My Storybook Life

One of the things I find amazing about good writing is the author's ability to resolve conflicts. Not all the conflicts, mind you--at least until the end of the book--but just enough by the end of the chapter to make you feel like you've accomplished something by reading it. Of course if they're really good, they've also thrown in two more for every one that's resolved so that the net result is you can't put the book down until the very end. It takes a certain amount of skill to resolve conflicts. After all, in real life conflicts and troubles are rarely resolved as neatly as they are in stories--making it a challenge to resolve them in a believable way. A good chapter leaves you hanging with a sense of unresolved tension. It may be sorrow, anger, fear or something else, but whatever it is, its unpleasant. And we don't want to stop reading because the rule of stories is that the tension will be resolved. At least in the stories I like anyway.

The great thing about a story though is that the resolution doesn't take any more effort than continuing to read. Real life is more complicated.

I find myself these days between chapters. The last chapter was full of adventures and romance, but there was also rejection and pain. Just enough of each to make you want to keep reading. And it isn't done being written yet. The material is all there, but the narrative is far from complete. I find myself reviewing it, revising it as time goes on and different events come to the foreground. Obvious conflicts that beg to be resolved but weren't, hidden conflicts whose resolutions were so neat and secure I couldn't have written them better if I'd tried.

The challenge I find myself facing is how to finish writing that last chapter in such a way as to preserve the joys and the pains as they really were but set them up for resolution in the next chapter. How to tell about the evil things without letting them take over and the good things without losing their believability. It is not an easy task, as there is more than just a good story at stake here. The conflicts I am trying to resolve are real conflicts. The pain is real pain. And the joys are real joys.

I am comforted with the thought that my Editor is the best in the business and the kind of story he wants me to write is my favorite kind: the kind where everything works out in the end. But that doesn't mean I don't find myself stuck at my writer's desk sometimes, wondering where the heck this story is going.