It’s been more than a week since I’ve written here. So busy, so lazy, so uninspired.

I’m down to the last three chapters in China Tour. This is the point where the action should get fast and furious, the conflict be greatest, the hero become the hero, and then have a quick cool-down to the end of the book.

Randy Ingermansson, a novelist best known for creating a system of novel writing called the Snowflake Method, discusses how to begin a book. In the opening, he says, introduce your main character and plunge him/her into conflict. Then, as the book goes on, raise the stakes in the conflict. Make it harder to achieve aims while at the same time make the consequences of failing to achieve aims more disastrous.

This is what the American reader wants. Whether it’s the same in other countries I don’t know. But books that follow this “formula” seem to be the ones that sell better. In real estate it’s location, location, location. In novel writing it’s conflict, conflict, conflict.

The conflict could be physical danger, emotional turmoil, or just about anything. Frank Peretti’s early and best known novels were about spiritual conflict.

I’ve read some novels, however, that were so full of conflict I was tired of it half way through. One book that struck me this way was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I need to first confess that I haven’t read the full book yet. I read some kind of abridgement to it, and listened to an audio abridgement, and read some of the book. Tolkien’s writing style isn’t my favorite, and I’ve had trouble getting back to it, and back to The Lord of the Ring trilogy, which I also started and didn’t finish.

In the abridgement, Bilbo never seemed to get a breath to just be a hobbit. I was tired for his sake by the time he got to the forest elves (I think I’m remembering that correctly). I would have liked a little more balance between conflict and resting. Oh, well, that may be just me. The popularity of the book indicates millions of readers don’t agree with me.

In China Tour, one of the couples has reached Beijing and the other will in the next chapter. The remaining two aims, not necessarily in agreement with each other, is to see the Bibles delivered to the persecuted Chinese Christian, and to make contact with the Chinese dissident and put him in CIA custody for extraction from the country. That was supposed to have happened in a rural province in the south, over the border to Vietnam, but the tourist couple got in the way of the spy couple, and the plans got blasted to smithereens.

I have the means of extraction figured out, the location, and how the principles will achieve it. I don’t know if the conflict is high enough or not. I’ll know that tomorrow or Sunday when I actually write it. I know for sure that I haven’t raise the stakes of failure sufficiently. Just this morning, however, I thought of a way to do that. It will happen in a chapter already written, and I’ll catch it on the first round of edits.

So, for the next three writing days I will be trying to create conflict. A strange position for a lover of peace to be in. Wish me luck.