tension Archive

Conflict & Tension: What Writers Can Learn From How Visual Artists Use Contrast

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Contrast is the visual artist’s most powerful tool. Contrast does not necessarily mean opposite. Evil and contentment, white and off-white are both contrasts, but they are not opposites. Artists use a spectrum of tools to achieve contrast: color and light, saturation and tone shading and line, focus, scale and

Tension mounting

Author: | Categories: Writing, Writing Advice No comments
We spend our lives avoiding conflict, and then we reach academia. On the playground we’re told to make peace, but in the classroom we’re praised for our thesis statement that makes an “argument,” that introduces “tension,” that “complicates” a previous notion. Conflict becomes, all of a sudden, the engine

Triangular Relationships

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In a previous blog post, I mentioned my difficulty with conflict and tension.  For this reason, I love triangular relationships, which bring up conflicting desires, competing loyalties, and dilemmas. All the things that make a juicy story go. When I was just starting out writing fiction, when my writing