Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

writing ideas

75+ Ways to Make Things Tough on a Character

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No story goes along smoothly for the main character. In fact, how they respond to adversity is how we get attached to the people in the novels we love. If they don’t struggle to get what they need, we won’t want to read to the end. There are innumerable ways for conflict to occur in a story.  I’ve listed the 75 I’ve come across in my or another author’s writing.

1. Everything has been working fine, until now.
2. The best friend is disloyal/undermining/lying
3. They aren’t his parents
4. The power goes out
5. The car beaks down
6. What she thought she knew is wrong
7. Injury
8. Attack
9. Not everyone made it to the agreed upon site
10. What was safe once is no longer safe
11. Supplies are lost or stolen
12. Weather change
13. Ambush
14. The character’s arrival is expected
15. The character’s arrival is unexpected
16. Sibling jealousy
17. Paralyzing fear
18. The parameters are changed
19. She refuses to go
20. Misplaced information
21. Locked door/cabinet/safe
22. Locked out of the city/house/business
23. Sabotage
24. Time is running out
25. He gets lost
26. Incorrect assumption
27. Malfunction
28. Loss of food supplies
29. Dangerous terrain
30. It is believed impossible
31. House burns down
32. Loss of parents/family
33. Loss of faith
34. Poison/illness/plague
35. Arriving late/early
36. Flight/bus/train cancelled
37. The store is closed
38. Misplaced keys/ticket/passport/spell/identification
39. Difficult terrain
40. Battery runs out
41. Old injury/illness flairs
42. Toothache/pink eye/infection
43. Curiosity
44. An immovable object
45. Prejudice
46. Mugged
47. Lost luggage
48. Missing vital ingredient/material
49. Lacks a skill/knowledge
50. A telegram/email/missive/letter
51. Inheritance
52. Loss of fortune
53. Ostracized/disowned/ignored
54. Waking up to a major change
55. Loss of memory
56. A misunderstanding
57. Death of a loved one
58. A major decision
59. Uncertainty
60. Phobias
61. A tool/skill/talent/gift has special powers, but the character can’t figure out how to work it
62. War
63. The craft is spinning out of control
64. The world is coming to an end
65. The phone/communication device goes dead
66. Someone has released the dogs/lion/critters with unfriendly intent
67. Things just don’t look/smell/feel/sound right
68. The other character would not normally say that
69. An unfamiliar vehicle has parked outside and the people in it appear to be watching the house/business
70. S/he won’t/doesn’t answer the phone
71. Heart-broken
72. Lack of confidence
73. Impatience
74. Tied up/trapped
75. supernatural/unnatural change of self/enemy/friend/general population (i.e., Zombies)
UPDATE to list provided by Marcy Peska.
76.  curses and other magical obstacles 
77. trolls
under bridges
78. gastric distress from eating too many
sugar-free candies
79. small and uncooperative children
80. hobbits too
interested in mushrooms and second breakfast
81. abrupt changes in mental
status/consciousness
82. being unable to act effectively due to being
grounded or having to go to work. [?] 
83.  Oh…and having a small bladder which requires frequent bathroom breaks. [?]

If you are a writer or a reader, you are aware of many conflicts that characters have faced. What  conflicts have your favorite characters faced? What other conflicts can you add to this list.

#conflict
#plot
#writing

Exercise: Writing the logline

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Getting my logs in a line

I visited +HannahHeath’s blog recently and read her great post on writing loglines for novels. It galvanized me to work at mine a second time. So here’s my loglines for all my Student of Jump books.

In Time Passed, Students of Jump Book 1


Logline: An accidental inventor of time travel
takes his desire for anonymity back 200 years, but his struggle to live as an
average Joe demands he accept the expectations present at his birth and use
them to recreate society and put into motion what he jumped into the past to
avoid.

