Filling in the holes. You write down your ideas—the bones of your story. These include who you main characters are, and what they want to have or to accomplish. As your story evolves, you will learn whether your main characters work well together, or are antagonistic, and what the results of their interaction may be. It is in how they go about trying to get what they want that your story is built. How does this story end? The ending is perhaps the most important piece of your story, because making one scene follow the next until it leads to your climax, with that sense of inevitability that separates the pros from the novices—is much easier to accomplish. It does not take an Master of Fine Arts to figure out how to do that. It just takes work. Once you have established character, conflict and conclusion, you can go back to fill in the missing elements.

          But not all stories are conflict driven, you say. Dig deep into the stories you have most enjoyed reading. The conflict may not have been immediately apparent, but generally, something happens to the main character, and he or she wants to fix it, or at least to make the situation more to their liking. Your character may experience a struggle, where everything he does only makes the situation worse, or, even with the best of intentions, the situation may simply be too big for your character to handle. But, by the end of the story, even if he has not attained the goal he has set out to reach, he is a wiser person than he was to begin with.

          I just finished reading Astrid and Veronika, by Linda Olsson. The story takes place in Sweden. Now, if I were being snide, I would say that because the Swedes are deprived of light for six months of the year, everything they write is depressive. They are all dealing with seasonal affect depression, as it is a characteristically sad story. In this book, two women, one an elderly recluse and the other a writer by profession, meet and tell each other the stories of their lives, bringing about healing for both of them. The conflict lies in their need to come to terms with the directions their lives have taken, and for the two women, redemption comes through communication. The conflict was always there, even though it was internal, rather than external.

          Most of the novels that make it to the best seller lists are conflict driven. Yes, we used to see adventure stories where the hero interacted with the world around him in a series of tales. These, I believe, were a direct take from the oral tradition, where a character is used over and over again in various adventures, because people enjoy hearing about that character. The character may have been exceptionally resourceful or smart, or he may not have known how to stay out of trouble. In those stories the main character does not change, because he embodies those traits in exaggerated form.

          However our present day novels involve growth and change, bringing them closer to our lives, because our lives are nothing if they are not shaped by growth and change.