I went to two conferences for the first time in July. One of them has been happening for years, the Confluence Sci-Fi and Fantasy Convention. The second just started this year, the Wildcat Lit Fest at the newly-renovated Wildcat Mansion in Franklin, PA.

I took part in workshops at both events, and between those and the panels I filled up a quarter of a notebook with awesome tips and ideas to improve my writing. Here are some of the highlights that especially resonated with me (and will hopefully be useful for other folks looking for writing tips!)

Tip 1: Start filling a “poison cabinet” to reference when you need to add conflict to a scene or story.

This tip came from Timons Esaias during the Confluence workshop The Muddle in the Middle. A “poison cabinet” is a place to store toxic or hurtful words that could enhance conflict in dialogue between your characters. These could be things said to you, things you’ve said, or things you overhear. Once your poison cabinet is stocked, you can dip into it when you need to ramp up the tension between characters in a conversation. As Timons said, “If anything or anybody hurts you, get paid for it.”

This is an especially great tip for folks who sometimes struggle to be mean to their characters (or just struggle to be mean in general). Another great source of poison cabinet inventory Timons suggested was to read self-help books—but stop before they get to the “help” part. The early chapters of those books, when they’re explaining the toxicity or problem they want to address, can be a great place to mine for bad things that your characters can say or do to each other.

Tip 2:  A high emotional payoff requires high stakes, so find those “emotional buttons” you can push for readers.

This is another tip from the Muddle in the Middle workshop. We’ve all probably read at least one story that’s a struggle to get through—not because it’s poorly written, but because it hits hard at one of our emotional trigger points. These are the kinds of stories that you might start choking up just thinking or talking about. Or maybe it’s something from real life that you haven’t seen yet in fiction but is equally adept at pushing that button.

For me personally, this is any time an animal is suffering or dies. It’s harder for me to read a cat, dog, horse, etc. suffering and dying than human characters going through the same (which maybe says more about my own psychology than anything, but that’s a subject for another post). The point is, my characters pretty much always save cats because I can’t bear the thought of them doing anything else—but that’s a big emotional button that I could press and haven’t.

One comment Gregory Frost made in the workshop was that you need to demand sacrifice from your characters. All the great heroes in literature suffer, and that suffering justifies the story for the reader because it raises the stakes. This can also mean demanding sacrifice from the writer—being willing to kill off that character you love when the story demands it, or letting your cats go un-saved.

Tip 3: Embrace the imperfections of your characters.

Jumping to the Wildcat Lit Fest, the fiction workshop led by Dave Newman started by thinking of some mistakes and the chain of events and consequences that would follow from them. This struck me as a great exercise, either to find a new story idea or to amp up the tension and drive the plot in a longer work like a novel.

Real people make mistakes. We sometimes act before we think, or say things we know we shouldn’t, or have insecurities that make us say or do things that don’t make sense from the outside. These flaws and foibles are a big part of what make us unique, and giving these same imperfections to a character can help them feel more authentic on the page.

This relates to the tips above, too. A real person might fling some choice lines from your poison cabinet at someone they love out of pain, anger, or other pesky emotions. They might get defensive when they’re criticized, or take someone else’s words the wrong way. Or they might suffer, not because of what other people do, but because of internal struggles—characters, like people, can feel things like imposter syndrome, social anxiety, or envy towards people that have the success they want. These are all things that can add extra tension and conflict to relationships in your stories, giving them that authenticity and emotional impact that makes readers feel like they relate to the character and want to keep reading the story.

Tip 4: When dropping info you’ve invented or researched, keep the character central.

One great quote that I wrote down from the Confluence panel on research for sci-fi and fantasy is that “the art of science fiction is 90% the art of sugar coating the info dumps.” Frederic Durbin gave advice on how to do that: keep the character central. This can apply more broadly to other forms of description, too, but especially when you’re dumping info on the world, technology, magic system, or other details, don’t let yourself go on longer than a page without interjecting some character into it. If you do, shift back to them or find a way to insert them.

As a corollary: make sure you’re only including details that it makes sense for your viewpoint character to notice and comment on. If they’re seeing a technology for the first time, for example, it makes sense they’ll spend some time staring at it and wondering about it—but if they use it every day, they’re not going to explain it in that kind of detail.

Another great tip: the characters don’t always need to know how things work in your world. Think about your real life. Do you really understand how a microwave heats up food? Could you explain to someone exactly how the internet works? The same concept is going to apply in a sci-fi or fantasy world. The characters can understand how to use something, or even how to repair it and its more advanced functions, without knowing the full details of what makes it tick. Whether the details are researched or invented, presenting them from the character’s viewpoint can help them be more digestible for a reader.

Tip 5: Use both big and small conflicts and desires to propel your narrative.

This was a recurring theme across the workshops at both Confluence and the Wildcat Lit Fest. Yes, you need a central conflict in a story, and yes characters should have a main motivation that drives them—those are Fiction Writing 101 kind of concepts.

But don’t stop at this big-picture. Small conflicts and wants also generate forward momentum at a scene level. For example, a character’s “big want” might be to, say, become a famous actor, but that’s going to take a while and lots of steps to get to. Along the way, they’re going to have smaller wants driving their action: to eat a really good cheese sandwich for lunch; to catch their bus to LA on time; to get a callback from their first casting audition.

Those small wants are also potential points for paragraph-level conflict, character development, and plot movement. Maybe they’ve heard about a great grilled cheese restaurant they’re going to go on a quest for, and encounter other characters or things that drive the story along the way. Or you can put obstacles between them and these small desires—what could make them miss their bus? What could go wrong at that audition that stops them from getting a callback?

Especially in longer works like a novel, you can’t just rely on the one central conflict on every page of the story. It’s going to be in the background of every scene, sure, but it can start to feel repetitive and shallow if that’s the only thing giving the story energy. Adding in smaller conflicts ratchets up the tension at the paragraph and scene level, giving the story more depth and dimension.

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