No-time like the Present, Students of Jump Book 2
Logline: The abandoned daughter of a time traveler takes
her skill of testing prototypes to their breaking point and applies it to a
time jumper sent to check on her, convincing him he must take her forward in
time to demand answers from her father whose guilt for leaving her and devotion
to her dead mother is both less and more than she could have expected or
imagined understanding.

Next Time We Meet, Students of Jump Book 3
Logline: Recently trained to travel in time and set to
take a honeymoon in the past, an anachronistic building contractor and his
quick-witted wife find the leisure life lacks challenge, so they take on locating
a missing and notably annoying physitech, placing them in the cross hairs of the
kidnapping entity as they jump through time chasing clues of uncertain reliability.

That’s the Trouble with Time (publication date sometime this summer), Students of Jump Book 4.

Logline: When a student of jump taking his first
solo time traveling assignment meets up with a determined renegade fighting
the world government for freedom from oppression, he finds losing his jump unit
is just one problem he has to fix, quickly followed by how he can protect his
heart from being the next thing he loses, especially when she keeps throwing it
back at him.

Follow this link if you are looking to revamp your own loglines and need a refresher course.
Hannah Heath: How to Write an Awesome Logline for your Novel

#writing
#loglines
+HannahHeath

Creativity: the art of the accidental inspiration

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Rules of Magic

A couple of years ago, a fellow blogger and I discussed writing guest posts for each other. She writes in the combined fantasy/urban legend genre and hoped I could write a post about magic or how place contributes to a story.

I decided to do it on how every story has rules, and how rules of magic effect story development?  I thought I would come up with a set of rules of magic and show how these rules would govern the flow of the story.  Great idea, huh?

So I begin asking myself a set of questions:

  1. Who is allowed to use the magic?
  2. How is the magic performed?
  3. Is there an age requirement or limit?
  4. When is one eligible to perform magic?
  5. How is one recognized as a performer of magic?
  6. What makes one especially good at magic and therefore a respected provider of magic?
  7. What/who determines quality, strength and usage?
  8. Are there social rules governing its use?
  9. How does economics play into its use?
  10. How does social standing play into it use?
  11. How does one learn or is it innate?
  12. Can one be employed as a magic provider?
  13. Are there any personal costs to performing magic?

My post never was sent to my friend because in the process of answering the questions so that I could show how they would govern a story, I ended up with a great idea for a short story. A case of accidental inspiration.

Perhaps these questions could generate a story for someone else.

What unexpected inspiration led to a story, novel, poem or what-have-you idea?

#magic
#inspiration
#creativity

Creativity: when the track is full and starting to backup

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You know that feeling: itchy fingers, voices in your head, ideas backing up, the urge to sit and type like a maniac through a scene, a tirade of dialogue, a well-strung motif? That’s where I am at, about to break out in a rash of words.

But there is a hold, the ever present disruption of life.  I have other work to do. So the log jam of voices stack up like train cars bumping into each other, linkages snapping in place, and me hoping I don’t run out of track in this backward build up of freight cars.

I bleed off pressure by writing on note cards quick bits I might forget, short cues of dialogue, beginnings to leap off from, to prime the pump when that moment of tunnel writing pulls into view.

That is the nature of being a writer while working at a job that does not include being a writer. I have said before that I teach and that teaching keeps me quite busy. I live two lives which impose on each other, sparring for my time, my creativity and my concentration.  I do not fear boredom when I retire. And sometimes lesson planning turns into an intense creative process that is nearly as satisfying as completing a chapter, getting through a bit of emotional dialogue, typing ###.

But at this moment, writing now this little post will have to suffice as a tug on the rope to let off steam until this weekend provides a few hours of uninterrupted racing down the tracks of my current book coming to an end or my next book establishing its voice, both rattled into line, the engine having gathered enough pressure to make my breaks squeal against the anticipation.

Who else is at the station? How are you holding out?

