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Tag Archives: conflict
Stock conflicts to make your conflicts richer
I’ve seen this technique a few times on television shows, and I’d love to think about how to apply it in my fiction.
My kids love the cartoon Phineas and Ferb. The main characters’ older sister, Candace, always tries to get her brothers in trouble for their crazy inventions. She is also 15 and majorly boy crazy, especially for a boy named Jeremy.
Whenever the writers need Candace to do something or go somewhere that she might not otherwise, all they have to do is bring Jeremy into it, even indirectly. Whether she’s shopping for a gift for him, trying to impress him or going to see him, he’s one sure way to motivate Candace.
Jeremy is also great for her internal conflict. She often has to choose between her two biggest goals—be with Jeremy or bust her brothers.
Another example I’ve noticed recently is in Psych. Shawn runs a psychic detective agency with help from his best friend, Gus. However, Gus has another full time job: he’s a pharmaceutical sales rep. His car—the only transportation they have—is a company car (which is comical in its own right). Gus’s job and using the company car are both stock conflicts in the series. If the writers need to add more conflict in the scene or between the main character and his best friend, Gus’s job is their go-to choice (and girls, when they’re both single).
Naturally, in a series (book or TV), you have more opportunities to develop and use these stock conflicts, but I think they can be useful in standalone novels—as long as you keep the conflict fresh.
What do you think? How have you used “stock conflicts” in your work?
What keeps you reading? Romance edition part 2
On Monday, we talked about the draw of uncertainty in romance. There needs to be an element of uncertainty or conflict between the hero and heroine of a romance for readers to be truly vested and interested in the outcome. Predictability is anathema to a story question.
But sometimes, there isn’t conflict between our leads. Sometimes, the romance between them blossoms and grows without too many problems. I think the potential problem here is obvious—even the description sounds boring.
When the course of true love actually does run smooth, we still need conflict. External conflict is good—but if the story is, at its heart, a romance (or possibly a romance hybrid, like romantic suspense), that external conflict really should impact the developing relationship in some way.
Rather than continuing to speak in the abstract, let’s get concrete. A story where Lucy meets Gary, they fall in love and live happily ever after doesn’t sound compelling. Monday, our example was of Lucy meeting Gary and neither of them could tell—and perhaps weren’t sure themselves—whether they would get together, or how the other felt about him/her.
Today, our example is more along the lines of Lucy meets Gary, and Gary is a cop investigating a murder. It’s possible to write a story where the external plot basically has nothing to do with Lucy and Gary’s relationship. I wouldn’t advise that if you’re trying to write a story with the romance as a main plot. Instead, search for ways for the external plot to intersect with the romance plot.
To my mind, there are two basic categories of this intersection: where the external plot pits the hero and heroine against one another, and where the external plot simply gets in the way of their relationship.
For an example of the external plot pitting the hero against the heroine, we’ll go back to Lucy and Officer Gary. Lucy and Gary meet, and they hit it off—until Lucy has information about Gary’s homicide case that she just can’t tell him. Kaye Dacus did this subtly—the police officer hero didn’t have to directly confront the heroine he was investigating—in Love Remains. I do it in at least one of my manuscripts—the heroine has information about the criminals the hero is tracking, but she’s trying to protect him from those criminals, so she steers him away from them at every opportunity.
Alternatively, you could have the external plot simply getting in the way of their relationship. Officer Gary’s murder case interrupts Lucy and Gary’s first date. He stands her up when questioning a witness takes too long. He has to prove his commitment to the relationship by finding a balance between his work life and Lucy. (This isn’t a great example, because that’s kind of life when you’re with a cop, and PS catching a murderer is pretty important, but you get the idea.)
Finally, another way to add a level of conflict to what would be a smooth-course romance—possibly as a subset of the second type of external conflict/love story intersection—is to forbid the romance. This one is a bit harder to do in a contemporary, but many historical settings have rigid rules of fraternization and marriage. However, we can borrow a contemporary example from Shakespeare—their families are enemies, or simply do not understand one another’s cultures. Another contemporary example might be having the hero or heroine already dating someone else, especially someone close to the “real” love interest (best friend, brother, roommate, etc.).
