One of the commonly repeated bits of writing advice is to write the book you want to read. You’ll be reading it quite a bit, so you’d better like it, and the passion and joy you bring to it will come out to the reader. The problem comes when the book you want to read isn’t a book most other people would want to read.

I realized that while looking at the book I’m currently drafting. I realized I was writing a book with almost no conflict. It was about reasonable people doing reasonable things in an interesting place. They only had minor disagreements, and people would hear conflicting views and say, “That makes sense, you’re right.” The action/danger involved thinking they were being followed, then either easily losing the tail or being wrong about being followed.

That is kind of what I want to read right now. I’d be fine with interesting people exploring an interesting place, with no opposing force to deal with. I guess I’d be better off reading travelogues or memoirs, but even those tend to have conflict. But I have to admit that what I was writing was boring even to me. This is supposed to be an adventure story. The conflict is human-scaled, in that the bad guys are people, not Dark Lords commanding vast armies of orcs, but it’s still a kingdom-level conflict, and on the interpersonal level there are disagreements over what to do about it. Or there should be. There will be, once I finish rewriting the scenes so they aren’t merely, “That makes sense, you’re right.”

I’m having to dig deeper to find the story here instead of skimming the surface, and it’s going to make the book better, but it’s really challenging for me. I’m having to take a lot of breaks, the way I sometimes have to do if a book I’m reading gets too intense. That may explain this week’s curtain obsession.

Mind you, I’m not talking about intense conflict, even with the revision. There are more intense and scary children’s books.

I guess it’s just that the world is so tense right now that I want to escape. There are people who turn to genres like horror in times like this to provide some sense of catharsis, and then there are people like me who want to hide in a soft, cozy safe space and avoid the outside world’s conflicts.

This is a book that will build from seeming to be nice to getting more intense, so I’m getting the chance to ease into it by letting the characters disagree with each other, and I’m showing the bad guys as an actual threat. I’m glad I caught this in the first half of the book rather than getting to the climactic confrontation with the villain and having him say, “That makes sense, you’re right. I’m sorry, I was wrong.”

Though, these days that’s more of a fantasy scenario than the armies of orcs.