Writing Conflict

Conflict is essential to story - regardless of genre. The friction between what a character wants and the lengths they will go to reach that goal is what pulls readers through your book. Great conflict is what leaves readers cheering (or crying) at the end of a story. Using humour and her deep knowledge of human behaviour, counsellor and award-winning author Eileen Cook will guide you through the causes of conflict, the differences between internal and external conflict, and show you how conflict resolution techniques can be turned upside down to ramp up the tension in your book.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, the enmity is between these three "tiger" nations and what prevents them from making peace.

Conflict in your writing draws listeners who want to listen to your work. Conflict keeps them listening. With conflict in every paragraph and sentence, you’ll create writing that sells.

"Sumptuous prose and a mind-blowing twist will make sure that readers don't forget The Professor's Wife, an unsettling psychological thriller wrapped in a provocative dark romance." -IndieReader Carl Bingham is a lonely British Literature Professor who has sworn off love and sex since an affair with a student at Skidmore College almost lost him his tenure and reputation. Camilla is a young artist who sits in his classroom, mesmerized by his voice and appearance. Despite their age difference, they fall in love, marry, and feed each other's physical and emotional needs. But when secrets and ...

There are several aspects to writing fiction. Rendering what John Gardner in The Art of Fiction describes as a 'vivid and continuous dream' is a complicated affair. Story is created from the imagination of a writer, who in turn must translate it onto a page of symbols so that another person can read, absorb, and experience the story in a similar fashion. It's a remarkable process when you think about it. In On Creative Writing the process of writing fiction is demystified and cut in palatable bites to help any writer who has the passion and mad desire to tell a story. Reviews: Bitten by ...

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East Editor, has been covering the region since 1989 and is uniquely placed to explain its complex past and its troubled present. In this new book, in part based on his acclaimed podcast, Bowen takes us on a journey across the Middle East and through its history. He meets ordinary men and women on the front line, their leaders, whether brutal or benign, and he explores the power games that have so often wreaked devastation on civilian populations as those leaders, whatever their motives, jostle for political, religious and economic control.

When the twenty-three Altoonian spaceships arrive at Earth, they not only shatter the shaky peace of the place, they thrust Vice President James Fenimore Hunter into a role he may not be ready for. While the aliens keep saying they’ve come in peace, the real reasons and the real costs are more than the vice president can ignore. Unfortunately, in his bungling attempts to stop this absurd madness, he unwittingly makes the most foolish decisions and chooses the worst allies, and thereby becomes the unwitting agent of the apocalypse. But he needs to make things right...or die trying.

“Heartwarming, poignant… a joy to read.” –Writer’s Digest Claire Chastain reflects on her journey of childhood innocence and discovery in small-town Texas in the 1950s. She and best friend Libby share a lifetime of challenges and friendship although Claire is pampered and sheltered in contrast to street-savvy Libby. Claire is blindsided by her mother's devastating illness and ensuing conflicts with her beloved father. Her world of family traditional values crumbles and her lifelong dreams shatter. For the first time, she must make her own way and her own forever decisions. Libby ...

Reporting from Jerusalem for The New York Times and Fox News respectively, Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin, witnessed a decades-old conflict transformed into a completely new war. The West has learned a lot about asymmetrical war in the past decade. At the same time, many strategists have missed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become one of them. This book shows the importance of applying these hard-won lessons to the longest running, most closely watched occupation and uprising in the world.

Men, did you know that it is possible to be friends with a woman? You do know what it means to be friends with a lady, right? Have you ever been friends with someone of the opposite sex? I'm not referring to intimate relations; I'm talking about friendship.

Best-selling author David Shields analyzed over a decade’s worth of front-page war photographs from The New York Times and came to a shocking conclusion: The photo-editing process of the “paper of record”, by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pulls the wool over the eyes of its readers; Shields forces us to face not only the the media's complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well.