When developing your story, you’ll want your characters to face a number of challenges or conflicts. One of the most basic of them is man vs. man. In this conflict, the main character finds his goals jeopardized by another individual: a stormtrooper shooting at him; a Klingon arguing with her in a space station cantina; or a lowly human turning our astronaut over to the sadistic ape overlords.

At its basest, man vs. man conflict is just two people taking on one another, with our hero usually winning. At its best, this conflict can symbolically test competing ideas and ethical solutions. A character represents one approach to a problem while the other represents an alternative path. All too often, these representations are reduced to simplistic views of good and evil. But by showing each characters’ motivations and needs, the story’s theme gains depth while the dramatic tension soars.

A good example of man vs. man conflict is “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” The story clearly revolves around two people: Khan and Admiral Kirk. The motivations of each are given: Khan wants revenge upon Kirk for marooning him on a planet that then underwent an ecological disaster in which his wife died. Kirk feels a responsibility to protect the civilized world from Kahn, a deposed dictator and product of genetic engineering who he had defeated several years before. They play an extensive game of cat and mouse with one another in an effort to win. In the end, Kirk wins because his motivations are not based on revenge but doing what is right by others.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

“Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.” –Katherine Paterson

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.” – Richard Wright

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” – Saul Bellow

“To be a writer is to sit down at one’s desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone – just plain going at it, in pain and delight.” – John Hersey

“To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.” – Aldous Huxley

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Of the five senses, taste is the rarest in stories. The reason is that we’re not eating, drinking, smoking or falling face-first into the dirt as frequently as we are seeing, hearing and smelling the world around us.

Like the senses of sound and smell, taste ought to be reserved for moments when it can offer meaningful descriptions of an object, to raise dramatic tension or to offer insights into a character. For example, describing how an extrasolar colonist who has learned bad news suddenly finds bitter the taste of his otherwise sweet julah drink shows how the information has affected him emotionally. Unfortunately, writers too often simply describe the food a character is eating either for the gross-out factor (such as the Klingon’s gagh in “Star Trek”) or simply to find a way to get the sense of taste into their story.

Where taste and smell are concerned, sometimes you can get your descriptions to appeal to both senses. They are, after all, closely related: Humans who have temporarily lost their sense of smell due to a cold often can’t taste either. J. Chris Rock accomplishes this in his short story “Lucy” (which appears in the August 2008 Asimov’s Science Fiction): “’Seriously though,’ Elgin says, his mouth full of Fritos. I can smell them, that gross wet corn mush smell.”

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

Suffering from writer’s block or need to add some spunk to your writing? The problem may be that you need to change up your routine. To that end, try this tip:

If undergoing a period of personal turmoil, write a page that continues with one of these writing prompts: “I feel…”; “I desire…”; “I need…”

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Talk about disrespectful! Or maybe where an individual’s official title is concerned, writers show too much respect. There are two easy rules to follow:
• Capitalize an individual’s official title if it appears immediately before the person’s name.
RIGHT: Commanding the USS Enterprise is Captain James T. Kirk.
WRONG: James T. Kirk is Captain of the USS Enterprise.
RIGHT: The captain of the USS Enterprise gazed at the viewscreen.
WRONG: The Captain of the USS Enterprise gazed at the viewscreen.
• Capitalize the official title if it’s in a quotation in which someone is addressing the person holding that title.
RIGHT: “Save me from the alien monster, Captain!
WRONG: “Save me from the alien monster, captain!”

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

“First you’re an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity.” – Martin Myers

“When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.” – Samuel Butler

“I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.” – Peter De Vries

“A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.” – John K. Hutchens

“The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.” – Russell Baker

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Sometimes novice authors write scenes that are fun and action-packed but simply don’t contribute anything to the story. These parts of the tale are called runarounds and are best avoided.

A good example are battle scenes written purely for the gore rather than to develop the character or to move the story forward. Similarly, a writer might have the protagonist look for some object or person that doesn’t advance the plot or resolve the story’s central problem. Or a writer might provide a descriptive paragraph about a character by offering information – such as his weight, height, where he attended elementary school – that is irrelevant to understanding his personality or why other characters treat him the way that they do.

Authors usually write runarounds because they’re failing their dramatic objective – which is how to solve the story’s central problem. Sensing that they need more action in the story, they toss in the sword fight or the humorous chase after a chicken. When giving overdetailed descriptions of characters, they problem arises from giving too much backstory. In that sense, the scene or descriptive paragraph is just running around the objective rather than aiming for it.

Getting rid of the runaround so you can develop a stronger plot and characterization is vital. Usually the problem for the author is that an outline was written with enough detail before jumping into the first draft; because of that, the author hasn’t thought enough about the storyline and how it will unfold. In other cases, the problem merely is overwriting. Authors usually know more their character and the plot than the reader and so include the nonessential facts, like lengthy descriptions of how the intestines spilled out of a henchman who the protagonist thrust a sword through. A strong edit is needed when that occurs.

The term was coined by the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop’s Steve Popkes, who won a Nebula Award for Best Short Story.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks: