McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Working against yourself

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Dom:
Do any of you have to "work against yourself" when you write at all?  Do you have any tendancies/quirks/whatever that you know are bad for your writing and you work to overcome?

One of my biggest flaws as a writer is that I very deeply want people "to get along with one another".  I don't like conflict in real life.  That's a problem in writing, where it only gets interesting when there's conflict!  So I have to work really hard to get my main characters disliking one another.  I want all my "baby" characters to play nicely, even to the detriment of their own personalities.  But that would hurt the quality of the writing.

The reason I fight it is because I don't want to be bland and boring with everyone being friends.  There are some good writers who do well without interpersonal conflicts between major characters, but I always think they could have been greater if they'd thrown more conflict in.  Anne McCaffrey for example--love her books, don't get me wrong, but her characters are generally very nice to one another unless they're specifically cast as a villian.  I would have liked to see Robinton, for example, be more vicious at times to underline his political mind (everyone knows politics holds no prisoners).  It would have been interesting to see villians have more mud to sling at him aside from "He drinks like a fish!" and "Robinton and Lessa are so close they're probably sleeping together".

Danielle/Evie:
one of the biggest problems i have is making my brain shut up. i sit down to write, but many times drift off as the story continues in my imagination..and i forget to actually write.
in the actual story (when i finally get to the writing) im still struggling to make the character's lives a little bit harder for them. Part of it is similar to you, Dom...i like people to get along with eachother, and i like things to work out  for them. But...sigh..it's not always going to.

Richelle Mead:
I too have a "can't we all just get along" mentality.  I also tend to use too many characters when merging a few makes things simpler.

Oh yeah.  I'm also hanging out on boards when I should be working toward my December 15 deadline...

SirThinks2Much:
I have a problem with wanting everyone to be good inside, so a lot of my villains become good guys or at least not-so-bad. I'd like to think of it as "character development" but there are many ways a villain can develop...

WonderandAwe:
I too have an issue with putting my ideas on paper.  The brain works faster then I can type!

My big issue with writing stories is having characters do "stupid" things based on thier personality quirks.  Having do things that they know will cause them issues later on but they don't care and do it anyways.  I'm working on getting over it in my head, but putting it down on paper is hard. 

I also unconciously borrow ideas from my own stories.  For some stories it's okay (they are basically fan fics that will never see the light of day) but for stories set in my own world, it causes issues.  I hope that when I actually get a complete story out, it will stop happening.

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