I use this technique in a pretty specialized way in one of my manuscripts: the hero is a priest—or at least the heroine believes he is. (And yes, this is the same MS I mentioned three paragraphs ago. Seriously—read the excerpt and it’ll make more sense.)
What do you think? How do you use external conflict (or like to see it used) to add conflict between the hero and heroine in a romance?
Photo by Paul Morgan
Posted in Technique
Tagged clues, conflict, conflict in romance, external conflict, reading, romance
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Enter late and exit early in dialogue
I’m not even going to pretend to point fingers. I’ve fallen into this trap myself. “Hey,” I think, “I’m good at dialogue. Dialogue makes scenes go faster. Dialogue is a great way to show conflict and characterize and keep things moving. We’re supposed to show not tell, right? And readers like dialogue. So I’m going to show the entire conversation.”
And two thirds of the conversation is the exact sort of boring warm up we talked about last week.
Just like we need to do in our overall stories and in our scenes, we need to enter a lot of dialogue late and leave early. Skip the greetings and the small talk, and get out of there before the conversation dies out.
I found one way to avoid this in Don’t Murder Your Mystery by Chris Roerden. I’ve mentioned it before:
Flat-out editing can help—especially for phone calls. (Eesh. I hate those!) Roerden uses the example of a phone call from a novel where the protagonist is in her car, realizing she needs to get a clue from her husband. She’s already thought about the context—when they heard it, what bit of information it is exactly—so why show that in a phone conversation? Indeed, after the words “she called him,” the author skips right to the husband’s answer: “‘Yeah, I’ve got it right here. . . ‘”
We can do this in other types of conversations as well—jump into the scene once the dialogue gets to the good part. Like Elmore Leonard, we want to leave the boring parts out!
What do you think? Do you try to enter late and exit early in dialogue? When would you not do this?
Photo by Trevor Devine
Setting as conflict
In my opinion, the best way to truly make setting a character is to have some conflict for the characters arising from the setting. It may sound specialized, but the setting probably provides opposition to characters’ goals in some form in almost any work of fiction.
In its most obvious form, setting can provide the main conflict of the story, as in disaster fiction. This use of setting always makes me think of movies like Twister, The Day After Tomorrow, or 2012.
The disaster genre uses setting very effectively on a macro level. A natural disaster—be it hurricane, tornado, earthquake, fire or flood—stands between our heroes and their goals. Often, the heroes’ goal is just staying alive, and, uh, dying really puts a damper on that.
Of course, natural disasters aren’t really characters. They may be the main antagonist in a story, but they’re still no villain. However, we have to establish that the disaster is truly a threat, if not evil (just like with human antagonists). And (also just like with human antagonists), the best way to do that is to show the antagonist in action: someone getting caught by the disaster, or its after-effects or foreshadowing.
Showing the natural disaster’s capabilities can be one form of the other end of the spectrum, a scene-level conflict arising from the setting. This type of setting-conflict is more common, and probably appears in almost any book. It can be something as simple as a traffic jam that makes our characters late for the big meeting.
Sometimes I find myself relying on setting for little conflict like this maybe a little too much, however. A traffic jam or two might not push our readers past their capacity for the suspension of disbelief, but if every time the star-crossed lovers are supposed to meet, the Interstate suddenly backs up, maybe the state DOT should get involved.
What do you think? Do you try to use setting to create conflict? What’s your favorite setting-conflict (that you’ve seen or created)?
Photo by Adam Stanhope
Tension fix: Dumpy dialogue
This is very related to yesterday’s point on getting information in there while keeping the tension. Sometimes the dialogue that’s used to convey that information is losing readers and we can’t find any secret agent monkeys or secret bad guys to help out. (And sometimes the dialogue is just dull. Fix that first, and then see if the scene needs more tension.) Now what?
