Monday, January 11, 2016

The Beating Heart of Story

by Linda Rodriguez

We’re surrounded by conflict. The airwaves and internet are full of reports of heated and often violent conflicts in our own neighborhoods, country, and in countries around the world. In our own lives, more often than we’d wish, we, too, are faced with conflict. So it may be a natural impulse on a writer’s part to avoid conflict on the page, part of a learned response. However, it’s almost always a mistake.

Conflict is the beating heart of story. It’s the engine for our narratives. When we make things easy and peaceful for our characters, we make the book boring for our readers. Boring means they close the book and put it down, and it’s unlikely they’ll ever pick it up again, nor will they buy or check out another of our books. Conflict is what drives our characters and our narratives forward and keeps our readers turning the pages.

As writers, we can make our background setting come to life on the page and write beautifully crafted sentences about interesting people, but if nothing is happening, the book goes nowhere. Our dialogue can be excellent and realistic, but if our people never disagree about anything or never have any subtext contradicting the literal words they’re saying, we’ll lose the reader’s interest.

I would extend what I said about the futility of well-crafted background setting, style, and dialogue without conflict to the writing of realistic characters that also come alive on the page, but if our characters were truly well-realized, we’d have conflict in our book to make the whole thing come alive. Conflict, along with story, arises from character. More precisely, it arises from the rubbing of characters against each other, this one’s need or desire clashing with that one’s fear or obsession.

Story and conflict are inextricably linked. Someone wants or needs something, and someone (or something) else doesn’t want her to have it or wants the same thing for himself instead. The first person takes steps to obtain what she wants, and at each turn, her opponent or someone (or something) else makes it impossible for her to succeed. But she keeps trying, even when it begins to look impossible. In the end, she wins through and obtains her desire (perhaps only to realize it wasn’t worth what she did to win it), or she fails through some fatal flaw in her or in the system, or she comes to realize that she’s been blind and she really wanted and needed something else all the time.

Without those conflicts, those obstacles the protagonist had to overcome, there would have been no story. If she wants a promotion and the boss gives it to her right away, if she wants the hero and he asks her to marry him right away, if she wants to find out who murdered her friend and bring that murderer to justice and he confesses and is arrested right away, there’s no reason for us to keep reading her story.


The rougher we make it for our characters, the better our readers like it. Not because they’re sadists or they don’t like our characters, but because they want to see that conflict—they want to see our characters struggle and overcome the odds. So pile on the troubles. Make sure every toss of the dice goes against your protagonist. Never make it easy for him. Your readers will love you for it. Save your pacifism and gentleness and nonconfrontational behavior and conflict resolution training for your own life. You need it. Your characters don’t.

16 comments:

  1. Great post. I remember learning early on that your characters have to want something in a scene, even if it's only a cup of coffee, and that want has to be thwarted in some way to create conflict or tension. It's the conflict that keeps us turning the pages.

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  2. Linda, you are so right about that. I bought a book from an author who was sitting next to me at a writers event last spring. I finally started it, and by the third very short chapter, I put it aside because not only was there no conflict or even the suggestion of one, the prose was flat and you never got a real feel for the protagonist except that he was a very boring person. The author is an engineer and so was the protagonist. I wonder if that was the problem.

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  3. Kait, that's so true. Scene by scene, those conflicts, large and small, drive that story along.

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  4. Gloria, it sounds as if your engineer was simply an amateur writer. Most of my students and clients are quite accomplished writers with very professional attitudes (thank heavens, or I'd never enjoy working with them), but it's often the wellsprings of story that are lacking for them. They can be skillful at description and background, at dialogues and slipping in necessary bits of exposition without infodumps, and their prose can be smooth and clear, but their stories are still dead on the ground because there's nothing to drive that story along.

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  5. Rodriguez's rules: 1. use conflict

    I keep a list pasted in my "everything except the grocery list" notebook.

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  6. Ha ha!Right, Margaret. One of my top students.

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  7. Thanks for the reminder. Sometimes I slip into "stories" that have little or no conflict--and thank goodness my writing critique group points it out to me. "Great character study, but what happens to her?"

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  8. When I find I've come up light on conflict, KM, I always know I haven't gone deeply enough into the characters. I go back into them, and always they show me the parts that will clash with other characters to create conflict, and we're off and running.

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  9. I'm hanging this over my desk, Linda. Whenever I start to think of my characters as real people (and want them to do what rational, sensible real people do) I think of the moment in that great 80s TV show, Dynasty, when sweet Krystle and scheming Alexis brawl in the grand foyer of Krystle's mansion. Ridiculous? Yes. Memorable. Yes! We want memorable, right?

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  10. Or, Shari, just think of the people in your life--many if it's like mine--who always look for someone to blame for everything first or who are always sure everyone's operating on a secret agenda that's not to their benefit, etc. Or the folks who perceive everything as an attack and hit back first. Then, even your rational, sensible characters can end up battling, whether they want to or not.

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  11. Your comments are right on target.

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  12. Thanks, Warren. I'm glad you found them helpful.

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  13. Thanks, Linda, (my former teacher) for such a great post. Your article really gets to the heart of the matter and I'm saving it for reference as I work on my next novel.

    All the best to you and Happy New Year!

    Jenny

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  14. Happy New Year, Jenny! I hope all is going well with your writing and your life.

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