In a lot of your books the internal struggle is just as important as the external conflict. How do you keep that internal struggle from devolving into just, into whining essentially.
Right, no that’s a real danger. We call it “navel gazing” a lot in writing where if you delve too much into that, you can have just characters sitting and pondering and nothing happens. I have to walk that line, and in fact some of mine probably turns into navel-gazing because I err on that side a little too much. I would say that the way I try to work on this is to mirror internal conflict with external conflict, meaning what the character is working on inside is, is enhanced, is conflicted, is in some ways changed by what’s happening externally which then allows some very powerful ways of showing them working through their problems in the real world, not just sitting and thinking about them.
That has worked with me so far, it is certainly a danger that I’m aware of and something that I think writers need to be aware of. At the same time, you know, what fiction can do is show internal conflict, emotions, thoughts, feelings in a way that other mediums can’t. It’s one of our specialties and I think that avoiding it completely is the wrong move because, Yes, any time you delve into that you risk just getting boring, but when you don’t delve into that you’re basically just imitating what a film can do, do everything external and a film can do that much better. I like taking what we can do as writers and just playing to our strengths and explore what the medium is capable of and that’s why I do it.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.