(Also Called – How to help your character face a plot-altering or personality altering choice!)
Hi all,
Worry not, the difficult choice is for Octavia and Regillus to solve. Here’s the simplest question. When is an atrocity committed in the name of saving lives allowable? Read more inside!
My biggest challenge comes in not wanting to make my stories too much ‘good guys catch all the breaks and can deal with every curveball without consequences’ but also not have incredibly vicious scenes of war and destruction (that, let’s face it, happen in wars, especially in civil wars) all over the place. No one likes reading stories with paper tigers as enemies. Imagine Star Wars without the Empire Strikes Back? Or without the death of Darth Vader and OBi-Wan Kenobi.
The hardest thing for me is to let the tension happen. It’s okay for there to be tension and challenge, heartache and ‘no good choices.’ I want every situation in my stories to be tied up neatly, have a beginning and end and a series of events in between but sometimes that’s not the way the story works. As a writer, I’m still learning how to grow and develop with this. Having a writing buddy to bounce ideas off, or simply talk something through, helps. As does taking a deep breathe when you want to make everything better and asking yourself.
“Will my character grow because of this? Or will this event simply be another blip in the storyline?”
As someone who enjoys writing action scenes, bringing more consequences into the world because of those actions is a new priority. What about you? What do you think about the questions I’ve posed above? Leave your comments below and subscribe to the blog for more awesome articles like this!
Modern Papyrus 