#creativity
#writing
#waiting

Creativity: Using your own experiences to authenticate your writing

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 My last post was about brainstorming with my writer pal Marcy on a novel idea involving dementia and Alzheimer’s.  Much of what is going into the book is based on my experience with my mother and my father-in-law who are both suffering from this kind of memory loss.  Every phone call I have with them or chat with my mother-in-law or my sister, who also keeps contact with our mom, is a source of inspiration and information. But it is also disheartening because it will only get worse.

I tell myself that as painful as it is to watch and keep up with the changes they are going through, it is part of life, part of loving someone and part of the truth that must be in what I write. What we experience is our greatest source of originality and authenticity.

I know this book is going to tax me and pull hard at my heart, for every wall my character must climb will echo a difficulty my mother is going through. I have long since given up having those chats with my mom that always left us laughing. For many years I would unload my disappointments through the receiver of my phone, and my mother would be on the other end listening.  But it was never a sad event for I would find myself giggling over those troubles because she brought that out in me.  They were fodder for humor instead of tears or anger when I shared them with her.

But I cannot do that any more. She cannot hold onto the same conversation for more than a couple of minutes. Sometimes she thinks she is talking to my daughter or worse me back when I was in high school.  It is much harder to make her giggle and much harder for me to find the humor in the troubles that come with the changes she is going through.  Nowadays, she is sharing with me her difficulties, and I am the one hoping to bring humor rather than sorrow to her experience.

What life experiences feed your writing and give you hope that you will find peace in the effort?

#creativity
#Alzheimer’s

Creativity: reading, thinking, and occasionally sunflowers are components of the process

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 Since I am often inundated with numerous obligations I cannot put off because they are important aspects of my income-producing job, I need a few tricks to galvanize creativity.  I have already written about several of them, but my most trusted approach to getting off the pot and onto the page is very simple.  I read what I have already written and/or read other writers’ work and think.

This post is a definite example of that.  I post every Wednesday pretty reliably (unless life interferes with unreasonable demands I must give in to).  But I don’t often come to the page with an idea ready to zoom from my finger tips.

Today I started by diddle daddling around reading my old posts, posts that landed in my mailbox, posts I came across on Twitter, and posts I know my friends have written recently.

Somewhere along my diddling about, I dropped in on a blog or two by other writers (Jane Friedman for one, on ironically “What should authors blog about?”  Seemed rather apropos.)

Reading makes me ask questions.  It also makes me stop and think, and thinking leads me to wandering and wondering, which can on occasion produce a thought worth writing about. 

Of course, this approach does have its downfalls.  I may be planning to write a post and I get curious about sunflowers and then think about My Antonia by Willa Cather. In the book was a long description of the sunflowers which often stretched far into the distance on hills and along road sides in that part of Nebraska. Thinking about this image, will remind me of a neighbor I had in Oregon who grew sunflowers along one side of her house. From across the street and several houses down, I could see those enormous orange/yellow bobbing heads.  They stood in a long narrow line along the garage wall like tall garish soldiers.

They made me want to grow sunflowers one day. Years later when my daughter was about eight years old and wanted to grow a garden, we bought sunflower seeds and planted them along a fence line just the other side of our neighbor’s garden. I imagined them leaning over our fence and gazing with smiling sunny faces at his squash and pumpkins and benefiting from his soil preparations.  We had one of the wettest seasons that year and my daughter’s foot-tall sunflowers were leaf deep in runoff.  We made numerous attempts at building up berms to hold back the encroaching flow, and dug channels to move the sitting water. But it just kept raining and raining.

We finally moved them to higher ground while rain ran down our necks, and the pooling water spilled over our low boot tops.  Either they never quite recovered or the seeds were only distant cousins to the spritely blooms my neighbor had grown.  We had a rather sickly crop of lean seeds to harvest.

That’s the thing about creativity, it’s like an unexpected rainy season when you’re trying to grow sunflowers: one thing leads to another and you just have to go with the flow.

What flows have you had to ride along that guided you to a writing moment?

#creativity
#sunflowers
#thinking