Blogging by the Sea

Overcoming the Monster - The protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic force (often evil) that threatens the protagonist and/or protagonist's homeland. Examples: James Bond (Ian Fleming), Jaws, Star Wars: A New Hope, Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling)

Rags to Riches -The poor protagonist acquires power, wealth, and/or a mate, loses it all and gains it back, growing as a person as a result. Examples: Cinderella, Aladdin, Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), The Prince and the Pauper (Mark Twain), "The Ugly Duckling" (Hans Christian Andersen

The Quest - The protagonist and companions set out to acquire an important object or to get to a location. They face temptations and other obstacles along the way. Examples: The Iliad (Homer), The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien), Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Voyage and Return -The protagonist goes to a strange land and, after overcoming the threats it poses or learning important lessons unique to that location, returns with experience. Examples: Odyssey (Homer), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), Back to the Future, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis), Peter Pan (J. M. Barrie),

Comedy -Light and humorous character with a happy or cheerful ending; a dramatic work in which the central motif is the triumph over adverse circumstance, resulting in a successful or happy conclusion. Comedy is more than humor. It refers to a pattern where the conflict becomes more and more confusing but is at last made plain in a single clarifying event. Examples: Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare), Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding), Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Big Lebowski.

Tragedy -The protagonist is a hero with a major character flaw or great mistake which is ultimately their undoing. Examples: , The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

Rebirth -An event forces the protagonist to change their ways and often become a better person. Examples: "Beauty and the Beast", A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens), The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett), Groundhog Day,

I find it interesting that all those millions of books, movies and stories out there can be so neatly boiled down to these basics and yet encompass so much variety. And what makes them all unique? The endless permutations of the conflicts involved and the plethora of characters caught up in those conflicts. Conflict is the STRUGGLE! This struggle can be between characters, between your specific character and the society in which he lives, your character and the forces of nature, and in today’s world, your character and technology, and lastly, internally between your character and him or herself.

Years ago, I added the book Goal, Motivation & Conflict, by Debra Dixon to my shelf and it has been my mantra ever since. To paraphrase GMC: WHAT does your character want - the Goal, WHY does he or she want it – Motivation, and WHAT stands in the way? That last question is the conflict that drives the story. What is your character willing to do or sacrifice to get what they want? Some things to consider when you start throwing obstacles into your character’s path are their relationships to others, their sense of duty and responsibility, how they cope with failure, and what moral temptations or dilemmas arise? One absolute requirement for good conflict is the stakes. WHAT will be the cost?

As my personal illustration, I decided to see how many different aspects a single event might have depending on the character and what they have to lose or gain. I opted to consider a fire that destroys the local corner store in a city neighborhood and how it might cause conflict and end with very different results. Here’s what I came up with:

What if the owner of the building has been trying to buy the store operator out of her ten-year contract so he can level the building and put up something more lucrative? (A power grab or a desire for more money.) Maybe your character is the store owner and it’s been in the family for three generations. (There’s history here.) Or it’s a relatively new enterprise, but it’s your sole mode of providing for your family? (Another, though smaller, desire or need for money.) Perhaps your character has been working in this store their entire adult life and is too old to seek a new career. It’s possible your character was homeless and camped there when the fire broke out and is now seriously injured. Or maybe the store owner’s teenage son was making out with his girlfriend and both perished in the fire. Perhaps your character is the woman who operates a similar store across the street – how will she benefit from this? Or did she start the fire to reduce her competition to ashes? What if your character felt wronged by something totally outside the store, but torched it for revenge?

So, you can see how a single event might impact each character in entirely different ways. I’m sure you can come up with a few more scenarios to this fire in a small store on the corner in a busy neighborhood so you can begin to appreciate how more than 1,700 different novels were boiled down to only 6 major plot lines, or where Wikipedia’s list comes from.

I could give you a list of plot devices or the cliches often used, but instead I’m just going to leave you with these links to a list of 50 of each that included all the ones I could think of and more.

PLOT DEVICES: https://nofilmschool.com/list-of-plot-devices

THE CLICHES: https://nofilmschool.com/storytelling-cliches

My first published novel featured a man who had fought in Vietnam during the era when I came of age. It was partly inspired by my brother’s time there and things he shared with me over the years, but more than partly because I did the brainstorming and asked myself dozens of questions similar to the query about the fire above. For my protagonist/hero, the experience in his relative youth had left its mark on him, just as it had the thousands of young men and a significant number of women who were sent into the cauldron of that poorly understood war. My own brother and others I sat down to speak with were generous with their memories of the conflict, the place, the people, their fellow soldiers and, unlike today’s soldiers, the welcome they did not get when they survived and came home. Their individual reactions to all of the above were a lot alike in many ways, yet very different in others, so I was able to create a character using a piece of this and a bit from that, and color his reactions and his current viewpoint by those reflected experiences. When my story starts Matt Steele has been tagged to run for president of the US on his party’s ticket. Ultimately my Steele’s arc is most closely aligned with the rebirth option noted above, but given that I am a pantser, this was never set in stone while I was writing. I created the character, threw him into the fire and went along for the ride while the story unfolded. But that story was informed by conflict that had been experienced and shared with me, by the men who went to war and came home to build their lives around the wounds, the triumphs and the losses.

In my Tide’s Way series, I worked closer to home - well, not home specifically since I’ve never lived in coastal North Carolina, but in the day to day give and take of family life, love, children, work and community – falling generally into either the quest or Cinderella categories. A bigger challenge for me was when I dove into my police procedural series since I have never worked in law enforcement, nor had any family members who do, but the generosity of the deputies I rode with and the Citizens Law Enforcement Academy provided me with an amazing amount of inspiration and ideas and those stories would, I think be categorized as the Quest. My only historical to date was inspired by a sailing trip I took to investigate a deserted island off the coast of Maine. When it occurred to me to wonder what if I’d actually fallen into the old cellar hole and woke up in another century, I began to ask myself those dozens of questions and toss around all kinds of possibilities. That story falls neatly into the voyage and return category. In my new series, I’m incorporating some of the typical tropes (plot devices,) but tying two stories together with the same or similar conflict yet separated by time: one current and one historic, but both in the same setting and place. Obviously, I hope this new twist will be as much fun for my readers as it was for me to write and all the intertwined stories are easily defined as Cinderella or rebirth stories.

As surprised as I was to read that there are only 6 or 7 major plot themes, it turned out that all my stories do fit somewhere on this short list. I bet yours do as well.

For all of us, creating compelling conflict includes one other very important ingredient – creating characters the reader can care about or hate – with passion. Next month, we’ll discuss how to create those compelling characters to go with our convincing plots.

Today, I leave you with this: there’s a joke that’s made the rounds on social media that goes like this: What has 27 actors, three settings, two writers and one plot? The answer? 671 Hallmark movies. In all fairness, there have to be a zillion viewers who keep tuning in or Hallmark would change things up, but their formula works for them and all those zillion viewers and even this formula fits easily into the comedy category outlined by Wikipedia. Unfortunately, you and I and all the other struggling authors today have tough competition and we need to up our game to have our novels find even a small share of the market. We need to take one of those six or seven main conflicts and find unique ways to present them. Updated ways to tell the story and interesting ways to resolve them so our readers will keep coming back for more.

Hop on over to my fellow Blog Hoppers and check out their wisdom for creating compelling conflict without resorting to clichés.

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 12:02 am | Permalink | 1 Comment | Email

Saturday, April 19 2025

Fictional Settings

Last month we blogged about using real settings for our stories and how to keep them authentic. This month we are exploring how to make our fictional settings feel real.

I’ve enjoyed setting stories in places people can actually visit, which offers readers a chance to either walk down familiar streets, or revisit places they’ve been, but my Camerons of Tide’s Way series is set in an entirely fictious town on the coast of North Carolina. I was pretty new to the published world when the first book in that series came out and I really was clueless about a lot of things more seasoned authors already knew, but I got lucky. My readers love Tide’s Way and tell me often they wish they could go there.

The original story in that series was a stand-alone book set in Anytown USA. Then I met the acquiring editor at Belle Bridge Books at a conference. She liked the premise and contracted the book, but she wanted it to be a series and asked for ideas for follow-up books. The first thing I realized was that I had to get a clearer picture in my head of this town; How big was it, and what kind of landscape? My first thought was that I wanted it to be more than just a small town with a book store and a bakery and perhaps an old house converted to a B&B. My second thought was where?

Being a lover of the ocean, I chose to put it near a beach. Being an East Coast girl, this ruled out California or Washington. I ended up choosing North Carolina, roughly between Wilmington and Camp LeJeune. That second location was because the heroine of the second book I tossed around ideas for was a Marine and the Marine base being close by somehow felt right. I had that second book half written when I decided to spend a couple days in the area, scouting out stuff like the climate and the terrain. While driving around I saw the sign for the airport and decided, why not check that out, where I discovered the building was all on one level. That side-trip was a lucky decision: I’d already written the scene where my heroine’s husband is waiting at the foot of the escalator for her to arrive home. I quickly rewrote that scene. I also visited Wilmington proper to get an idea what the city close to my fictional town looked like and what the amenities were, just as I’d have had to do if I had a town named Driftwood Cove on the Massachusetts coast north of Boston. I’d have wanted to get the known surrounding cities right when my characters visited them.

But what about Tide’s Way itself? First, I needed to know how big I wanted my fictional town. That kind of dictated what needed to be there, like a town hall, a library, perhaps a police station. Although some small towns are policed by the county sheriff’s department and won’t have a police force or station, I decided my fictional town would have a police department, but it was small enough to share quarters with the town hall. Any place but the end of no-where needs a convenience store and gas station? But, what else?

