Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (21 page)

R
evision presents you with a platinum opportunity to find ways to increase the conflict measures of your book.

When you write, write. Head down, plugging away, letting the words and scene unfold.

Get a first draft done as quickly as you comfortably can.

Revise the previous day’s work if you like, smoothing rough spots, making the conflict clearer. Then get to today’s work.

When you’ve completed your novel, put it away for at least two to three weeks. Get away from it. Work on another project. Take a vacation. Concentrate on your day job or your long-suffering friends or loved ones.

Finally, print out a hard copy. A complete revision strategy is presented in my book,
Revision & Self-Editing
. Here’s what you can do to revise for conflict.

The characters in your story, especially the main characters, should not be passive. Another way to put this is that things need to
matter
to the characters. They need to be taking action.

The proceedings must be meaningful even from the perspective of the minor characters.

There will be times for the characters to pause and reflect, but those should be within the context of the
confrontation
discussed in chapter three. And, at certain points along the line, the characters ought to be in overdrive.

Are your characters
active
? Are they pressing the issues in a way that shows they truly care about the conflict?

In this aspect of revision, go to the introductions of each main character. At what point do you show the intense interest they have in their story situation? When is it clear that they have a stake in the narrative?

If it is not in the first two pages of their introductory scene, put it there. And demonstrate how this results in initial conflict.

In Greg Iles’s
24 Hours
, chapter two gives us the introduction of Will and Karen Jennings, whose lives are about to be shattered by some bad guys. We see them in the car, as Will is driving to the airport where he’ll catch a plane for an out-of-town trip without Karen and their five-year-old daughter, Abby, who is in the backseat.

In less-skilled hands, this could have been a Happy People in Happy Land scene (see chapter six).

But Iles is better than this, and by the second page of the chapter, there’s a small argument about insulin, which their daughter needs. This develops into a larger argument about Will’s trip, during which we get his thoughts:

Thus we have, in the introductory chapter, a small picture of the conflict that is based upon family tension. But it’s enough to get us interested in the threesome. We see how much they care about each other, too, even as the tension hangs over the scene.

So go back to all your main character introductions and open with a disturbance. Then make it clear that the character is heavily invested in the actions going on around her.

Find the most intense scene, emotionally, in your novel. Is it intense enough? Have you held back because you, the writer, are afraid of melodrama or writing “too hot”?

Forget that. Ratchet up the scene intensity by 10 percent. Look to interior life, dialogue, and action descriptions as ways to indicate the higher level.

For example:

Could be one of these:

Which one is too much and which just right? Now you have some options, like dialogue:

Could be one of these:

Which is too much, which just right? Come up with alternatives.

Make sure your cast of characters is differentiated enough so there are possibilities for conflict. Look for ways to accentuate the differences (see chapter three). Look to:

• Physical makeup
  
• Mannerisms
  
• Dialogue (each character should have a unique “sound”)
  

When looking at your individual scenes, have a checklist handy and remind yourself to look for the following:

• Scenes where there is a lot of dialogue without conflict or tension.
  
• Scenes that give too much exposition.
  
• Scenes where a character is alone, thinking.
  
• Scenes where characters are on the same side, not in conflict.
  

Each one of these areas can be “heated up” using the principles in this book.

Alfred Hitchcock hated scenes of people just talking. He never allowed that to happen. He always had something else of interest in the frame.

Character movement is a good way to avoid “talking heads.” Look for ways to have characters move physically in keeping with their particular agendas. Ever notice in the show
Law & Order
how the cops are always going to a workplace to question someone? And that person is in the midst of doing his job? This is to keep the scenes from being static, always a wise choice. People at work have to work. People at home have duties to attend to.

Keep things moving like ping-pong balls all over the table.

Refer to chapter ten, on dialogue, especially the section on using dialogue as a weapon.

Go over all your dialogue exchanges and make sure you are clear on what each character wants in the scene. Put the agendas in opposition to each other.

Are the words your characters using the sharpest they can come up with? Be consistent with their makeup but give them strong verbal action in the scenes. The words do not have to be directly confrontational. They can be devious, clever, off-putting, charming, obscure, nervous—anything at all so long as they are in service of a certain agenda.

Make sure every character in every scene has an agenda, even if it is just not to be noticed.

When going over your draft you should always be asking yourself a key question: Is there any place in my manuscript where a tired, overworked editor might be tempted to put the manuscript down?

