Read Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense Online
Authors: James Scott Bell
Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (11 page)
OPENING WITH CONFLICT
W
riting does not feel the same from day to day. Sometimes you are in the flow of creative discovery and the words seem to pour out effortlessly. Other times it’s like you’re playing tennis in the La Brea Tar Pits. Regardless of your “flow state” or the place you are in the novel, there is one unifying theme: conflict.
Alfred Hitchcock said that a good story is “life, with the dull parts taken out.” Hitchcock’s axiom holds for everything you write.
No conflict=dull. No trouble=readers are tempted to put the book down.
Let’s talk about the elements of the three-act structure and how they relate to conflict and suspense.
In brief, beginnings should have a disturbance and portend major trouble to come. Middles show the main confrontation and how it escalates as the story goes along. The final act keeps readers in suspense as the conflict heats up until the final resolution.
In each of these acts there are things you need to keep in mind. You don’t want the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock coming to you with a reminder to cut your dull parts.
The majority of manuscripts I’ve seen by new writers over the years begin too calmly, slowly, or sometimes DOA. The three biggest reasons for this are the myth of exposition, the black hole of happiness, and the lure of the lyrical.
The myth of exposition holds that a reader needs to know a whole bunch of backstory and explanatory material at the beginning of a novel. After all, the author has spent all this time coming up with character background, setting, and so on. At the very least, the writer will have a picture of the character and may make up the background as she goes along.
In either case, the writer reasons that the reader must know all this material to understand what’s happening in the story. But this is a myth.
Readers, in fact, will wait a long time for exposition. What grabs them is a character in motion and something that is stirring the placid waters of existence. I call this the
opening disturbance
, which is further explained below.
For now, memorize this rule: Act first, explain later. You will never go wrong delaying exposition.
This is not to say you cannot include some backstory or exposition, in light doses, in the opening chapter of your novel. You can “marble” it in as you go along, but err on the side of restraint.
One way of insuring conflict in your openings is giving us a real scene; that is, something happening on the page in real time—not a summary.
Also a scene in which dialogue is possible helps bring conflict to the surface. By having at least two people with different agendas in dialogue, you have an automatic scene with confrontational possibilities:
“Any thoughts that you’d like to start with?”
“Thoughts on what?”
“Well, on anything. On the incident.”
“On the incident? Yes, I have some thoughts.”
She waited but he didn’t continue. He had decided before he even got to Chinatown that this would be the way he would be. He’d make her have to pull every single word out of him.
This is the opening of Michael Connelly’s
The Last Coyote.
It’s immediate conflict. We know as the scene goes along that Harry Bosch, LAPD, is being examined by a psychologist over some of his actions on the job. The psych wants answers and Harry doesn’t want to give them.
Different agendas.
This scene goes on for a long time, back and forth, thrust and parry. Every now and then, through the dialogue itself or in narrative form, Connelly drops in a little bit of exposition:
Harry Bosch just looked at her silently He wanted a cigarette but would never ask her if he could smoke. He would never acknowledge in front of her that he had the habit. If he did, she might start talking about oral fixations or nicotine crutches. He took a deep breath instead and looked at the woman on the other side of the desk. Carmen Hinojos was a small woman with a friendly face and manner. Bosch knew she wasn’t a bad person. He’d actually heard good things about her from others who had been sent to Chinatown. She was just doing her job here and his anger was not really directed at her. He knew she was probably smart enough to know that, too.
Sometimes that exposition is through dialogue:
“Everybody keeps calling it the incident. It kind of reminds me of how people called it the Vietnam conflict, not the war.”
“Then what would you call what happened?”
“I don’t know. But incident … It sounds like … I don’t know. Antiseptic. Listen, Doctor, let’s go back a minute. I don’t want to take a trip out of town, okay? My job is in homicide. It’s what I do. And I’d really like to get back to it. I might be able to do some good, you know.”
“If the department lets you.”
The point is this opening scene never bogs down because it is, from the start, one of confrontation. And that makes for immediate reader interest.
But what if you’re writing some other sort of novel, like a sweeping historical, that requires you to take a broader view of the opening? Follow your instincts, but see if you can put some hint of conflict to come somewhere on that first page.
Here is the opening of Dennis Lehane’s historical novel,
The Given Day:
Due to travel restrictions placed on Major League Baseball by the Department of Defense during the great War, the World Series of 1918 was played in September and split into two homestands. The Chicago Cubs hosted the first three games with the final four to be held in Boston. On September 7
th
, after the Cubs dropped Game Three, the two teams boarded the Michigan Central together to embark on the twenty-seven hour trip, and Babe Ruth got drunk and started stealing hats.
Lehane lulls us into thinking this opening paragraph is merely a documentary-style setup. But the last phrase hits us out of nowhere and, most important, hints of conflict to come. Not just getting drunk, but stealing hats? Babe Ruth? Why? Who from, and what will they do about it?
Of course, a historical novelist can begin with a character in crisis right off the bat:
The gale tore at him and he felt its bit deep within and he knew that if they did not make landfall in three days they would all be dead. Too many deaths on this voyage, he thought. I’m Pilot-Major of a dead fleet. One ship left out of five—eight and twenty men from a crew of one hundred and seven and now only ten can walk and the rest near death and our Captain-General one of them. No food, almost no water and what there is, brackish and foul.
(Shogun
by James Clavell)
There are innumerable ways to open with conflict or the portent of conflict. There are also many ways
not
to open your novel. Here are a few of them.
Many times an author lays out a scene of domestic bliss or perfect harmony, thinking that the readers will get to like the characters involved. Then, when the trouble starts, they’ll be hooked in with these nice folks and be oh-so-worried about them.
