Easy Conflict

Like most writers, I fall into the trap of creating easy conflict, and for me personally, that means villainizing either an ex partner or a parent. It’s not that I’ve had a bad experience with a parent, and nothing too horrific with an ex, but rather, it’s a great place to start with a lot of unsolved emotions, especially if the break up, or whatever bad thing happened with the parent, occurred relatively soon to the story starting. It creates a bit of character motivation. Like does my character want their ex back, does their ex want them back, what caused them to break up and how is that showing up now, etc. Though I am not dissing myself or other writers for doing this, it’s become a bit of a pattern in my writing, and I want to change that. 

See, the villainized ex is really strong in The Cora Anthology, and it came directly from a place of wanting conflict. Granted, there’s a lot of conflict in that series, but for the first book I wrote (which was the second one in the series), that was a big factor. Another place that that trope shows up is in the Healing x3 Trilogy, but that came from a place of wanting to heal that tendency in myself, among other things. Although I have strong feelings on how people react after break ups, and we’re not getting into that here, I want to focus on other things, since Healing x3 (especially books one and two) kind of put the final nail in that coffin, and I’m ready to let it rest. 

As for the parent thing, both of my parents are lovely people who are great parents, and it feels kind of like a disservice to them to be writing terrible parents, especially bad dads, since my dad is the complete opposite of that (i.e. Cora’s dad in The Cora Anthology). Although that experience is not authentic to me, I think it’s incredibly realistic, due to the fact that many people have complicated relationships with their person, and despite the seven books of contradiction to this, not every female main character I write has to be exactly like me, which is a whole other thing on its own. 

I can’t say that I have an answer as to what conflict I’m going to be writing with, but I think it’s important to notice the patterns we fall into as writers, just to keep the writing fresh and interesting. It’s certainly no crime to use the common threads of conflict that we’re comfortable with, but I definitely think it’s important to mix up now and then. 

That's it for now folks!

-C