Cut that scene. And keep cutting until there are no more weak scenes.

Next, find three scenes to elevate into greatness. This doesn’t mean the rest of your book will have mediocre scenes. Every scene must work by itself, adding to the whole. Every scene needs tension and a strong readability quotient.

But three scenes should be elevated relative to the rest. These scenes need to be packed with conflict, emotion, and surprise.

All three.
Conflict. Emotion. Surprise.

Conflict
is the engine of fiction, of course. Crank up the conflict. How?

Through
emotion.
Make sure readers see the stakes to the inner life of the character.

Finally, give us something
surprising,
the unexpected setback, twist, revelation, or new question raised by the events.

A final thought on revising for conflict is to look at all your scene openings and endings. A very simple strategy can increase the readability of the scenes.

For beginnings,
start closer
to the main conflict in the scene. Can you begin your scene “farther in”? Can you cut some sentences, maybe even whole paragraphs? Just take a look at each scene opening and see how it feels to cut.

At the other end, see if you can cut the last few lines, or even paragraphs, of the scene. Many times you write to a natural resolution point. But if you cut away before that it will often leave the impression of conflict left “hanging in the air” (like a cliff-hanger; see chapter sixteen). It will prompt the reader to find out what happens and turn the page.

And that’s always a good thing.

I
n so many ways you are like a good auto-body guy.

That’s right. You create this mess of a manuscript (at least that’s what you’ll think of it at times) and now you’ve got to shape it into something that looks good and actually runs.

So you use tools.

That’s what the writing craft is all about. Tools. And the more you use them, the better you become at using them. The more tools you’re exposed to, the greater your skill.

So herein are some tools for you in this matter of creating conflict. Use them to build a great-looking book with plenty of horsepower.

I picked up one of the best ongoing writing tools for conflict from Sue Grafton. It’s the novel journal. This is a document you keep, almost like a diary, jotting things in it every day before you begin to write.

“One of my theories about writing,” Grafton says, “is that the process involves an ongoing interchange between Left Brain and Right. The journal provides a testing ground where the two can engage.”

Grafton begins by writing a few lines on what’s happening in her own life. Next she writes about any ideas that occurred to her in the dead of night.

Then she writes about where she is in her book. She talks about the scenes she’s working on, or trouble spots.

And that begins the “
What If …”
game. She writes down story possibilities and the pros and cons for these possibilities. Then she lets those ideas simmer for a day or two. When she checks back on them, she can determine which ones have stood the test of time.

This journal idea works for both OPs (Outline People) and NOPs (No Outline People).

For the NOPs, it’s pure gold because you’re tiptoeing through the tulips of your imagination. “Every day I fall in love again with my writing,” you say right before an OP slaps your face.

You OPs, on the other hand, are practically military in your position. You scoff at the NOPs from your structurally sound edifice of steel girders and industrial wiring. But the NOPs shake their heads, lamenting the beauty you might have created if you were in the tulips, too.

Strike back by using the novel journal to coax out deeper scene ideas, to discover surprises that you can work into your outline, and to find solutions to problems that inevitably arise in the writing of a novel.

The journal may be the item that enables NOPs and OPs to get along.

Here’s what a NOP journal entry might look like for the novel we’re writing about Roger Hill. Notice how I’m asking for more trouble—from the book, not life:

Now, while the NOPs are falling in love with their journals, you OPs can be using it to give depth and surprises to your well-thought-out plans. Your entry might look something like this:

Yes, a little pep talk never hurts.

So there you go. The novel journal. A tool that helps you to keep your mind in the book, no matter how you approach the material.

You’ll find it also stimulates your thinking when you’re not writing. Ideas will start popping like cameras at the Oscars.

Keep a running list of questions to be answered. This is, primarily, for research purposes.

Writers differ in their approach to research.

Some believe that research done up front reveals areas of conflict you never would have come up with on your own.

Others like to write the story and, as research areas pop up, save them for later.

Like the NOP and OP approaches, each has its strengths.

If you like research, by all means go for it. But don’t do so much that you never get around to writing.

If you like to wing it, put a symbol in your text where you are going to need research and keep writing. Make your best guess about what should go there.

When in doubt, make it up and make it seem real.

You write fiction, after all. You’re a liar by trade.

If it is a fact you must ultimately get right, keep writing and come back to it later.

When you have the chance to interview an expert, go beyond the standard issue questions. Ask things like:

• What makes your job hard?
  
