I've been working my way through the Big Red Book (BRB) that supports the Open University's A215 Creative Writing course. I've just got to the Chapter on structure and it has made me think about how to get tension and conflict into my stories. In particular I was thinking about how to write the sort of scenes that make you want to keep on reading and keep people up at night to see what happens next. I also found this writing resource post on tension vs conflict in writing. The thought process that these triggered reminded me of an incident from my late teens. Back in July 1991 I spent a couple of weeks on the Isle of Lewis with my UOTC on annual camp. One night we were sent out on an orienteering exercise in the dark (it wasn't…
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