Wednesday's Writer's Tip - The Basic Conflict #MFRWauthor

I'll be depending on one of the books I first bought when I was starrting to write novels. The pub date is old but the advice is good. I read a lot of writing books at the start and this is one of the three I kept.

The basic conflict is where the story begins and several things are needed to build the conflict.
The first is the protagonise. Now this can be a single person or there can be more than one. The protagonist is the main character or characters. In mysteries, this is usually the hero or heroine. In a romance both of the characters can be the protagonist. And there are other combinations showing who the main or focus character might be.

The environment is the second need to build the basic conflict. Environment is's just a setting with a house, a room or other places described. The environment  encompasses many subtle things. The environment is developed by looking at the social, moral and  cultural aspects of the place where you choose to set the book. There is a feeling to each environment in the book something that lies beneath the physical structures. I often write about hospitals and the atmosphere here is one of life and death and the way the characters relate to this atmosphere. My fantasy stories are the development of a world, one specific to the story. How the protagonists react to the environment begins the building of the basic conflict.

To set up this basic conflict the protagonist must be in conflict with his own environment or the one of others. I've finished revising a story where the heroine is a union nurse in a hospital that really needs a strong support for the patients and the nurses but this is becoming a hostile environment for her. The hero has come in. He is anti-union and thus he is in conflict with the heroine's environment. They must learn to work together.

So the next time we'll look at what some of the conflicts with environment can be.