Why Bother?

This naughty little phrase sneaks its way into my head on many, many occasions and I've made it a goal to kick its booty to the curb whenever it makes an appearance.

It appears most when there is some daunting or seemingly insurmountable or pointless task ahead of me. Like doing dishes or laundry or getting my kids to clean their rooms. Why bother? I'm just going to turn around in 15 minutes and find another mess, another pile of dirty clothes, another sink full of dishes.

But if I didn't do it, I'd have twice the work to do later on.

The same rotten phrase sometimes attacks my writing goals. Starting a new project is daunting. It's a LOT of work and there's no guarantee that the book will be published at the end of all that work. Same with revisions - why bother? There will just be another round as soon as I finish this one. Querying? The ultimate Why Bother. All that's waiting for me there is a big pile of rejections.

It's a good thing I'm stubborn or the Why Bothers might derail me. :D

Yes, my house is going to get trashed again. But if I don't pick it up occasionally it'll be a much bigger job later on. Yes, that new project is going to be a lot of work and yes, it might never see the light of day. But I'll never know if I don't try. And yes, querying is going to get me a ton of rejections. But it might get me an offer or two as well.

The only thing that is certain is that if I let the Why Bothers win, I'm guaranteed to fail. And that just isn't okay with me :)

So - no matter what it takes, I'm determined to kick the Why Bothers to the curb. No matter the endeavor, no matter how daunting/scary/just-plain-no-fun the task, I'll never reach my goals if I don't work at them.

So work at them I will. :) Who's with me? Do the Why Bothers ever plague you? How do you get rid of them?

Gotta Love a Little Torture

Someone once asked me what I did to amp up the conflict in my stories? What did I do to create drama, to torture my characters?

It was a great question :) It tends to be the drama, the conflict, that drives a story…and you just can’t get that if your characters get everything they want and are happy all the time.

So how do I amp up the conflict, torture my characters? Simple...I take away whatever it is that my character wants the most. I throw up as many obstacles as I can. I tease her with it and then take it away. :D I let her be happy for a few short moments and then I crush all her hopes and dreams *mwahahahaha*

Okay, so it's not always so horrible (though really, it kinda is). I am actually in the process of rewriting my very first book. Back then, I wanted to write a book where the girl got her guy, kept him throughout the book, had an adventure that was scary blah blah blah, but where there was no real internal conflict. I thought it would be fun to have my book be different than all those other books out there where characters were being tortured all the time.

Guess what? It was boooooring.


Stanley Elkin said, “I would never write about a character who is not at the end of his rope.”

This is such a great piece of advice…a person at the end of their rope has no where to go but up….but there is always the threat of crashing down…and that makes a great story. If your characters never go through any kind of conflict or “torture,” then you have a story in which nothing happens. A happy person who has everything they want, and continues to be happy with everything they want…Where is the story in that?

Ernest Hemingway, in a book of advice to writers, said that a writer should…“find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement.”

I LOVE that quote. And it made me think, “What is it that gave me emotion? What gave me excitement?” Sure, I am happy when a character gets the guy at the end, or finds the treasure, or gets to live in the big pretty castle and lives happily ever after. But that isn’t what keeps me reading the story. What keeps me reading, what gives me goosebumps and makes my heart pound, is when the heroine cradles her dying love in her arms…when she is on the back of a thundering horse, shooting a gun over her shoulder at the villain chasing her….when she made some stupid mistake and screwed up the good thing she had going….THAT kind of stuff makes me want to turn the page.

Did the love interest really die? Will she get away? (Or will the retort of the gun knock her on her butt?…because that is always fun) :D Will she be able to fix her mistake and get the good thing going again, or has she just completely screwed up her life?

So, that is what I do to my characters. I give the reader a reason to turn the page, by giving my characters a reason to keep going, giving them something to fix, to resolve, to get over and move past. Death, pain, despair, torture, emotion, threat, danger….these all get the blood pumping, the tears pouring…and make that happy ending all the happier for the mess they had to go through to get there.

What do you do to torture your characters? How do you create your drama?