Throwing Enough Rocks
Posted by annastan on August 13th, 2009. Filed under: Books, Craft, Writing Rants.Last night I attended a talk at my local library featuring murder mystery writers Clea Simon, Cindy Davis and Sheila Connolly. It was interesting to hear authors who write in a completely different genre from my own talk about their work. Overall their process isn’t so different from mine (character, conflict, etc.) though I must say I’m glad not to constantly have to be thinking about good locations for murders and interesting ways to kill people off!
One tidbit mentioned that I loved was the “Poison Lady,” a pharmacist who attends mystery conferences and educates writers on good ways to kill off characters. She sounds like a fictional character herself! A great piece of writing advice that I got out of the evening, which I believe was supplied by Sheila Connolly, was that writers “put characters up in trees and throw rocks at them.” In other words, the way to make a story interesting is to give your characters a whole lot of conflict to deal with. So next time you have a story that isn’t working, maybe the problem is that you haven’t thrown enough rocks at your characters yet.
August 13th, 2009 at 11:30 am
A good point, whatever the genre! (Sometimes it’s hard to remember that we’re supposed to hurt our characters to help them — otherwise: boooring.)
August 13th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
It certainly is hard to remember that these characters who we love and who, in some way, are part of us, need to be hurt sometimes! Again, this is why I’m glad I don’t write murder mysteries – it would bring new meaning to the saying “murder your darlings!”