional annihilation.

So what are your thoughts? What are some of your favorite stories? What kept you glued to your seat? What are some books or movies that fell flat? Was it because of one of the reasons I just mentioned? I want to hear from you!

And, to prove it and show my love, for the month of February, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. If you leave a comment, and link back to my blog, and mention WANA in your blog…you get your name in the hat THREE times. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly. A free critique from me on the first 15 pages of your novel.

Happy writing!

Until next time….

In the meantime, if you don’t already own a copy, my best-selling book We Are Not Alone–The Writers Guide to Social Media is recommended by literary agents and endorsed by NY Times best-selling authors. My method is free, fast, simple and leaves time to write more books.

Also, I highly recommend the Write It Forward Workshops. Learn all about plotting, how to write great characters, and even how to self-publish successfully…all from the best in the industry. I will be teaching on social media and building a brand in March. For $20 a workshop, you can change your destiny….all from the comfort of home.

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