Don’t you love Christmas? What, you don’t? A lot of us have a love-hate relationship with the holidays: love, because it is supposed to be a great time of celebration with family and friends; hate, because it is often filled with stress over expectations and sadness that things aren’t the way they should be. With…
Tag: conflict
Muse on Monday – December 8, 2025
For most of my life, I haven’t really known my neighbors. We might say hi in passing but nothing more. I do know the neighbors on both sides of us where we are currently and we get along well, so that’s a blessing. Bad neighbors, on the other hand, are a nightmare since there is…
Muse on Monday – May 26, 2025
One of the main elements of fiction is conflict. There has to be some problem to solve or it is not that interesting to read. A lot of stories take place in horrific circumstances, where there is conflict all over the place. However, could you write a story in a seemingly ideal situation? What would…
Muse on Monday – January 27, 2025
Have you ever read a story where the fate of the world rests on what the characters do? Probably, since that’s a lot of stories. This is what is called a high-stakes story and the reason they are so common is that the higher the stakes, the more we are invested in it all turning…
Doommates
Doommates I came home to see my bike bent out of shape. And blood covering the front porch. Not again. Jorgan the Doomhammer was on the couch, watching an infomercial. It was the same old story: you meet a barbarian in another dimension, he saves your life, follows you home. “You broke my bike.” I…
Muse on Monday – September 2, 2024
A few years ago, one of the Muse on Monday story prompts was to write a story that was nothing but dialogue. Today’s is similar but it is combative dialogue: an argument, a fight of words, an attempted persuasion, perhaps. With this kind of dialogue, the conflict is obvious. It is like a fencing match…
Muse on Monday – August 5, 2024
The bedrock of a story is conflict. In a lot of stories this is something external like someone trying to kill the main character, or the characters trying to find some object or other, etc. However, conflict can also be something that no one can see. A few weeks ago, I left work to catch…
Muse on Monday – August 29, 2022
Would you want to know everything? It would simplify some things and massively complicate other things. And you’d always know how a book ended before you read it, so that would be annoying. Much of the conflict in stories is based on a lack of key knowledge: for instance, romantic comedies often hinge on a…
Muse on Monday – May 9, 2022
When we think of conflict, we often think of very dramatic things: wars, murders, and attacking creatures if it’s external or fights, gossip and backstabbing if it is interpersonal conflict. However, conflict does not always have to be big. It could be as subtle as a girl trying to get a particular seat in class…
Writing Corner: Conflict
This is the first of a weekly series called Writing Corner. It is a place where young writers can hopefully learn things that will help their own writing. There are many different opinions about how to write well, but I will share what I have learned from my own writing experience, from 100-word stories to…
The Green-Walled Treehouse 