My selection of books to study conflict and suspense

Improve your writing while you read

Experience Writing is all about bringing you along on the roller-coaster of my writing life. Changing my focus from my writing life to yours means I need to let you in on my plans, so you can join me, right? To do that, I typed up my plan of action for studying conflict and suspense.

Plan of attack

I consulted my notes from several books on writing and laid out a plan of questions and exercises to explore while reading a selection of novels. I included identifying conflict in character, setting, dialogue, and story beats. Each section includes exercises to apply to our writing. If you would like to join me on my quest for knowledge, or are curious to see what I came up with, you can download my action plan.

Poll results show you like book reviews, so

For a quick primer on writing conflict and suspense, I recommend:

The ideas are clear and well explained with many useful examples and exercises. I like the idea of creating a personal actors stable to audition for your characters, but did not include it in my study plan as I didn’t see that helping me with my study of suspense. I created a different character conflict chart for our action plan.

Please let me know what you think. If we find the exercise satisfying and worthwhile, I can imagine creating this type of Read to Write action plan for many aspects of writing.

Don’t forget to tune in on Sunday for the first episode of The Misadventures of Moxie Sharpe. I’m excited to see what Moxie gets into. Oh, the suspense!