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Cliched Situations

   Today's blog-hop topic is  Finding compelling conflict and avoiding clichés .  As usual, this is an interesting challenge, both in reality and in describing... if you see what I mean. It offers lots of possible approaches. I've chosen to focus on clichéd situations and their role in compelling conflict rather than on verbal clichés...  So, to clichéd situations.  Many genres and sub-genres rely on genre-specific tropes, or givens. I don't regard these as clichés in the parameters of this piece, and indeed they can be used in varied ways to avoid that clichéd feeling. What I find of more interest is situations that are commonly used to create conflict or action, but which contravene the  would-he-really  test. Let's look at a few of these. 1. Character One (let's call her Jane) overhears a conversation, whether in reality or via phone, or even by reading part of a letter/email. Jane immediately decides Character Two, a friend, mentor, ...
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Landscapes of My Mind - Creating Fictional Settings

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The round robin this month is a wonderful subject... creating fictional settings. Creating fictional settings is one of my favourite things to do. I've always loved reading about landscapes of the mind- p laces that don't exist- so long as the author makes them  seem  as if they do. The whole concept has a long and grand history. Plato did it so convincingly that even two thousand years later some people choose to believe Atlantis once sank beneath the waves rather than rose from a Greek man’s imagination. I've never invented any place as ambitious as Atlantis, but I've been creating my own settings for almost as long as I remember. Back in the 1970s, I created a farming district I named Springford as a main setting for my first published book, a collection of linked stories called  Her Kingdom for a Pony.  I didn't use the real farming district in which I lived, because I wanted freedom to use features that didn't exist. Having developed a taste for it, I...
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Making Real-Life Settings Seem Real

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  The round robin this month is a wonderful subject... making real-life settings seem real! Using real-life settings for books is a fascinating mixture of joy and consternation. As with writing fantasy and science fiction, using a real setting appears to offer a lifeline. In fantasy and science fiction we can make anything happen—right? Don’t have a gadget to repel gravity? Invent one and hand it to our characters. Can’t think of a blood-pounding challenge for our weedy hero? Introduce a dragon into the playground. Yeah. That’ll do it. Yet of course, it’s not that simple. For every greasing of the wheels switching to a speculative fiction genre offers, it tosses at least as many spokes into the same wheels. It’s the same with real-life settings. On the face of it, using a real place means we don’t have to invent stuff, right? Maybe, but we still have to solve some thorny problems. For one thing, we have to be familiar with that setting because failing to research is going to me...
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