The Proper Care and Feeding of Conflict

Erin Shakespear

 

"The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict and conflict."

                                                   -James Frey

Conflict. Oy...we need a lot of the stuff, right? In our books anyways...in my living room, between the wee natives, not so much.

But how do we make conflict? How do we stuff enough into our stories to turn them into Must-Be-Read-Until-The-Crack-Of-Dawn page turners?

I'm glad you asked! I'll just turn to my notes from a lecture Patti Gauch gave. Yep, I know, I'm talking about her again. I tell you, she's brilliant. And then I'll sprinkle in some wisdom from other awesome people.

The Proper Care & Feeding of Conflict

#1: Start in a hole. 

 

What does you character want? Put them as far away from this as possible. Make 'em suffer! It's for their good. Give them a large dose of internal conflict. They want something so very very badly. It's the thing they want most in the world, but they are their biggest obstruction. Somehow they are standing in their way. Or maybe someone else is. Someone else is keeping them from getting this Great and Grand Thing They Need. Just make it big and make it good. 

#2: Dual Desires 

Okay this is just an awesome idea. Dual desires? I'd never thought about this before until I read Daisy Carter's blog post about conflict. What if your character wants two equally good things? Or one is good and one is not so good, but he just can't choose? Two different love interest? Yep. that would definitely add some major conflict. 

The story...must be a conflict, and specifically, a conflict between the forces of good and evil within a single person. - Maxwell Anderson

#3: Load It Up


You could give your character one conflict. But why not throw in all three? A conflict internally, something he wants desperately, a conflict between those around him, with a friend or family member and a conflict within his environment. Oooooh, that would be a whole lotta conflict. 

#4: Set the Stage

 

Let your atmosphere reflect your main tension. Throw in some mist, creaking doors, play with the lighting. Be the stage director. Set your stage.

#5: Pacing

Slow down when you're about to have a big moment. Let your character take time to notice the smells around him, the sounds (back to the creaking), what the floor feels like against his bare feet. Draw out the anticipation. Make us feeeeeeeeel the conflict.

"If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster." -Gustav Mahler

#6: Fear

When you're watching a scary movie and someone says, "Hey, I know I should stay in the house, with the light and the friends surrounding me because there's that risk of the crazy masked murderer attacking people with a cheese grater and a spoon, but I think I heard a strange noise out there. Yeah, sounded kind of like someone scraping something against metal, almost like a grating sound. I'm going to go investigate. But I'll take this baseball bat with me and I'm sure I'll be fine. Yep, I'll be right back."

 

Mmmmhmmmm, yeah...buh-bye now. 

We sit on the edge of our seats wishing the person would stay in the house and hoping they'll actually make it back safe and sound. Or that they would have at least put on the protective rubber suit hanging beside the door. But there's no hope for that guy. Nope, he's done for.

Make your reader want to shout, "Don't go!" or "Don't do that!"

Fear, yep it works, right?  

#7: Give your character a secret

I love secrets. Give your character a good and juicy secret he tries desperately to keep from everyone else. Make him hold onto it. Make it eat him up. Make him go to extreme measures to keep that secret hidden. Or maybe someone finds out. And of course...it's the wrong someone, right?

Thing about your own secrets or your friend's or your spouse's. Think about what your character faults are. Does he try to keep them hidden? Or something about his past? Maybe he did something wrong. Maybe he made a wrong choice. And now he doesn't want those he cares about to know. You can learn a lot about people by the things they try to keep hidden.

And we're all hiding something.

#8: Hit "em where it hurts

At Writing for Charity on Saturday, Jennifer Nielsen talked about how we need to know what the worst thing that can happen to our characters is. We don't need to make it happen, but we need to know what it is. 

But if you're looking for more conflict, maybe it needs to happen. What is the most dreadful and horrible thing that could  happen to your character? What would they do if it happened? Or maybe it almost happens. Oh, the horrible anticipation of watching The Worst Thing Ever coming towards your beloved character. Yep, that will definitely keep us turning the pages.

Or maybe it's just something really really bad. You might not want to completely ruin your character's life. Either way, make it worse, make your character truly suffer. Take away what they want and then dangle it in front of them like a carrot.

 

#9: Dialogue


Use the dialogue to increase the tension between your characters. What can your characters say to make the conflict greater? Do they lie? Does your main character believe something false he's told? Or maybe your characters is threatened. Or maybe your character swears revenge on the Spoony Cheese Grater (the mass murderer of doom).

#10: Cliffhangers


Ooooooh, I love a delicious cliffhanger. Seriously, this is my very favorite part of writing a chapter. I love coming up with a massive cliffhanger which (I hope) makes the reader's mind explode with questions. Try it out! How can you end your chapter so the reader has to read "just one more"?

#11: Mystery


Can you include a good mystery? Something that keeps your characters wondering? Fill your character's heart (and the reader's) with fear and confusion. Drop clues which only create more and more questions in their minds.


There you have it. Stuff your manuscript will all of that and you'll surely have enough conflict.

"Turn the screws! Blow up the balloon! MAKE IT WORSE!" Patricia Lee Gauch

How do you add conflict to your stories? Do you have a stellar surefire way to throw your character's lives into peril and make us want to keep reading about them?

Glueing It All Together

By Julie Daines

An element in story crafting that I frequently find missing is cohesion. Each story needs a few elements that bind it all together and carry the protagonist--and the reader--through to the end.

For some reason, I find that adventure type books struggle the most with this problem. Often, the main character sets off on the adventure, but it feels more like they are strolling through the zoo. They wander along the hero's path, going from one interesting animal (scene) to the next. It feels like a series of random events that happen to the main character.

So the question is, how do we keep our story unified?

There are many ways, but here are a few to get you thinking:

The Main Character's Goals Must Be the Driving Force: Whatever it is that the main character wants, that should be what influences all their choices and actions.

