Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (15 page)
Read Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense Online
Authors: James Scott Bell
For a fight scene to work in a novel you need three things:
- The fighters
- A closed environment
- An emotional component
The following is from my novel
Try Dying:
Ratso took a Barry Bonds swing at me with a baseball bat. I ducked. The bat slammed into the inner doorjamb.
I stumbled backward into the homeless camp. Hit the shopping cart. Saw Ratso get ready for another swing.
Spinning, I whipped around to the other side of the cart as the bat whammed down on the cart stuffings. It made a sound like a fist hitting a pillow. A big fist.
I could keep the cart between me and Barry Bonds now. Like kids playing tag around a car. But that couldn’t last forever.
Ratso’s eyes gleamed like a rabid vermin wanting to bite something.
I needed a weapon. There was some furniture in the place. Old sofa. Tattered chair. An end table, scuffed and ancient. But with four legs.
“You die now,” Ratso said.
“You don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Yeah I do.” He smiled and again I thought he might be high. Or just crazy.
“Put it down and we talk about it,” I said.
“You not leaving with your head,” he said.
He started tapping the bat on the edge of the cart.
Chank chank chank.
I took a step back, put my right foot on the side of the cart. Drove it into Ratso’s middle. If he hadn’t slipped on something and gone down I wouldn’t have made it to the end table.
But he did. And I got it.
Held it up to him like a lion tamer. Or rat handler.
His eyes widened a little, then narrowed. “You got nothin’, white boy.” He laughed. “Fat white boy, you don’t know how to fight.”
I stared at him, not moving.
“What you say, white boy?”
Nothing.
“Say something!”
“I’m not fat,” I said.
I charged, table up.
He sidestepped, but I anticipated that, guessing which side. He went to my left and drew back the bat.
I went left and high with the table. Caught his right cheek full on with a table leg.
He swung the bat but without anything behind it. It hit my shoulder but only enough for a dribbler up the first base line.
He screamed in pain.
Shoving with the table I got him back against the wall, pinning him with the table.
He kicked and almost got me flush between the legs.
I brought the table back and shot it forward again. Got him with a leg just below the right eye.
He cried out and his hands went to his face. He dropped the bat.
I slammed the table on top of his head, holding back about 25 percent. Didn’t want him dead.
Not yet.
He crumpled to the floor like an old sleeping bag.
I picked up the bat and let him writhe a little. Then I poked him in his back with the knob end.
“Get up.”
He put his hand behind him, rubbing the spot where I’d jabbed him.
I kicked his hand. He screamed again. I was glad about the rap thumping in the hallway. It would make it harder to hear him. “Get up or I take out a knee,” I said.
“Who you think you are, man?”
“I’m a lawyer. Deal with it.”
I poked him again. He struggled to his hands and knees.
“Sit there,” I said, pointing to the couch.
In this scene the fighters are the narrator, Ty Buchanan, and a lowlife he has nicknamed Ratso.
They are in a close environment, Ratso’s seedy apartment.
The emotion comes through in Ty’s hurting Ratso once he’s debilitated. There’s an animal thing happening inside him at this point. Maybe he’s even a little crazy. His thought is he’s glad there’s rap music blaring because that means he can hurt Ratso even more.
- Be clear on the motives for your fighters to be engaged in combat.
- Picture clearly the environment where the fight is taking place. A lot of writers actually map out their fight scenes, looking at the location and charting moves. It’s not a bad practice.
- Give us a glimpse into the emotions of the POV character in the fight scene. How does he feel about what’s going on even as it’s happening?
Even a scene that is a “setup” for other scenes will work if infused with conflict. Don’t ever write a scene that is simply for the purpose of giving information.
In
Try Darkness
my lawyer hero, Ty Buchanan, an experienced civil litigator, is taking on a capital murder case for the first time in his professional life. He meets his opponent, Mitch Roberts, for the first time in court. The scene goes like this:
His name was Mitch Roberts. He was my height and had toxic eyes. The prosecutors who handle capital cases are like that, I was told by a law school friend, one who worked for the Public Defender’s office. They mean business, he said. They mean to put people on Death Row, on the gurney with the needle. They don’t play around. And what are you doing trying criminal cases, you idiot?
Good point. When Roberts came over to me and stuck his hand out, I thought this is a guy who owns courtrooms.
“Buchanan?” he said.
“How you doing?” I said.
He smiled. “Saw you on TV.” Lots of people saw me on TV when I was accused of murdering a hot reporter named Channing Westerbrook. That profile was not going to go away.
“How’d I look?” I said.
“Like you do now. Nervous.”
“Once I get going I’ll be okay.”
“You were a civil lawyer. Ever do criminal?”
“Some.”
“Trials?”
“Once. Small company, a CEO cooking the books.”
“Criminal’s a different gig. Homicide’s different than that. Capital is a world all its own. Think you’re up to it?”
All right, the macho game had begun. Chest thumping. Looking for the advantage. That was right in my wheelhouse.
“Just call me Fast Eddie,” I said.
“What?”
“Ever see
The Hustler?
Paul Newman?”
“What’s that got to do—”
“There’s a scene where he’s going to play billiards with a guy, only he’s never played it before. He plays the pocket game. So his manager, played by George C. Scott—”
“Look, Buchanan—”
“—tells him they’re leaving, but Fast Eddie says, Hey, it’s the same. It’s a table and it’s balls, you just have to get the feel of it. And he wins.”
Roberts looked at me, eyes unimpressed. “You want to plead him out now?” he said. “We’ll take off the special circumstances, he can do life.”
“That’s some sweet deal,” I said.
“It’s not going to get any better.”
“Let’s shoot some pool.”
- Look through your manuscript for scenes you wrote primarily to set up other plot points or scenes.
- Have you left out the conflict?
- List some possible ways you can add—or intensify—the conflict in the scene.
- At the very least use dialogue to create a minor argument or back-and-forth between the characters.
Love scenes are great fodder for conflict, and they should be. A love scene where everything is rosy is boring. There needs to be something happening that offers tension.
It can be outside or inside the characters, but it should interrupt the proceedings in some way.
Forces outside can be against the lovers. When Romeo climbs up to woo Juliet, she warns, “If they do see thee, they will murder thee.”
That threat hangs over the couple for the whole play.
Inside, there are many ways lovers can doubt what they’re getting into.
In Robin Lee Hatcher’s
The Victory Club,
a World War II novel, Lucy is married to Richard, who is off fighting the war. At home she finds herself drawn to another man, Howard. The inner conflict is obvious and rendered this way:
Lucy entered the market a few minutes before the store closed, knowing it was less likely any customers would be there. She was right.
Howard stood behind the counter, writing in a notebook. He looked up as she approached. She suspected he’d been about to tell his last-minute customer that it was closing time.
His eyes widened when he saw who it was, then he straightened, laying down the pen. “Lucy.”
“Howard.”
There was a world of unspoken sentiment in those two names, spoken in greeting, a confession of right and wrong, temptation and resistance, longing and regret. It wasn’t until then that Lucy realized he wouldn’t have pursued her if she stayed away. He wanted her, that she knew, but he would let her go.
Turn …
Run …
Resist …
Oh, that wretched voice of warning. She wanted it to be silent.
“I’ve missed you.” Howard’s smile was tentative. “Did you find a better place to shop for groceries?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“How’ve you been?”
Lonely. I’ve been lonely, Howard, and I don’t want to be lonely anymore.
He untied his apron, removed it, and laid it on the counter. “I’m hungry. Would you care to join me for supper?”
Resist …
Flee …
“I was headed for Chloe’s,” he said, “but we could go somewhere else if you want.”
“Chloe’s is fine.”
He stared at her for what seemed a long while before he said, “Give me a few minutes to close things up, and then we’ll go.”
Richard …
She nodded. “I’ll wait.”
- Utilize conflict in any romantic situation.
- Look to both inside and outside obstacles. Make a list for each and choose which would work best for your purposes.
- At the very least, employ the fear factor. What is it that each character fears in the passion of the moment?
Comedy needs conflict as much as any other kind of writing.
In fact, without conflict you can’t have funny.
