Ancient Logic

So far this week, I've looked at the two most basic types of conflicts for characters in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation -- physiological needs and concerns over threats and safety. Pressing forward, it's more difficult to make sweeping generalizations about such and such an episode, we have to focus on individual characters and their motivations. The simplest and most general type of psychological motivation revolves around acceptance and love. Human beings are social animals, and even our fictional creations seek relationships and affection. For the most part, the crew of the Enterprise is presented as a surprisingly well-knit and supportive work place considering that initially most of them are strangers to each other. However, there are tensions that pull the characters away from each other, a reoccurring theme in first season "character episodes."  Sometimes you can almost guess what's written on each index card for the main charac...

I've run into a problem. My current story's conflict doesn't quite have the punch I want it to. I've tried a few different methods to figure out what exactly is troubling the main character or what larger issues are in play, but I'm not there yet. While my story stews for awhile, I thought I'd talk about my dissatisfaction with the standard model of literary conflicts. In other words, let's talk shop. Usually in literature we say conflict comes in four basic types: man versus nature, man versus man, man versus society and man versus self. This is the model I heard in school and this is the model I teach in my own literature class. You could throw in a few other types of conflicts, depending on the genre, conflict versus supernatural beings or conflict with technology. You might even subtract one of the categories due to ideological preference (Ayn Rand disliked the idea that nature had any choice in a story, big surprise). But for the most part...

I was super excited this morning to see my listing for Arisia 2013: World Building in Role-playing Games. This was one of five panels I applied to, and probably either second or third in terms of my preference (there is a panel on the Future of School with my good friend David Nuremburg that I was angling for but alas as of now it appears to have not happened). World Building is one of my favorite aspects of role-playing actually, the one the I spend the most time on and the primary reason I don't actually play characters as much. I paint maps, I construct histories, I build languages, I tinker with vanilla RPG rules to accommodate newly made races. I think one of the reasons I consider role-playing fun and writing a craft is with RPG's I'm devoting all my energy on things that I do not consider work at all. Writing, with the messy collisions of characters and plot, is more of a challenge. A good challenge but still... I will be posting more about the panel, what I'...

It's a tricky balance preparing to write for a short story. I've veered between two extremes. On one hand I enjoy creating page after page of back story for characters even if I know they'll never actually make it into a story. I've created family trees to the third generation, elaborate maps of fictional neighborhoods and timelines spanning centuries. On the other, I've always had the ideal that short stories just sort of happen. That a good story is a singular moment of creation stemming from some profound and mysterious process deep within the human mind. A story isn't written, it's summoned. Planning, preparation, brainstorming were all harmful to the ritual of the thing. The more I set down ahead of time the more possibilities I was closing off permanently before I even gave the story a chance to work itself into existence. Then I decided I wanted my stories to be read by a general audience and I realized that neither the 'labor of love' o...