But the opposite is usually true. The reader is wondering why bother? Life is good! These people can get along just fine without me.
Remember the first shot of
The Wizard of Oz
? It’s not of Dorothy waking up in her nice, warm bed, the sun shining, the birds singing. If that were so, and she started singing about some land over some rainbow, we’d be wondering,
What’s her beef?
She’s got it good. Quit whining already.
No, the opening shot is of Dorothy running down the road, Toto at her heels, looking over her shoulder in fear. And then, back at her farm, she tries to tell her aunt and uncle, and the farmhands, about the terrible Miss Gulch and her plan to ice little Toto. And no one will listen!
Okay, now we see not a happy girl in happy land, but a girl with problems. Now when she sings about escaping over the rainbow, we’re with her.
Here is my rendition of the type of thing I see all too often in beginning manuscripts:
As Janet prepared breakfast for her girls, she paused at the kitchen window and thought how lucky she was to have April and Dakota. They had it all, it seemed. They were both pretty and smart. April had recently won first prize for her third-grade essay, “The Weimar Republic and Why it Matters to Children Today.”
And little Dakota, what could one say? At four she was already reading Proust. The countless hours spent reading to her in the womb had paid off.
Janet sighed contentedly as she poured the organic wheat flakes into the bowls.
“Thanks ever so much for the breakfast, Mommy,” said April.
“I like wheat flakes,” said Dakota.
“I know you do,” Janet said.
“Where’s Daddy?” Dakota asked.
“He’s still on his business trip,” Janet said. Her thoughts turned to Frank. What had she done to deserve such a wonderful husband?
And so it goes. The girls are readied for school, Janet thinks about her day, and then at the end of the chapter there’s a knock at the door:
Janet opened the door.
A deputy sheriff stood there. He was about thirty and had a stern expression on his face.
“Janet Robinson?” he said.
“Yes. Is something wrong?”
“This is for you.” The deputy held out a trifolded paper. She took it.
“Have a nice day,” the deputy said and walked away.
Janet unfolded the paper. Her eyes scanned the official-looking heading:
Petition for Divorce.
This is indeed a disturbance to Janet’s placid world. But it has come too late. Enduring Happy People in Happy Land for this long is too much. The harried reader won’t get past the first page.
Instead, I would do something like this:
Janet looked out the kitchen window as the Sheriff’s cruiser pulled to a stop in front of her house.
Now what could that be about?
“Where’s my cereal!” Dakota shouted.
“Be quiet,” Janet said, “I’m going as fast as I can.”
The disturbance happens in the opening line. A Sheriff’s car stopping in front of your house is not ordinary. It’s usually going to be bad news. Now the scene can unfold with the reader worrying, along with Janet, about the meaning of the vehicle.
Also, having crabby kids adds to the conflict.
No dull parts.
You’ll often hear editors and agents warn about opening with weather. It’s a standard complaint. Because most often when it’s done it is merely descriptive and doesn’t set a tone of trouble to come.
Now it’s true that many excellent novels begin with lyrical passages. Most often this is done in so-called literary novels, where style is as important to the author as story. Readers who respond to such writing are patient if the style is pleasing to them.
The only caveat I would offer here is not to be lured by the lyrical in a desire to show what a good writer you are. You may be the best writer since Shakespeare, but always serve the needs of the story and the reader first. One exception: If you write solely for yourself, without concern for connecting with an audience, you can of course write whatever you like.
The best of both worlds is if you can combine your style with portents of trouble or a mood that mirrors the novel as a whole.
Ken Kesey’s famous opening to
Sometimes a Great Notion
is exactly like this. The novel is a big, lusty story of men in the logging business. The setting is key to the story, as a background for the major conflicts to come:
Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range … come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River …
The first little washes flashing like thick rushing winds through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, sheering, cutting … forming branches. Then, through bearberry and salmonberry, blueberry and blackberry, the branches crashing into creeks, into streams. Finally, in the foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark and silver spruce—and the green and blue mosaic of Douglas fir—the actual river falls five hundred feet … and look: opens out upon the fields.
Metallic at first, seen from the highway down through the trees, like an aluminum rainbow, like a slice of alloy moon.
I don’t want to discourage you from playing with the language and exploring style. Just be intentional about it and know that style is not about being admired. It’s about weaving rich language into the conflict.
“A pet peeve of mine is ragged, fuzzy point of view,” says literary agent Cricket Freeman. Fuzziness means either not knowing whose POV the story is in or having a narrative voice that is not distinctive. Let’s take each problem in turn.
Here’s a common opening mistake I see:
The trees were ghostly skeletons against the night sky. In the distance the wail of a nocturnal bird seemed to signal trouble to come. Getting stuck in the woods was not in anyone’s plans. But that’s just the way it was.
Liz drew the blanket around her and said, “This place creeps me out.”
The problem here is that we don’t know whose head we are in at the start. While the description gives us some indication of the mood, it is removed from a “hot” POV. That makes the start less intimate for the reader. It becomes a wasted opportunity.
The fix is simple. Just set us in a POV at the start:
Liz drew the blanket around her and said, “This place creeps me out.”
The trees looked like ghostly skeletons against the night sky. In the distance Liz heard the wail of a nocturnal bird that seemed to signal trouble to come. Getting stuck in the woods was not in her plans. But that’s just the way it was and now she’d have to deal with it.
By tweaking this opening we are inside a character. Since character is what fully engages a reader, we get that from the start.
Is it ever okay to begin with a large-canvas type of opening? Sure, if that fits the need and mood of your novel. It’s a time-honored move to begin with an omniscient POV and then to “drop” into a character POV.
