First off, fingers crossed for your new submission, let’s hope it’s a winner.

I feel your pain on the whole conflict issue – it’s something that I struggle with on every single book and frankly, it never gets easier to solve. Some times I have lots of revs, other times only a few, but there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why that is. I think the reason for that is becaasue each one of your characters has to be an individual, who will respond to different situations in different ways and that makes them maddeningly unpredictable. Also for them to be believable as characters, their conflict has to be convincing and for it to be convincing it also has to be complex, but the complexities are only revealed gradually during the course of your story as your characters become aware of them.

For example when writing my most recent story, I thought my hero’s conflict was basically a desire to avoid intimacy because of an inability to trust, which was all wound up in a childhood trauma when his father had used him as a ‘cover’, pretending to take him to a saturday morning judo class while he was really seeing his mistress while he made the hero wait outside in the car. Of course at the start of the story he didn’t know he had trust issues, he just knew he wasn’t comfortable with intimacy in a relationship.

But then in the original draft of the story once the hero had told the heroine his guilty secret – of his involvement in his father’s infidelity – his conflict was effectively resolved… But once I’d written it, I knew that wasn’t it.

So I had to dig deeper, and after lots of rethinking and angst, I realised it wasn’t actually the hero’s inability to trust that was stopping him from having meaningful relationships, that was just a symptom, the real problem was that what his father had done to him had made him desperate to control his situation and therefore his emotions — so that he would never again be so powerless and to do that he had shied away from being dependent on other people. And it was only when the heroine had forced him to relinquish that control that he could begin to admit his true feelings….

Confused? I was, and it took me a long time – and a lot of hair-pulling – to figure it out (plus I needed some help from my ed).. And let’s not even talk about the heroine’s conflict… Which was even more evasive.

So don’t beat yourself up for ‘not getting it’, there is no ‘getting it’, because ‘it’ will be different for every character and every story you write. A lot of times it really is just a case of trial and error to dig it out – and remember you may think you have a clear idea of their conflict at the start, which is great, but then it will grow and change during the course of the story as your characters and their relationship grows and changes. Which is a whole ‘nother pain in the backside!!

Anyway, enough of my tales of woe. Good luck with your sub.

Suzanne – don’t stop. Keep writing huh?

I’ve kind of reached a full stop – haven’t written anything for ages, so I’m even more impressed than I’d normally be that you’ve sent soemthing away.

XX

Amy