Nat’l Opposite Day

It’s National Opposite Day. It’s supposed to be a day for kids being silly.

But opposites is an interesting concept. It’s a tool writers use to keep their stories interesting.

Romance authors are often told, “write the firefighter and the arsonist.” Opposites create conflict. Conflict is what keeps a story interesting.

One tool authors use is called the List of Twenty. Write down the problem at the top of the page then come up with 20 solutions. The first five answers will be obvious. The cliches. The tried-and-true. The next five will be ridiculous. Supposedly the next ten will work for you because you’ve gotten the cliches cleared away and jumpstarted true creative thinking.

I used the List of Twenty with success while writing And Jericho Burned. My problems was what kind of trauma would my heroine have suffered as a child that would turn her into a claustrophobic. I think I came up with a great answer.

I read another interesting exercise the other day: write down nine things that wouldn’t work. Just the opposite of the above. This has the mind approaching the problem from the opposite angle.

In The Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook super agent Donald Maas suggests reversing motivations. Another of his exercises consists of figuring out what a character would never do, then have the character do that.  His standard advice on almost every aspect of writing is “do the opposite.”

In my February 28 release, Mask of the King, I made sure my hero reacted to something in a way my editor didn’t expect. That’s a twist. I think most readers will expect him to react in a certain manner, which is one of the reasons I didn’t write the scene that way.

Opposites. They don’t just attract, they rock.