I’ll turn the time over to two of the books I’ve been reading for this series: Don’t Murder Your Mystery by Chris Roerden and Revision And Self-Editing by James Scott Bell.
Bell can start us off with a point we’ve touched on: “Your Lead should be dealing with change, threat, or challenge from the get-go. At the very least, whenever she is in dialogue with another character, that inner tension is present” (97). Bringing out the inner conflicts can add subtext to even the dullest small talk. (But please, make sure that the small talk isn’t so small that it can’t support subtext 
.)
Roerden adds several techniques specifically for increasing tension in dialogue, since mysteries may require a lot of talky investigation. (And really, how many people would poison a PI’s potato chips?) She mentions bypass dialogue, borrowed conflict, simulated disagreement and flat-out editing (179-184).
Bypass dialogue is when two characters speak but don’t communicate. Naturally, this can be boring, but it can also be used to increase tension: make sure that the speakers have opposing agendas and different priorities, even if they’re friends. (“Transforming allies into temporary adversaries not only increases tension but also builds the reader’s empathy with your protagonist . . .” [180]).
You can also borrow conflict from a background source (a bit like yesterday’s fix). Roerden uses an example from a novel, a reporter interviewing a couple with a tennis game on TV in the background. When she asks about the victim, the husband suddenly swears. The reporter thinks she’s onto something—but he’s just upset about the game.
Simulated disagreement is a bit more tricky—obviously, the name refers to when two characters seem to disagree without actually doing so. In the example Roerden cites, two female characters are trying to relate a creepy occurrence (which we’ve already seen dramatized) to a male third character. He has no real reason to disbelieve or oppose them, but he repeatedly interrupts them (increasing the tension) with stories of his own. One of the women (his wife), gets on his case for interrupting, further heightening the tension.
Finally, flat-out editing can help—especially for phone calls. (Eesh. I hate those!) Roerden uses the example of a phone call from a novel where the protagonist is in her car, realizing she needs to get a clue from her husband. She’s already thought about the context—when they heard it, what bit of information it is exactly—so why show that in a phone conversation? Indeed, after the words “she called him,” the author skips right to the husband’s answer: “‘Yeah, I’ve got it right here. . . ‘”
CLOSING CAUTION: Overusing any technique or tension fix can be gimmicky or hackneyed—and can actually undercut the tension. Mix up your tension techniques to keep your readers reading without getting bored.
What do you think? Any good examples of the above fixes? Any other tension fixes? (Next week, we’ll look at suspense fixes, so let me know if there’s another tension fix you’ve used successfully—and if you’d like to guest post about it, just let me know!)
Photo credits: fraying rope—Govind Chakravarti; acorn hanging by a thread—Karen Dorsett
Wrapping up the suspense: Act III
Eventually, all suspense and tension must be released—since anticipation is the source of suspense and tension, it’s probably not fair to readers not to eventually satisfy that anticipation. Naturally, this will happen to some extent throughout the story as we build up anticipation for events along the way. But the overarching suspense of the story reaches its ultimate payoff in the last part of the story, in the final act.
In fact, Raymond Obstfeld refers to Act III as The Payoff in Fiction First Aid. Here, we have to satisfy all that suspense we’ve worked so hard to build—and that payoff had better be commensurate with the anticipation, or our readers will feel cheated.
Obstfeld says, “The key to a good payoff is not to give the reader what you think they want” (55). That’s not to say that the hero and heroine shouldn’t get together in a romance (they should), or that the hero can’t catch the villain in a thriller (he should). It does mean that giving the reader exactly what you promised all along and only that is not enough to reward the suspense you’ve created for that goal.
This is a common reason why we don’t like the way a book ends. I read a book last year where the entire book was about the heroine learning about others and herself—but at the end, she went back and did the same thing she’d been planning to all along (and it was rushed). All along, I was promised some revelatory, life-changing experience, but in the end, the character didn’t change.
