Hi gang, Craig here today. One thing good fiction requires is a bit of turmoil. Your main character has to have something unsettling going on in his or her life. I write speculative fiction, so it’s fairly easy to give an example or two.
I could dive right into an alien invasion or zombie apocalypse and have all the turmoil I need. In these examples it’s something the main character never wanted, but now has to come to grips with, maybe even defeat.
Something unwanted might apply in a more realistic setting when settlers have to flee an Indian uprising, or survive a starvation winter because the ships didn’t come.
There are also divorces, loss of employment, sick children, that kind of thing.
Another form of turmoil involves getting what you want, but it turns out to be problematic. Think about that new marriage that leads to her entire family moving in with you.
Shame is a good one, too. People will go to unfathomable depths to keep something from becoming widely known. Caesar has epilepsy, kill everyone who knows, etc. In a modern setting, maybe it’s social media postings from years ago that could be targeted in our current environment.
In all these cases, someone has something going on they would rather not have to deal with. That could be putting it mildly, but there you have it.
That was a long lead in, to get where I’m going today. There is an old piece of writing advice: Write what you know. People often misunderstand and ask questions like, “How can you know about a haunted house?”
You can’t, or can you? But that’s not what the advice means. What I do know about is turmoil. How will people act when put in the crucible? Some will break, some will survive, a few will excel.
Welcome to the modern world. We have a deadly virus all over the globe, and you’ve seen all the absurd things people are doing. They’re attacking each other in some cases because someone is wearing personal protective equipment, in other cases because they aren’t.
There is political and social unrest, and we have rioting in the streets. We’re destroying works of art just like when other cultures burned books.
I’m not going to turn this into a tantrum, but I could. This is Story Empire, and we want to offer you something useful here.
The point is that you know turmoil. You’re living it. You’re neck deep in it right now. Observe the people around you, or on social media. This is how characters might act during an alien invasion. This is how your characters might feel under similar circumstances.
Maybe you have more personal experience to draw from. Think about that acid reflux in the middle of the night because you have a loved one in a nursing home that is currently locked down. You can use that in a story, even if it’s a different set of circumstances.
Give a thought to the unemployed person who used to work at a Wendy’s restaurant that got burned to the ground. How might they feel this morning when the rent comes due.
Maybe your eight-year-old is late coming home from school, and the riot is right outside your apartment building. This is stress and turmoil.
There are equipment operators who got called upon to dig a lot of graves in the last few months. This isn’t the same as installing culverts. Maybe there is some PTSD they have to deal with. Maybe it sparks them to take up a cause where they can do some real good.
There are stories to be written based upon what we’re observing right now. These can be real world, speculative environment, or historical. I’m not talking about stories that include a virus either, only about how people react under stressful times. Apply this to your own work and see if it makes it better.
Story Empire 
Pingback: Advice? Do I have any? – Judi Lynn
Thank you, Craig. You’ve offered great examples of turmoil and showed us how to tie into our own experience with this ongoing mess. Much appreciated.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Glad you liked the post, and thanks for the comment.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, I don’t think there are many of us who aren’t experiencing turmoil right now. And one way or another, it’s a necessary part of writing. Great post, Craig. Happy Writing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks. Have a great weekend.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reblogged this on Archer's Aim and commented:
Good ideas for writing needed turmoil from C.S. Boyack at Story Empire.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Fabulous post, Craig! Every story needs a good amount of tension to keep those readers turning the pages and both internal and external turmoil will get the job done. You are so right about the turmoil we’re living in today. We have a lot to work with. Excellent points!😊
LikeLiked by 1 person
Glad you enjoyed it. Seems like we have plenty to draw from these days.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Interesting read, Craig.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Emotional turmoil is always my favourite turmoil to subject characters to. One fan of my fanfiction series of a few years ago nicknamed me the ‘the writer-queen of dark doom and gloom’ because of all the emotional turmoil I like to put my characters through. I quite like the moniker actually 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
That’s quite the tag. Sounds like you earned it, though.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Maybe I should consider changing my byline on my blog 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
I used to think that “write what you know” meant falling back on my own life experiences or subjects I was knowledgeable about. Then I thought, I’ll just research subjects that interest me to become knowledgeable—missing what was staring me in the face the whole time.
Your haunted house example is an excellent one to illustrate the point.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks, Mae. Some of these common bits of advice don’t make sense until we’ve written for a while.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Excellent points, Craig. Write what you know, but add your twist. That will make your work interesting. I like learning new things, so I don’t mind doing a bit of research. Turns out, you can learn a lot and put it to good use.
LikeLiked by 1 person
We wind up learning a lot of new things, but how characters feel about it we learn from daily life.
LikeLiked by 1 person
A great post, Craig. You have expressed this idea very well. The USA certainly seems to be in a state of turmoil at the moment, but there are issues everywhere. There is a say that when poverty comes in at the door, love flies out the window and I think that applies to the financial state of the world right now.