Think about the great comedies, from
The Taming of the Shrew
to
The Odd Couple
. Those are all about characters thrown into conflict, usually over something trivial (see the discussion of
Seinfeld
in chapter one), although it can also be the opposite: an extreme. Here is a snippet from
Life, the Universe and Everything
by Douglas Adams:
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
It wasn’t just that the cave was cold, it wasn’t just that it was damp and smelly. It was that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there wasn’t a bus due for two million years.
Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.
He was stranded on prehistoric Earth as the result of a complex sequence of events that had involved his being alternately blown up and insulted in more bizarre regions of the Galaxy than he had ever dreamed existed, and though life had now turned very, very, very quiet, he was still feeling jumpy.
He hadn’t been blown up now for five years.
The narration here is extremely “serious” in that it involves poor Arthur Dent alone in the vast galaxy, stranded.
The scenes then unfold with natural comedy based upon the situation.
Which is, by the way, the crucial component in all comedy writing. Danny Simon, Neil’s older brother, is credited by both Neil and Woody Allen with teaching them how to write narrative comedy.
For many years Danny Simon taught a legendary comedy-writing class in L.A. I got into one of his last ones. And from the start he hammered into us that comedy was not a matter of jokes. It was a matter of a solid premise and natural character reactions, and finding the humor in those.
In that sense, don’t ever write something just because it sounds funny to you. Make it come out of the conflict of the scene.
Once again, conflict is your friend.
Even if you write intense action, comedy can add much needed relief in short spurts. This adds to the layers of the reading experience and enables you to spring further conflict in a way that takes the reader deeper into the story.
Hitchcock was always using comic relief in his films. An example is the auction scene in
North by Northwest.
Cary Grant, trying to find James Mason (the villain) tracks him to a fancy auction in New York. But then Mason’s henchmen show up and it looks like they’ll be able to throw the net on him.
To get out, Cary begins to bid on items, and then bid against himself.
This frustrates the auctioneer and the other people in attendance.
In my novel
The Whole Truth,
my lead character is in search of someone:
They were dressed in blue smocks with yellow tags pinned on that said
Volunteer
. One of them had sleet-colored hair done up in curls. The other had dyed hers a shade of red that did not exist in nature.
They looked surprised and delighted when Steve came in, as if he were the Pony Express riding into the fort.
They fought for the first word. Curls said, “May I help—” at the same time Red said, “Who are you here to—”
They stopped and looked at each other, half annoyed, half amused, then back at Steve.
And spoke over each other again.
“Let me help you out,” Steve said. “I’m looking for a doctor, a certain—”
“Are you hurt?” Curls said.
“Our emergency entrance is around to the side,” Red said.
“No, I—”
“Oh, but we just had a shooting,” Curls said.
“A colored man,” Red added.
“Black, Liv. They don’t like to be called colored.”
“I always forget.” Red shook her head.
Steve said, “I’m trying to locate a certain doctor—”
“We don’t do referrals here,” Curls said. “But if you—”
Red jumped in: “We have a medical building just down the block if you’ll—”
“He didn’t ask for a medical building,” Curls snapped.
“I know that, but if he’s looking for a doctor that would be the place to start.”
“Not any doctor,” I said. “A specific doctor, named Walker C. Phillips.”
A sudden silence fell upon the volunteers. Neither seemed eager to tackle that one.
“Is he still practicing?” Steve said.
Red leaned forward and whispered. “Lost his license to practice.”
“Terrible tragedy,” Curls said, shaking her head.
“He drank,” Red added, and gave a tippling motion with her hand.
“When was this?” Steve asked.
“Oh, it’s been, what, ten years, at least,” Curls said. “His wife left him, you know.”
“Ah, no, I did not know that.”
The two women nodded.
“Can you tell me, is he still around?”
“Oh, he moved,” Red said. “To Tehachapi.”
“I thought it was Temecula,” Curls said.
“No, Tehachapi.”
“He moved where the prison is.”
“That’s Tehachapi.”
“No, it’s Temecula.”
“Oh no. I have a granddaughter in Temecula.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“I would have remembered.”
“Excuse me,” Steve said. “Maybe there’s someone here at the hospital who would know for sure?”
