Young Writers Society

I've decided to participate in the Prewriting: Journal Making Challenge so, yeah, this is my journal.

I've decided to work on a story that I know hardly anything about. It has been in the back of my mind for a while, but I never really developed it at all. So what I have now is the barest little most insecure idea I've ever shared with someone. Normally they have got a lot more to them before I start talking about them. I just really love the concept for this story, and what better way to develop it then with the prewriting challenge?


This story is about a boy who I have yet to name. His best friend is his horse. The two live on a little piece of country land way out in the middle of nowhere. The boy's house is very small, but he has a large family, so he usually spends his time outside and has become somewhat of an introvert.
The basic idea is that in his real life he (and possibly his family too) are going through some sort of crisis. I haven't decided what it is yet (teehee). Every-other chapter will deal with that and his day-to-day life and how the crisis is messing with it and all that jazz.
The other chapters will have a more fantasy feel. At first (right before the crisis starts) he finds a horseshoe. It is relatively large, and has strange markings on it.
He also sees this fox. A beautiful silver eye with one blue eye and one brown eye. He is enchanted by the fox and desperately tries to find it again. He does see it a few more times.
As his problems arise in the more normal feeling chapters he discovers that the horseshoe works as a sort of portal (or a key to a portal, I haven't worked it out yet) to two other worlds.
The two worlds are both Utopian societies and they mirror each other most of the time. The biggest difference between the two worlds, one is perfect in the sense of everyone has what they want, everyone is beautiful, there is no poverty or illness, and that kind of thing, while the other is perfect in the sense that everyone is happy, everyone is willing to lend a hand to their neighbor, nobody is alone, everything will work out even when things are rough, and that kind of stuff.
The story follows the boy as he travels between worlds (with his horse) and slowly learns things in each world that relate to the crisis in his own world.
At the end it will hint that the horseshoe, fox, and two wolds might have been a dream, but that will be left unresolved.

I am a bit or an organizer. So rather then posting character sheets as I fill them out, I will just edit them all into this post.
As I think more on the characters I will fill out more of their form. For now I am just putting what I know.

So... what's the conflict for the story?

I get the fact there's a crisis in his life, but right now the story arc seems to be very much... predictable. There's no actual tension in the story, considering everything is about the crisis getting fixed. It reads more like a moral story right now, with the point ending in some kind of message and that's the sole reason for the plot to exist.

Which is fine if you're going for that.

But if you're not, I'd put priority #1 on conflict generation. Cause right now, there's nothing past a cool world concept and a mysterious fox to grab me.