Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (3 page)
Read Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense Online
Authors: James Scott Bell
If the reader does not care what happens next, she puts the book down and doesn’t buy your next one. That’s why this change is so important.
You must have emotional connectivity on every page, indeed every paragraph. It must vibrate through the entire book.
BRAINSTORMING
FOR CONFLICT
H
ow do you begin to write a story with conflict?
- You come up with ideas that connect with you emotionally.
- You nudge them in a direction that offers the greatest possibilities for conflict.
So where do you find such ideas?
Everywhere.
Your problem should never be a shortage of ideas. It should be deciding which idea you will develop into a novel.
Become an idea-generating machine. With a little bit of training, your brain will start generating spark after spark. Your creative mind is a muscle. The more you use it, the more nimble it becomes.
This is what you want. You want an imagination that works even when you’re sleeping and when you’re just observing life (“the Boys in the Basement” in Stephen King’s wonderful metaphor).
By learning to brainstorm for conflict, you’ll have your writer’s mind on active duty at all times, ready to pick up potential ideas and, even more, begin shaping them into concepts with conflict at the core.
Here are some ways to begin this training process.
- With a concept, or “What if …”
- An image
- A setting
- A story world
- An obsession
- Steal old plots
- An issue
- First lines
- Your passionate center
- Dictionary game
Perhaps the most honored creative game of all is the
What If? Game.
Storytellers from the campfires of Mesopotamia to the screens of the Kindle have come up with tales by asking that question or having their writer’s mind ask it for them.
When you engage in the game, train yourself to think in terms of conflict.
Let’s say you’re driving down the street and you see a man in a nice suit on the corner. He’s wearing old tennis shoes. You wonder, what’s odd about that?
You continue on, driving and thinking about your idea. You are careful not to crash into the car in front of you, of course (though, if you do, you can use it as material).
So you think in terms of conflict. Why would a man in a suit be in beat-up tennis shoes? Has he been recently fired from a great middle-management job? Or is he a homeless guy who has managed to find a good suit? Was he once a lawyer?
Wait a second. The last idea triggers some interest. Lawyers are always fair game.
What if … he was once a high-powered lawyer brought down by a trumped-up ethics violation? Framed by his former partner?
And now he’s out for revenge.
Revenge is good for conflict.
Or you’re driving down the highway (notice how often you’re driving and playing this game?) and see a billboard for some sort of sunscreen. A beautiful woman in a bikini and sunglasses is lounging under a hot sun as a bronzed Adonis applies the protective goo to one of her honey-colored legs.
What if … he is a hit man who is supposed to kill her? What can we do with that? He’s fallen in love with her, which brings up all sorts of conflict with those who hired him. His own life may be on the line now.
… she is having an affair with him? Who is she married to? Maybe the most dangerous man in Las Vegas. Or, for a more literary take, an older man she has fallen out of love with.
… he is rubbing her not with sunscreen, but a substance from another planet that will turn her into a half woman/half squid with a thirst for blood?
You take it from there. Come up with at least five other “What if …” scenarios. Make that your goal each time you get an idea spark. List five to ten possibilities. The last few should be the hardest to come up with but may in fact turn out to be the best.
Let each idea involve a potential Lead character.
Look at each item on your list and tweak them until they are packed with conflict. Come up with an opposition character who has a strong reason to oppose your Lead. Later, choose the top two to develop into a one-page pitch.
My novel
Try Dying
was based upon a news item I read one day. It seemed to be one of those strange stories that happens in a town like L.A. I cut the piece out of the newspaper and threw it in my idea box, where I keep notes and clippings of all kinds.
It was in there for a few years, and I’d see it every now and again. It always intrigued me. I never knew what to do with it. Finally, I just sat down and rewrote the item, as if I were a reporter:
On a wet Tuesday morning in December, Ernesto Bonilla, twenty-eight, shot his twenty-three-year-old wife, Alejandra, in the back yard of their West 45th Street home in South Los Angeles. As Alejandra lay bleeding to death, Ernesto proceeded to drive their Ford Explorer to the westbound Century Freeway connector where it crossed over the Harbor Freeway and pulled to a stop on the shoulder.
Bonilla stepped around the back of the SUV, ignoring the rain and the afternoon drivers on their way to LAX and the west side, and placed the barrel of his .38 caliber pistol into his mouth and fired.
His body fell over the shoulder and plunged one hundred feet, hitting the roof of a Toyota Camry heading northbound on the Harbor Freeway. The impact crushed the roof of the Camry. The driver, Jacqueline Dwyer, twenty-seven, an elementary school teacher from Reseda, died at the scene.
And that’s all I had. I felt this could be the opening of a novel, but then what? What kind of novel? Who was it about? How could this bizarre occurrence lead me to a compelling story?
I started to ask “What if …” and the third or fourth thing that came to me was, “What if this was being narrated by the man who was engaged to the driver, Jacqueline Dwyer? I found myself writing the next lines:
This would have been simply another dark and strange coincidence, the sort of thing that shows up for a two-minute report on the local news—with live remote from the scene—and maybe gets a follow-up the next day. But eventually the story would go away, fading from the city’s collective memory.
But this story did not go away. Not for me. Because Jacqueline Dwyer was the woman I was going to marry.
This became the first page of the novel and hardly changed at all. I didn’t know who the
I
was yet, but I saw the possibility for huge conflict to come. And it did.
So play “What if …” all the time. If you start doing it consciously, pretty soon your writer’s mind will run on automatic pilot, feeding you story idea after idea. Any “What if …” idea can be noodled into a conflict situation. You don’t even have to be driving:
- Find an ad in a magazine or tabloid that has two or more people in it.
- Jot down five “What ifs …” that harbor conflict between characters.
- Choose the best one and write a one-page scenario on the developing story. It may be one you want to keep.
