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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27815
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27815
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There is a kind of brainstorming process that some writers seem to go through when trying to come up with something to write about. It goes something like this. Can I take two apparently incompatible features, assign them to the same character, and see what happens.

And after trying to make this work for a while, they post here asking how to make these two incompatible things work together, because, not surprisingly, it has turned out to be difficult to do.

But this is not where good stories come from. Good stories come from observation. If your story process begins with the observation of a duality in man (and lots of them do) than you can begin to invent a character who displays this duality, and put them in circumstances in which this duality is revealed.

When you approach it from this angle, you are not going to end up asking questions about whether this is psychologically realistic or not, because you began with an observation of a real duality in the real world and if psychology cannot account for it, that is psychology's problem, not yours.

As an artist, you can certainly take artistic license in delineating the duality you have observed. You can exaggerate or simplify, just as long as you don't lose sight of the original duality you observed.

On the other hand, if you began with a brainstorming exercise jamming two opposing characteristics together, then even if someone suggests a way to resolve the contradiction, you are not likely to get a good story out of it because it will still not be driven by an actual observation about the nature of human life.

Fiction does not start with invention, but with observation. Invention is just a tool for highlighting and focusing on the thing you have observed.

Original score: 3