• What conflicts do you face day to day?
  
• What “war stories” can you tell me?
  
• What kinds of people complicate your work?
  

Look for the friction points of a profession and not just the duties.

Dreams in fiction are often misused.

One way they are misused is when they open a novel. The writer thinks, Wow, I can write this really gripping opening, with all sorts of big-stakes conflict right off the bat! The reader will be totally sucked in and then I’ll spring it on them—it’s just a dream—but by that time they’ll be hooked. Man, what a great idea.

Not.

It’s a rip-off, a scandal, a con.

Do not open with a dream. (Yes, I know you can point to an author or two who has done this and sold a gazillion copies. And when you sell a gazillion copies, guess what? You can do it, too! And I know Daphne du Maurier did it in
Rebecca,
but that was first-person narration, and she
told us
it was a dream and related it to us in past tense, so we’ll let Daphne get away with it, okay?)

Watch out for the
recurring premonition dream.
This is where the character has a mysterious dream that keeps repeating, and holds obvious significance the character can’t figure out but is afraid of. As the dream repeats, we know that at some future moment all will be revealed.

It seems like a way to keep the reader’s attention, but it’s a bit like having the narrator (you) write,
Little did she know that danger lurked just up the road.
Yes, it gets the point across, but will the readers respect you in the morning? One reason they might not is that this type of dream has been used so many times in thrillers and speculative fiction. I’m not going to say you can never do it, but think twice before you do.

Almost as overused is the
past psychological mask
dream. This is where the character keeps having a dream about a traumatic experience in the past. All the symbolism is explained at some point in the proceedings. Hitchcock did this well in
The Paradine Case,
in 1947. But it was starting to show its age in
Marnie
(1964). Yes, you can do the same, but once again I’d consider alternatives.

The best way to use a dream is
sparingly
(once per novel as a general rule) and then only to give a window into what the character is experiencing, emotionally, at the moment. It is a method to get us inside the character and show us just how the conflict is getting to her:

Dreams can be part of your toolbox but should be one of those that doesn’t come out all that often.

Remember the woman in Starbucks wanting to know where Jimmy Hoffa was?

That’s an ongoing mystery, isn’t it? The ongoing mystery is a technique of suspense. It is the unanswered question that everyone is thinking about, is concerned with. The opening line of Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged
is: “Who is John Galt?” That question haunts the characters in the book for quite some time (and I do mean
quite some time
in a book of that size). It’s one of the elements that keeps us going.

Indeed, whole dramas can be built on the ongoing mystery. What else keeps us watching
Waiting for Godot?

Can you work a mystery into your book that keeps the readers guessing for many pages to come? It’s not that difficult to do and can pay big dividends in readability.

In du Maurier’s
Rebecca
, the ongoing mystery is Rebecca herself, the dead wife of Maxim de Winter, whom the book’s unnamed narrator has married. What is Rebecca’s hold on this man? What is her hold on the imperious Mrs. Danvers? Was she so perfect that Maxim can never truly love another?

The new bride fights her way through all these doubts and expectations and youthful mistakes, until finally the mystery is resolved in a most shocking way. But until that point, the mystery has a hold on the narrator and thus the readers.

Try working a background secret of some kind into your story. It can be something in the Lead character’s life or in the life of another. But the secret has to be asserting itself in some fashion, unexplained but very real.

When my son was about ten years old we were at a store and came out to the car in the parking lot. My son opened the door of the car, carefully, and slid into the passenger seat.

Out of what seemed like thin air a guy appeared, the owner of the Mercedes in the space next to ours.

“Hey!” he shouted at my son, “you hit my car!”

I whipped around the car and told the guy to hold on for a moment.

“He hit my car!” He took a step toward my son. I got in front of him and said, calmly, “He didn’t hit it. I was there. You only thought he did.”

He was not mollified. He started yelling at my son again.

I told him to back off.

He stopped shouting and looked at me. There was a moment there when I didn’t know what this guy might do. He was completely irrational. And such people are dangerous.

Well, the guy gave a big huff and got in his car and drove away. My son was rattled. But I used it as a teaching moment, to tell him there are such people in the world. They won’t listen to reason and they might just pop.

What if such a character walked into your story world?

He doesn’t have to be violent, just irrational. Doing or saying things that don’t have any relation to reality is unnerving. In my novel
Try Darkness,
the Lead character goes to a downtown hotel to find a witness: