TnT: a race through dark places

[azuire]

Hello inkstainers (inkstainites?). One final kudos to 1stmate for coming out on top this week. As for everyone else, contest 18 awaits!

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Today's Tips & Tricks is brought to you via writer jo_graham:

Here's a writing exercise I've always found useful. Take your main characters, say the four or five main ones, and then write what each of them thinks about some conflict. It can be a personal conflict, like whether person A and person B should be together, or it could be a major political conflict or a major religious difference. Speak for each of them. Write what each of them believes.

It won't be the same unless you're failing to differentiate between the characters sufficiently. For example, if you take the Stargate Atlantis team, Rodney, Ronon, John and Teyla are not going to bring the same perspectives to the table. They're not going to have the same reasons or the same core beliefs underlying even things they basically agree on. Pick a hard question, like "Are the Wraith people?" And then work through it four times from four different perspectives.

Why? Well, firstly it helps the author get the characters straight. Secondly, it shows you where there is organic interpersonal drama. Ronon and Teyla are friends and care for each other very much, but they're not going to agree on "Are the Wraith people?" In most situations, all conflict is between good people. All conflict is between people of good will, people who are basically trying to do the right thing. To write conflict realistically, the author needs to grow past the heh-heh-heh comic book villain and find the organic sources of conflict inherent in people's differing backgrounds and points of view -- without making anyone the good guy or the bad guy. And so it's very useful for the author to present each point of view sympathetically.

Thirdly, it shows the author where their own weakness is. If, for example, there is one character who you can't see anything good about -- there's your problem. That's the thing the author needs to work on. A skilled author can understand the perspective even of unpleasant and unlikeable characters. More to the point, a skilled author can get into the heads of people who are very unlike them in experience. It's easy to write Mary Sue, because she's you. Writing someone very different is much harder, and much more a test of skill.

So it's a useful exercise in my experience. What do you guys think?

Pick a conflict -- physical, ideological, anything that strikes your fancy -- and let's go!