In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's goal is to go home. It is what motivates everything she does. In The Hunger Games, Katniss wants to protect her sister Prim. That is why she volunteers for the games, and that is why she wants to win the games, so Prim is not left alone with a wacky mother.

This is perhaps the most important element in cohesion. If your main character's object of desire (goal) is not present throughout the story, the reader will loose interest. Why is he/she doing this? If we don't know, we don't care.


The Threat of the Villain: Keep the threat of the villain ever present and constantly hanging over the hero's head.

JK Rowling did a great job with this throughout SEVEN Harry Potter novels, always upping the stakes with each one. Never once do we forget He Who Must Not Be Named lurking in the back of Harry's mind. And, every other "mini-villain" Harry faces ties back to Voldemort in some way, such as Draco Malfoy and Professor Umbrage.

And not only should the villain be always present, but the stakes. What happens if the villain wins?!


Keep the Main Conflict Front and Center: This is good for books that are not adventure stories and don't have a specific "villain," like Twilight. Not much happens in the story, but the conflict is always there, hanging over Bella's head--forbidden love, is he or is he not going to eat her.

These are only three. What other elements of cohesion can you think of?

Julie Daines
www.juliedaines.blogspot.com

Non-character Antagonists and Conflict

by Deren Hansen

Commenting on last week's post about Antagonists and the Source of Conflict, Julie Daines said, "This is great information. But not all stories have an actual antagonist character. I'd love to hear what you have to say about conflict that isn't generated by an antagonist but rather comes from inner conflict or from the environment or whatever"

Being completely incapable of not responding when someone says they'd love to hear what I have to say, and guilty of assuming that Julie was speaking for everybody, I decided I should expand on the topic here.

Julie has highlighted the distinction between antagonists and the source of conflict by pointing out that some stories don't (or can't) embody the forces working in opposition to the protagonist in a single character. Even so, those stories still must have a source of conflict, whether interior or exterior.

If you ask writers about kinds of stories you'll likely get a variation on the classic triumvirate of man vs. self, man vs. man, and man vs. nature. I like to add a few more gradations to the sources of conflict:

• Self - Internal demons, conflicting needs or desires, psychological dissonance
• People - Lovers, family, friends (i.e., people with whom the protagonist has more than casual relationships)
• Society - Organizations, clubs, cabals, conspiracies, churches, companies, bureaucracies, armies, parties, governments, movements, etc.
• Nature - A particular feature of the natural world: animals, mountains, oceans, storms, droughts, etc.
• Universe/God - The external world in general

What's convenient about having an antagonist as a character is that it's easier to give our protagonists the moral high ground if the conflict is forced upon them by the bad guy.

But there's a deeper reason that the conflict in the vast majority of stories occurs at the level of people and society: conflict is fundamentally interpersonal.

Before you accuse me of forgetting the question, let me explain: in the same vein as the philosophic question about trees falling in the forest, there are no stories about the world that existed before people. It's not that things didn't happen--indeed, if contemporary CGI-rich dinosaur documentaries are to be believed, there was plenty of red-in-tooth-and-claw conflict--it's that there was no one around to attribute significance to the actors and events. Was it good or bad that the tyrannosaurus took out the ailing duckbill?

Often, scarcity is the source of conflict. A great many sports, for example, depend on the fact that there are two teams and only one ball. But the significance of the conflict depends upon the meaning we assign to it.

"Okay," you say, "what about a man trying to conquer a mountain?"

It all depends on why he's trying to conquer the mountain. If he's trying to get to the other side to find the cure for the fever in his village, then it's a heroic conflict. If he's trying to get to the other side to enslave the village there, then it's a very different sort of conflict. 

Put another way, regardless of the source of conflict, the first thing readers want to know is, "Why should we care?" Most people find it very difficult to care about anything unless they can do so in personal terms. When another person or persons oppose the protagonist, readers immediately recognize the personal stakes. When the source of conflict is non-personal--either internal or external--you must show why that conflict matters to your protagonist and, by extension, your readers.


Deren blogs daily at The Laws of Making.

Antagonists and the Source of Conflict

by Deren Hansen

When we talk about the fundamentals of writing, we often juxtapose protagonist and antagonist without any separate consideration of the source of conflict. Because the antagonist is often the source of conflict, particularly in realistic stories, this gloss is fine. But other times, the antagonist is motivated to oppose the protagonist by an external source of conflict.

It helps to be clear on the distinction between the antagonist and the source of conflict, and to understand the structural implications for stories where they are one and the same, and stories where they are distinct.

The antagonist opposes the protagonist by acting against him or her. In order to show and understand the conflict that drives the story, the antagonist must be introduced at about the same time as the protagonist.

The source of conflict is the person or agency that causes the antagonist to act against the protagonist, either directly through some sort of motivation (the bad guy sends his henchmen), or indirectly by creating the conditions that force the protagonist and the antagonist to compete (they must fight to the death in the arena).

Emperor Palpatine (Wikipedia)

For example, in a fairy tale, the minion sent out to slay the child of destiny and who tries but fails during the course of the book is an antagonist, while the evil queen who sent the minion is the source of conflict. Often the climax includes the revelation that the minion, whom we thought was pretty bad, is nothing compared to the queen.

You might argue that the source of conflict is the ultimate antagonist because many stories end only when the protagonist finally manages to destroy the source of conflict. If you want to think in terms of major and minor antagonists, that's fine.

But it's important to be clear on the distinction between the character who actively opposes your protagonists and the reason that character opposes the protagonist. The Emperor Palpatine was the source of conflict and Star Wars didn't end until he was destroyed, but it was Darth Vader who most actively opposed Luke and Han.



Deren blogs daily at The Laws of Making.