main characters and their conflicts

weekly story work exercise

The following post is a Story Work exercise that paid subscribers receive every Sunday night at 8 pm et. If you are interested in receiving this weekly flow of self-reflection ideas for your writing practice, plus access to our monthly group journaling session, The Practice, consider becoming a paid subscriber. 

---

Photo by Alvin Balemesa on Unsplash

The weekly Story Work topics cover universal life themes, with references from literature, philosophy, science, and spirituality; offering perspectives that spark ideas for personal growth and creative expression. If you are just joining us, our current theme is The Art of Conflict which presents many layers for us to explore for healing and storytelling. To recap, so far we’ve covered two exercises:

• the art of conflict: six questions to ask yourself when working through a personal issue in your journal, or when building the story arc for a piece of creative writing. (If you’re not familiar with story arc, it is how a creative writer shows the way a character changed in a story. Story arc is also a tool for therapeutic writing to heal from emotional pain and trauma. According to research, the first characteristic of a healing narrative is that it creates an arc of life events—what happened, how you felt about it then, and how you feel about it now.)

• making the personal universal: a tool to create a road map that turns your specific story into something universal. this formula can be a pre-writing or post-writing tool that helps you get to the heart of what your story is about.

Remember that even if you have no intention of ever sharing your writing, Story Work exercises support your ability to discover the life lessons, inner conflicts, and intimate transformations that are hiding in the details of your life experiences. In other words, it helps you to move beyond venting and brain dumping in your journal to assigning meaning to your experiences, and shaping stories that support your healing and growth.

This week, we will look at four types of conflict in creative writing and use them to generate ideas for writing about our lives.