Writing...Just because!

Jack Scott, author and publisher, Springtime Books This week I'm so thrilled to welcome Jack Scott to Writing...Just Because to share his author journey and a few words of advice. Jack is the author of   Turkey Street - Jack and Liam move to Bodrum , t he sequel to the best-selling memoir Perking the Pansies - Jack and Liam move to Turkey . Here's a little taster of Turkey Street... Six months into their Turkish affair, Jack and Liam, a gay couple from London, took lodgings in the oldest ward of Bodrum Town. If they wanted to shy away from the curtain-twitchers, they couldn’t have chosen a worse position. Their terrace overlooked Turkey Street like the balcony of Buckingham Palace and the middle-aged infidels stuck out like a couple of drunks at a temperance meeting. Against all the odds, the boys from the Smoke were welcomed into the fold by a feisty mix of eccentric locals and a select group of trailblazing expats, irresistible ladies with racy pasts and pluck...

At the heart of every story is tension. Building conflict, internal and external and keeping what your protagonist desires just out of reach, is the key to establishing the rising tension that readers are expecting, while injecting the unexpected. I remember writing a scene in my latest novel, Deep Deceit , where tension was building between two characters, conflict was palpable and as I wrote it I still didn't really know where it was going but I could feel the anxiety building in myself! When the scene climaxed, even I was shocked at what happened. The result of that scene then continued to escalate the overall tension leading to the ultimate climax of the story. No matter what type of structure you follow, whether you're a plotter or pantser (I fall somewhere in the middle), no matter how many chapters and scenes, all stories have: An introduction to your characters A situation, brought in early on, that creates a central conflict for the main character A...