Bowl ‘em over
Writing fiction should be like playing a game of skittles, says Adrian Magson
Life, it was once said, is like a bowl of custard. Or was it cherries? I forget. Whatever it is, cherries or custard are nice enough but can soon get pretty tiresome if that’s all you have.
The same could be said of a story. If all it had inside it was a bunch of people and some nice descriptions, where would the fun be in that? No challenge, no conflict, no tension, no emotion… The End.
I like to think of writing as like a game of skittles. The main character is the ball, thrown into contact with lots of others – the skittles. However, real skittles are uniform, with nothing to distinguish one from the other, whereas a writer’s skittles are varied and do whatever is chosen for them. Some are even designed to fight back, which makes the interaction a lot more interesting and adds tension to the mix. Skittles are also the other characters, circumstances, settings, motivations and a host of other elements found in any story. They stand or they fall, depending how the ball touches them.