I started with a hand-drawn map. I needed to know where things were in relation to each other and where my characters lived. And I didn’t want to have them next to an assisted living facility in one book, then behind the grocery store in the next book. No matter how good your memory is, it’s easy to make a mistake unless you have a concrete image and a map is the best way to do this. Since my fictional town was in coastal North Carolina, I needed to have access to the beach, as well. My map was an evolving thing as I wrote. If I needed to have my character visit a cemetery, then I needed to add it to the map. Or a childcare center. A church or churches.

That was the start of the image in my mind about Tide’s Way. I did, as I mentioned, visit this area of the country to get an idea on flora and climate as well. Now I knew what kind of flowers I might see along the side of the road or in people’s gardens. I knew that it would be cool enough in winter for my characters to wear warm coats and hats, yet warm enough in summer for flip-flops and tank tops.

While you are creating your fictional setting, don’t forget not only what kind of things grow there, but what kind of birds and animals might be seen. No village or town on the ocean would be real without seagulls. Any village in Maine could have sightings of a Moose, and in the dessert out west, there would be coyotes and ground squirrels. In a city park you’ll always see pigeons, but in other places you might see crows or eagles. Your fictional setting needs to have flora and fauna appropriate to the area you have chosen to set your story in.

So, now you have your layout (map) with physical structures, beaches, ponds, roads, parking lots and shops. You have an idea of the animals and plants you want to see and can feature encounters with. Now let’s get the rest of the senses involved. Since we know what kind of plants there are, you can have the scent of blossoms, or the scent of fresh mown lawns. If it’s near water, make the scent of the water fit the scene: swampy, salty, etc. Do you want your setting somewhere in Alaska? Make sure you include how long it stays light in summer and how short the days are in the winter. The closer you are to the equator, the less difference there is in the length of the days, or for that matter, the changes in temperature from one season to another. Suburbia and cities will be light even after dark with streetlights, stores and traffic – the country will be dark, often with no streetlights for miles. A city will be noisy with traffic, perhaps even the sound of airplanes landing at the nearby airport. The country will have the soft, often startling sounds of animals foraging for food at night, or a dog barking in the distance. Nearby streams or the ocean will add the sound of water to your setting. Did you put a school or a park in your setting? Don’t forget the sound of children playing.

The best part of a fictional setting is you can make it whatever you want. What best fits your story, or your characters. Does Sam love to ski? Put him in a mountain town in a chilly climate with lots of snow. If Barbara hates the cold, move her further south. Jenny loves to fish, so a river, or a lake or the ocean will all give her skills a place to be used. The most important part is to find all the assets that not only fit the character, but the general area of the setting. Your heroine might work in NYC and commute, but chances are, unless she has a lengthy commute, she won’t be living in farm country, and if your hero is a cowboy, then the city isn’t his best setting unless you want him homesick and miserable. (Although that is an option if it fits the story.)

All my historical writing has happened in real places, but even those needed to be researched for what existed at the time. But if you are writing a sci-fi set in the future, you have all kinds of freedom to create whole new worlds. For those folk, I’d only suggest you keep physics in mind and make sure that your science and innovative creation is physically possible – unless, of course, it’s another planet or outer space where anything goes.

My last bit of advice would be to keep in mind to treat your setting like another character. Give it as much time and thought when you create it because you want your reader to fall in love with the place. You want them to feel like they’d be eager to take a vacation there or even buy a house and move in hoping to become neighbors for your characters. You want to draw your reader in to care as much about the setting as you want them to care about your characters. Give it quirks that add spice and interest. Maybe a holiday that only the folk in this little burg celebrate due to some event in the past, or a unique way of celebrating the holidays we have already. Or an annual event unique to this fictional place. (Boston has the annual Patriots Day Marathon and New York City has the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade so why shouldn’t your fictional town have a special day as well.) Maybe there is a monument so old all the wording has worn away and no one is really sure what it was for thus a myriad of tales have grown up around it. Maybe there’s a house or other place that is rumored to be haunted. Every setting, current, past, or future, has a history. Give your fictional setting some history to add to the fun.

Another bit of advice – I know, I already said one last bit, but this is important too. Now that you’ve created your fictional setting, you know it so well, you can just plop your characters down and let them start living their lives and coping with all the problems you are throwing their way. But you DON’T need to include every detail you have created in the story. Your knowledge of the place informs your writing and the lives of the characters you’ve created, but the reader doesn’t need to know every detail until it becomes a part of the story. If your character is visiting that cemetery in the dark, then you can mention the hooting of owls because that’s part of the setting, but you didn’t need to tell the reader that there were owls living there until then. I personally have stopped reading books by one of my one-time favorite authors because she includes reams of details that I don’t need to know and don’t care about, turning a 300-page story into an 800-page book. I found myself flipping pages, skipping whole sections that I found boring. Too much unnecessary detail slows the pacing and the action and turns the reader off.

As always, I’m sure I’ve only covered some of the possibilities so why not hop on over and check out the rest of the posts and see how they go about creating fictional settings.

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 12:02 am | Permalink | 4 Comments | Email