LikeLiked by 2 people
That’s a cool statement. Thanks for sharing it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Turmoil is all around us like you said, Craig. We do have plenty to work from unfortunately. But adding our experience or observations certainly adds more depth to our work. Great post.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s pretty deep this year. I think we’re all going to have plenty of tumultuous fuel.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Excellent post, Craig. Turmoil is the stuff of great story tension. Sometimes it can be below the surface or right out there for everyone to experience. The core of “Write What You Know” has to be the ability of the writer to take an unknown situation and apply known feelings and experiences.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I like your summation. Too many new authors think it means their main character has to be writing a novel.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hahahaha. I suppose that is true. Funny thing to think about.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is a great post, Craig! Today’s angst is certainly providing us all with plenty of fodder. The more we can tap into the experiences that people are having (and how they deal with them), the better our writing will be. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
So glad you enjoyed it. Thanks.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You speak the truth, Craig. Or stories must have turmoil in order to move forward and overcome, or as you say, crumble. 🙂 We certainly have enough reality to draw from right now. I like the way you took common situations and turned the volume up to create even more stressful situations, based on our current world climate. Great post!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you, Jan.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reblogged this on The Write Stuff and commented:
C. S. Boyack has a great post on Story Empire today on using turmoil to “write what you know.” We are living in turbulent times, for sure, and our own emotion-filled reactions to that can be used to help us create fictional characters facing turmoil of all sorts in our writing. The cause of the fictional turmoil isn’t as important for that as the human reaction to it is. Check out the post to learn more about how this can work to make you a better writer, and please consider passing it along to others, as well. Thanks, and thanks to Craig for making us think about positive ways to use negative feelings. Well done, Craig! 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Super ideas on using pain and stress we’ve actually experienced to create believable pain and stress for our fictional characters. I agree, the situation doesn’t have to be the same (though it could be), but it’s the human reaction to fear, anger, frustration, loss of loved ones–all of the above–that a writer wants to capture. And pulling on your own reaction to various types of turmoil is a great place to start. For instance, it doesn’t matter if you’re trapped in your house due to fear of catching a deadly virus or fear of a demon-cursed evil wizard (think Voldemort) on a rampage in your neighborhood. The emotional trauma that comes with being afraid of something you don’t understand is the same.
Good advice, Craig! Sharing! 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
Glad you enjoyed it, Marcia. Thanks for sharing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It took me a while to realize that Write what you know didn’t mean that you had to experience it. It meant you knew how people would feel and react when they experienced it. And we’ve all run the gamut of emotions, so we know what would push a person’s buttons to do something he normally wouldn’t do. Enjoyed this post. We have lots of emotions to draw on this year.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Might be a Pollyanna approach, but there is a lot to draw from this year.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Reblogged this on Author Don Massenzio and commented:
Check out this post from C.S. Boyack via the Story Empire blog on the subject of turmoil in fiction
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks again, Don.
LikeLiked by 2 people
You’re welcome.
LikeLike
This year certainly has enough turmoil to draw upon. I’ve heard that write what you know advice and agree to a point. Then again, if we only wrote what we know, our writing would never expand. I used to hate research but the more I write, the more I want to learn new things.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I dig research. I’ve lost days to it when something is interesting. Then it winds up adding a paragraph to a story.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Great post, Craig.
The write what you know reminds me of a scene I wrote in FALLOUT where two guys had to wait a long time for a lift on the space ship due to it being peak movement time. Obviously, I’ve never been on a space ship, but I have been on a cruise ship and so I took what I knew from that experience and peak lift usuage times and transplanted it onto a space craft.
I love your clear examples on how to use your pain, turmoil, and stress responses from real life in our fiction.
LikeLiked by 2 people
That’s a perfect example. It might be a post for our newer authors, but they deserve some love, too.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is wonderful! All stories need that turmoil to draw in the reader and you’ve explained how to achieve that in a concise and clear manner. Thanks.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for stopping by.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Fiction is all about turmoil. “Once upon a time, everyone lived happily ever after,” is a pretty boring tale. I love that you suggest using real world experiences in different ways in fiction. That’s putting your pain to good use.
I’ve heard people counter the saying “write what you know” with the phrase “write what you want to know.” But I think that statement is directed to research-obsessed people like me. Totally different approach to the idiom.
Great post, Craig.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I think there are a lot of notes people could take in 2020. They don’t have to weave their way into a story right away. Remembering how some of this made you feel could bring a good element to some fiction.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Great post, Craig. Life gives us so much we can use in our writing, even when it becomes ‘too much’…
LikeLiked by 2 people
Sometimes it is too much. That’s why I like to keep notes. Can’t remember it all.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Where would we be without our notes?
LikeLiked by 1 person