After spending hundreds of pages with these characters being thwarted in their quests, yes, they have to see some measure of success in the end (unless this is a tragedy, I guess). But that hard-won success probably shouldn’t just be the exact thing they’ve looked for all along. Take Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy is reluctantly dragged into looking for the Holy Grail, which he doesn’t really believe exists. What does he find in the end? (Yeah, he finds the grail—but is that all?)
A good payoff is both unexpected in some way and commensurate with the suspense the author has created.
What do you think? How else do we see suspense in Act III?
Photo and baking credit: Heartlover1717
Posted in Technique
Tagged conflict, plot structure, raymond obstfeld, story structure, structure, surprise, suspense, tension
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Keeping the suspense in the middle of your structure
Oh, the sagging middle. The bane of most Americans’ existence. And also tough for writers .
The sagging middle is where we can start to feel a little lost. Even if we’ve done a good job establishing conflicts and the stakes in the first part of the story, sometimes the middle has us feeling like we’re running in circles or spinning our wheels. Are our characters making progress, or are all these obstacles we put in their way (because you are putting obstacles in their way, right?) starting to make them wander aimlessly?
In Fiction First Aid, Raymond Obstfeld acknowledges that this part of the book is a challenge—as we try to make the story more difficult for the characters, it’s often more difficult for us.
But he also offers a structural solution. He explains that Act II is The Complication where we “increase [the] suspense by complicating [the] plot through increasing stakes and/or decreasing [the] ability of [the] character to achieve [his/her] goal.”
So in Act I, we established the stakes—whether the character will lose his job or let a killer go free if the hero fails. In Act II, we increase the negative consequences of failure—the character will go to jail or the killer will go on a rampage if the hero fails.
Also, we can “inhibit [the characters'] ability to get what they want.” The guy clinging to his job tries to do something to impress his boss, but it backfires and ruins a major project. The hero after a killer gets suspended from the force/agency/whatever after his drive takes him just a little too far.
Interestingly, many plotting methods and structures have specific events designed to accomplish these things. In Larry Brooks’s Story Structure, for example, Act II contains two “pinch points” that are designed to raise the stakes by showing us just how bad the villain is. Even the Mid-Point is designed to help with this, showing the hero more to the story, changing the way he views the world.
Simply establishing suspense in Act I isn’t enough. We have to build on it in Act II to keep our readers reading—and hooked.
What do you think? What other ways can we increase the suspense and keep the tension high in Act II?
Photo credit: Todd Stadler
Posted in Technique
Tagged conflict, plot structure, raymond obstfeld, story structure, structure, surprise, suspense, tension
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Conflict and suspense in structure: Act I
Yesterday we established that conflict is the source of suspense and tension, and what gives meaning to surprise. Combined with structure, we can create a plot with enough suspense and tension to keep our readers engaged.
In Raymond Obstfeld’s Fiction First Aid, he looks at the intersection of conflict, suspense and plot, taking it act by act in the three-act structure. This week, we’ll take a look at his structure for creating suspense.
Obstfeld defines suspense creation as “a series of . . . promise-payoff scenes.” In act I, the setup, we establish the conflicts and the stakes to create suspense. Says Obstfeld:
- Plot conflict. This focuses on what the characters are pursuing. It could be a romantic relationship, money, a new job, an education—anything they think will make them happier.
- Character conflict. This focuses on the internal/emotional problems that get in the way of the characters achieving what they think will make them happier. In fact, this conflict may involve the characters pursuing the wrong goal, one that the reader realizes won’t make them happier.
- Stakes. This focuses on the intensity with which the plot conflict affects the characters.
Now I’ll turn it over to you. How do these elements work to create suspense in the first quarter of a book?
Photo credit: Damon Brown
Posted in Technique
Tagged conflict, plot structure, raymond obstfeld, story structure, structure, surprise, suspense, tension
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