Conflict alone won’t raise your book to the best-seller list, the conflict has to be emotionally engaging to the reader. If the story is emotionally engaging, it will generate reader interest. Your goal as an author is to create emotional familiarity within your work.
You might ask me, "Well, my book is a far-future, space opera, based on the life of a highly advanced form of life. How do I write something familiar with that?" While it may be difficult to imagine, writing something emotionally familiar isn't hard to do. You may already be doing it. You can write your space opera, epic fantasy, or historical fiction, but the emotional content needs to be relateable to the reader. Anger, happiness, sadness, euphoria, depression... these are all familiar emotions. They are universal and cross culture boundaries. That being said, they can cross genre boundaries just as easily. Karl Iglesias said, “Bottom line, it doesn’t matter who or what you write about as long as your characters experience emotions we understand and relate to.” What does this mean?
Coming up next: Conflict Part 3--Micro-tension.
You might ask me, "Well, my book is a far-future, space opera, based on the life of a highly advanced form of life. How do I write something familiar with that?" While it may be difficult to imagine, writing something emotionally familiar isn't hard to do. You may already be doing it. You can write your space opera, epic fantasy, or historical fiction, but the emotional content needs to be relateable to the reader. Anger, happiness, sadness, euphoria, depression... these are all familiar emotions. They are universal and cross culture boundaries. That being said, they can cross genre boundaries just as easily. Karl Iglesias said, “Bottom line, it doesn’t matter who or what you write about as long as your characters experience emotions we understand and relate to.” What does this mean?
Coming up next: Conflict Part 3--Micro-tension.
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