Fighting With Yourself – Making Internal Conflict

On this week’s podcast, we talked about the types of conflict in your story. You can check it out here.

But I wanted to delve into internal conflict a tiny bit more.

Internal conflict is when your character is waffling about something important in the story. Sometimes that’s hard to figure out.

Here are some hints about creating internal conflict.

Think about the character.

Yep, that’s it. You have to think and know about your main character to understand their internal struggle.

Think about:

  1. What are their morals? Are they all about peace? Justice? Freedom? Creativity?
  2. What are they afraid of happening more than anything else? What’s their biggest fear?
  3. Is that biggest fear related to their core values?
  4. What do they want more than anything in the world? What do they yearn for? Why?
  5. How can their biggest fear and their biggest values mess up them getting their goal in the story?

Boom. Done. Brilliant right?

If you’re still stuck, this author, John Vorhaus, uses the BUT method.

I love my husband, but sometimes he turns into a Big Foot and I’m allergic to fur.

I want to get promoted, but my boss never promotes gerbils and I’m super proud of being a gerbil and don’t want to be a hamster.

My twisted brain

LET’S HANG OUT!

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One of our newest LOVING THE STRANGE podcasts is about the strange and adorably weird things people say?

And one of our newest DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE episode is about fear setting and how being swallowed by a whale is bad ass.


And Carrie has new books out! Yay!

You can order now! It’s an adult mystery/thriller that takes place in Bar Harbor, Maine. Read an excerpt here!

best thrillers The People Who Kill
The people who kill

It’s my book! It came out June 1! Boo-yah! Another one comes out July 1.

And that one is called  THOSE WHO SURVIVED, which is the first book in the the DUDE GOODFEATHER series.  I hope you’ll read it, like it, and buy it!

The Dude Goodfeather Series - YA mystery by NYT bestseller Carrie Jones
The Dude Goodfeather Series – YA mystery by NYT bestseller Carrie Jones

TO TELL US YOUR BRAVE STORY JUST EMAIL BELOW.

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On one of my Patreon sites I read and print chapters of unpublished YA novels. THE LAST GODS and SAINT and now ALMOST DEAD. This is a monthly membership site (Hear the book chapters – $1/month, read them $3-month, plus goodies!). Sometimes I send people art! Art is fun.

On this, my second site, WRITE BETTER NOW, you can do a one-time purchase of a writing class or get two of my books in eBook form or just support our podcast or the dogs. It’s all part of the WRITING CLASS OF AWESOME.

It’s a super fun place to hang out, learn, read, and see my weirdness in its true form.

And I’m starting up a brand new, adult paranormal set at a Maine campground. You can read the first chapter here.


SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!