We are a visual culture, moved and shaped by what we see. In the brainstorming for conflict stage, getting images uploaded to your writer’s mind provides an infinite supply of story material. Here are some ways to tweak it:
I once imagined almost an entire screenplay from a scene that came to me listening to a movie soundtrack. It was a piece that gave me a picture of a father and a son together, on a hillside. The son was fourteen years old. The man was troubled about the son. And then the son burst into tears.
The music gave me the image and the emotion. I used this to imagine the conflict between the son and the father and then the inner conflict in both.
Other scenes started falling into place. All from a little music.
Make playlists of mood tunes. Mine are almost entirely film soundtracks. I have them subdivided into things like
heartfelt, adventurous, suspenseful, fighting.
If I’m about to write a particular scene and I know the mood I want, I’ll go to that playlist.
To generate material I sometimes put my soundtracks on a random mix, letting images play in my mind until something comes up that demands to be dramatized.
You never know what you’ll come up with when you switch from
Ben-Hur
to
Dirty Harry
, but I guarantee it will be interesting.
When an image really grabs you, stop and write about it for five minutes. Let the music play as you write, with the scene reeling like a movie in your mind. Keep an eye out for the points where characters are opposed to each other.
You don’t have to know what’s going on right away. Record to discover.
What are your dreams trying to tell you? You don’t have to be Dr. Freud to let dreams suggest story material.
Keep a pad by your bed so you can record your dreams if they awaken you.
At the very least, write notes in the morning.
Some people say they can’t remember their dreams when they wake up. I’ve been told that if you get back into your sleep position for a while, the dreams might come back to you.
It’s worth a shot because dreams can give us subterranean material we can’t get at any other way.
Your mind will play you a movie if you let it. And it’s free.
Carve out some time in a quiet place for this exercise. The only direction you are going to give your mind is to come up with some conflict.
Imagine two characters and set them down in a scene. The more vivid you imagine the setting, the better.
Let the characters suggest who they are but don’t settle for plain vanilla. Keep watching until the characters develop some originality. Begin to see them.
Sometimes it helps if you cast these characters, letting actors from the past or the present “audition” for a part in the drama.
Once you’ve got the setting and the characters, watch the scene until conflict occurs. It can be an argument, a physical confrontation, points of confusion, other characters entering the scene, random events, an obsession, an odd action.
Keep the scene going until it grabs you. At some point, it will. Guaranteed.
Nurture this idea by setting down a little bit of the backstory, how these two characters got to be who they are.
You may find yourself caught up in the beginning of a tale packed with the clash of conscious wills.
What physical locations offer possibilities for novel length conflict? Answer: Anywhere! If you know how to look at it.
I live in Los Angeles. I’ve rarely used any other setting because there is such a wide variety of places right here in my hometown, each one offering a unique kind of conflict.
Take Skid Row. I set a novel there because every corner offers a sense of dread and danger. From the seedy transient hotels to the sidewalks where drug deals go down. It’s hard to find anywhere there isn’t some form of illegality or craziness on Skid Row.
I’ve also used the lovely San Fernando Valley, which at one time was the ideal suburb for all of America. Mostly Caucasian in population. Now there are at least one hundred different languages spoken in parts of the Valley. And almost as many gangs to go with them.
But a big city is not the only place to find conflict.
Consider the lovely, rural climes of Washington’s Puget Sound. Ideal for a tourist getaway? Not for Gregg Olsen, who places the grisliest of serial killers there, and then plays off the forbidding nature of the undeveloped setting.
Here’s Olsen’s description from
Victim Six
:
Even in the midst of a spring or summer’s day with a cloudless sky marred only by the contrails of a jet overhead, the woods of Kitsap County were always blindfold dark. It had been more than eighty years since the region was first logged by lumberjacks culling the forest for income; now it was developers who were clearing the land for new tracts of ticky-tacky homes. Quiet. Dark. Secluded.
Notice the words Olsen chooses:
marred, blindfold dark. Quiet. Dark. Secluded.
And then notice what happens by adding another element to the setting—the killer:
The woods were full of dark secrets, which is exactly what had attracted him in the first place. He’d noticed the brush pickers when he’d been out of the hunt several weeks before, when he had an urge to do
something.
A crammed-full station wagon was parked on the side of the road as close to the edge as possible without going into the ditch. They poured from their vehicle, talking and laughing, as if what they were about to do was some kind of fun adventure.
He sized up the women.
Most were small.
Good.
City or country, rural or populated, every setting holds the possibility not just for conflict between characters, but for being part of the conflict itself.
That’s where you need to take your mind.
In
Good in Bed
, Cannie Shapiro’s infant daughter is in critical condition at a Philadelphia hospital. The circumstance has rubbed raw all sorts of issues for Cannie, from her father relationship to her fitness as a mother. Author Jennifer Weiner uses this as an opportunity for the setting to conflict with Cannie:
I walked and walked, and it was as if God had fitted me with special glasses, where I could only see the bad things, the sad things, the pain and misery of life in the city, the trash kicked into corners instead of the flowers planted in the window boxes. I could see the husbands and wives fighting, but not kissing or holding hands. I could see the little kids careening through the streets on stolen bicycles, screaming insults and curses, and grown men who sounded like they were breakfasting on their own mucus, leering at women with unashamed lecherous eyes. I could smell the stink of the city in summer: horse piss and hot tar and the grayish, sick exhaust the buses spewed. The manhole covers leaked steam, the sidewalks belched heat from the subways churning below.
1. Start with your own living situation. Write a page of straight description of your immediate setting—work from your residence outward to neighboring homes, streets, town centers, parks, undeveloped land, and so on.
2. Take apart the individual settings and give them their own page. For example, maybe your original page had this:
