Wow, Alicia that's a lot of "keeping track" of all the tracks. And I concur with your assessment of _The Fire in Fiction_. Great resource.

Hi Lisa,

Yay! I'm glad that the examples are useful. Conflict certainly makes the stories interesting!

Hi Alicia,

How wonderful that you have all those stories from your mother, remembered by you and your sisters. Dementia steals so much. I hope the researchers develop a cure soon!

A pantser with a plotting glaze myself, I am in awe of your plotting superpower.

Many writers I know love Scrivener, and I can see why.

Even though I basically write by the seat of my pants, I still use a Character Bible to keep track of the minutia. That helps me quite a bit, as does a basic outline so I don't get lost.

Thank you for your suggestions! The Fire in Fiction sounds awesome.

Hi Jenny,

I'm happy to know that the list will be helpful in the editing process!

YES!

The Pride's Children mainstream trilogy has 80% or more of the types of conflicts you list - and it is great fun making sure each individual scene has as much as possible AND a variety
of different kinds.

As an extreme plotter, a lot of this is embedded, through the three pov characters, in the scenes from the very beginning, so I know which to make sure are there when I get to writing a particular one. I usually end up adding more conflicts rather than subtracting them as I go through the scenes.

The story is a long one (think GWTW), and advances similarly through the critical years in the characters' lives, 2005 to 2006.

Conflict CAN get heavy-handed, so it works for me, a bear of very little brain, to keep track of it all both in the plotting, and, after a scene is finished, in adjusting/recording anything extra, so I know where a particular idea got expressed. The 'data' I record as I go, essentially a living 'bible', helps me find the points on all the conflict arcs. Scrivener is great for this, as all those files (they number in the hundreds) can be searched simultaneously. My Scrivener project files tend to around 60-100MB by the time a book is finished, most of that typed in by me.

Lots of room for conflict AND lots of conflict necessary to keep interest going that long!

I love using Maass' The Fire in Fiction to keep the ideas flowing for microtension - reviewers have commented positively.

The more different types of arcs you have in a story, the harder you have to work to keep details clear for the reader - not by reminding them over and over with summaries, but organically, like I heard stories from Mother. She never wrote anything down - wonderful memory - which then dementia stole, leaving only the fuzzy second-hand ones her five daughters remember. Her creative activity was painting, not words. But she didn't attach stories to her paintings, and there are no triggers there.