In this week's episode, we take a look at four different types of story conflict, and explore three different ways to add them to your stories. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 222 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October the 11th, 2024 and today we are discussing four kinds of story conflict and three ways you can bring conflict into your books. Before we get into that, we will have an update on my current writing and audiobook projects and then do Question of the Week. The good news is that I am done with the first pass of editing on Ghost in the Tombs and I'm ready to start on the second. This is Episode 222 and if all goes well, I think Ghost in the Tombs will be out shortly around the time Episode 223 comes out. So second-half of October, we're on track for that. I am 28,000 words into Cloak of Illusion and that will be my main project once Ghost in the Tombs is published. I'm also 8,000 words into Orc Hoard, the fourth Rivah book, and that'll be the main project once the Cloak of Illusion is done. In audiobook news, Shield of Darkness is now out. You can get on Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Chirp, Kobo, Payhip, and all the other major audiobook stores. That is excellently narrated by Brad Wills. Recording is underway for Cloak of Spears and that should hopefully be out before the end of the year. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects. 00:01:22 Question of the Week Let's move on to the Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's question: if you listen to audiobooks, where do you listen to them? While cooking or driving, commuting, or perhaps walking? The inspiration for this question was that I was looking at some old sales spreadsheets from 2020 (that was a fun year, wasn't it?) and I was sure the start of COVID was going to wipe out the audiobook market because a lot of commuting was temporarily going away. Except this turned out not to be the case, and audiobook sales overall actually went up during COVID. So clearly I was wrong about how most audiobook listening took place while commuting. We had a few answers to this question. David said: Mostly while I'm home prepping and eating a meal, sometimes I'm in my vehicle enjoying a coffee while I drive somewhere. Sometimes when I go out to eat by myself, I'll listen on headphones. So it’s when my hands are otherwise busy and it beats listening to music or TV. JLH says: I pretty much only listen to audiobooks while driving. While home, I prefer to read. I'll listen to music when I'm at the gym. Tom says: Anywhere and everywhere. Driving car and tractor, at work, when walking (single earpiece only), and when at the gym. MW says: Usually while driving. I prefer reading and drawing to listening, but those aren't an option when driving my car, so a podcast is usually it. For myself, these days I usually listen to audiobooks when making long road trips by myself where I don't need the GPS to navigate. That's because if I'm going someplace I've never been before and need the GPS to navigate, it is highly distracting to have the audiobook and the GPS cutting back and forth between each other while you’re trying to figure out where you're going. That said, long drives to places where I know I'm going happen less than it did, so I generally listen to audiobooks less than I than I did before COVID. That said, in 2023 through 2024 I listened to the new audiobooks Andy Serkis recorded for the Lord of the Rings and was blown away by how good they were. Definitely recommended. So that is Question of the Week. 00:03:21 Main Topic of the Week: Story Conflicts So now on to this week's main topic: four types of story conflict and three ways you can add those conflicts to your story. So as we all know and as I've mentioned many times before on this podcast and on my blog, a story is nothing without conflict. Conflict is what drives the story. There's a story that when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien probably would have wound up with a 1200 page description of a Hobbit dinner party if C.S. Lewis hadn’t kind of gently urged him to add more conflict and have things happen to the story. I'm not entirely sure if that's true or not, but the point is quite valid that if you want to have an interesting story, you need a conflict. You need the characters to act and respond to that conflict, and that will help drive your story. Most stories also have more than one type of conflict. You can have internal conflict and external conflict and different kinds of internal versus external conflicts. For example, my novel Half-Elven Thief contains three of the four types of conflict we will discuss. I will mention those when I get to them. So let's look at four classic types of story conflict. #1: Person versus internal conflicts. What does that mean? That means the ...
