For several years, Lincoln was my county town and, for centuries before that, it was the county town for many of my ancestors. So, today, for the #HistFicThursdays blog, I'm delighted to be hosting Rachel Elwiss Joyce with a guest post about her book Lady of Lincoln , as part of her Coffee Pot Book Club tour! Read on to find out more about the woman who inspired this book and where her place in history is secured forever. But first, let's meet the book... Blurb A true story. A forgotten heroine. In a time when women were told to stay silent, could she become the saviour her people need? 12th-century England. Nicola de la Haye wants to do her duty. But though she’s taught a female cannot lead alone, the young noblewoman bristles at the marriage her father has arranged to secure her inheritance. And when an unexpected death leaves her unguided, the impetuous girl shuns the king’s blessing and weds a handsome-but-landless knight. Harshly fined by...
Saturday 23rd November - Characters - Part Four – Conflicts
On Scrivener – my writing programme of choice – two of the headings on the character sketch pages is for internal and external conflicts. This is so important and will tell your readers all they need to know about the defining behaviours of your characters. You can take this as literally as you like.
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| Smiling on the outside, what conflicts are on the inside? |
Back when Facebook was still young (and I was much younger!), all those quizzes to find which character in X series you were most
like were about the coolest thing you could do, they could have been summed up
in two questions. What are your internal
conflicts? and What are your external conflicts? If you could match these two questions to a character,
you were definitely the most like them, never mind your eye colour or favourite
animal.
In writing, outward conflicts are the easiest to convey. Character A dislikes B because of C. These show clear signs to the reader through
the POV narrator, by their actions or words. It’s harder with internal conflicts. After all, all of your characters have them but, mostly, we don’t write
from all points of view...
So here are a few things to think about in securing your
characters’ conflicts:
- Only certain people say what they think – while this is the easiest way to disclose to your reader what inner conflicts your character is suffering, there are better, and more believable, ways to demonstrate this. Someone who is chronically shy is not going to announce to a full room that they’re feeling nervous!
- Conflicts are the gears of your character – every crucial moment in any story comes from a personal conflict of one of the characters coming to light. Your story grows in pace and involvement every time you use them.
- No one likes an infallible hero – you may think you do, but actually true heroics come from conquering conflicts rather than having none in the first place.
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