Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (6 page)

What has this done to Roger’s insides? Whatever it is, make it full of conflict. Especially when he meets the mysterious Belle Duncomb. Does Roger keep his distance? Or use her? Or love her? Or something else?

Your call.

The point is you can play this game with as many questions as you want. Each time you do, you will find rich sources of plot material growing like kudzu on the side of a bridge.

And when you are finished here, try one thing more:

What is it that your Lead does not have, but yearns for? A yearning is a desire for something without which a person feels life will be incomplete.

It is a thing that predates the story. The Lead brings this to the tale from her past. What this does is enable you to hit the ground running when you start your novel. The character already has trouble inside, in the form of yearning unfulfilled.

A yearning will give you a store of character actions that are not predictable, creating interest from the outset.

Some people say that what you wanted to be when you were twelve is where your true yearning lies. It’s true for me. I still wish I could have played center field for the Los Angeles Dodgers. What does that say about me?

I will leave that to others.

Instead let’s take our Roger. He’s in this grinding accounting firm. This is not what he saw himself doing when he was twelve.

Make a list of possible things Roger wanted to be or do when he was a boy:

Make the list as long as you like, then choose one that grips you. Play with it. I usually like the ideas that come further down the list, and in this case it’s going into Ultimate Fighting.

Now I ask why would twelve-year-old Roger want to do that? Maybe it was because he was being picked on at school. He yearned to be somebody who could defend himself, anytime, anywhere.

Give us some backstory on this:

And so on.

The last step in this yearning process is to designate ways that yearning can still mean something to Roger today and become a source of inner conflict.

For example, the root of Roger’s yearning was a hatred of injustice. The bully, an unjust punk, needed his face mashed in. As Roger has gone on with life, he’s seen many such punks who need retributive justice. But Roger has always left that to others.

Now, in the trouble to be developed in the novel, he’s going to feel that tension between being “practical” like his father told him to be and doing something about justice.

Don’t ignore this deep soil for conflict. It’s your chance to play amateur psychologist with your Lead character and make him all the richer because of it.

When you hear agents and editors talk about characters that grip them, you’ll sometimes hear the phrase “jump off the page.” It means the character is more than what they’ve seen before. Even if it’s a familiar type, there are things going on that give way to some happy surprises.

In
Revision & Self-Editing
I talked about three aspects of character that attract readers. I called them
grit, wit,
and
it.
Briefly:

Grit
is guts. Strength. Courage. This is what a character needs in the death struggle of the plot. She may not have it at the beginning, but you better make sure you show the reader she has the capacity to develop it, and soon.

Wit
is a sharp mind. The ability to laugh at yourself occasionally or to simply not take yourself too seriously.

It
is a sort of magnetism that draws other characters (and the reader) to the Lead.

You can see it in the following characters:

You can easily find other examples just by thinking about these three characteristics as you read or revisit your favorite titles.

Another jump-off-the-page factor is
unpredictability.
This one is useful in that it almost always causes conflict for the very reason that the other characters can’t anticipate what’s going to happen.

Think of the character of Ronny Cammareri in the movie
Moonstruck.
When we first see him, he’s with the ovens below a bakery. Loretta Castorini, who is engaged to Ronny’s brother, has come to invite him to the wedding. There’s been bad blood between the brothers and Loretta wants to discuss it.

But her attempts to communicate like an adult are met with completely unpredictable responses:

Not exactly handling the question in the way one might expect, Ronny goes on, asking loudly, “What is life?”

Loretta just wants to talk, but Ronny interrupts:

We have traveled a bit far afield from a civil conversation, have we not? But it’s pure conflict, of an operatic sort—which is part of Ronny’s character.

Another jump-off-the-page aspect is
nobility.
When a character is acting according to high ideals, it’s a natural he will run into trouble. Conflict arises when two sides clash over the right thing to do.

In
To Kill a Mockingbird,
for example, Atticus Finch must face off against men who have come to lynch his client, Tom Robinson. He sets up outside the jail, alone, and awaits the confrontation.

Perfect people are not interesting to us. We need to sees flaws in the characters as well as strengths. Flaws will give you even more areas for possible conflict.

Scarlett O’Hara is selfish, and therefore doesn’t have any qualms about marrying men she doesn’t care about, so long as they serve her purposes.

Scout Finch is not a model child. She gets into fights at school and speaks her opinions at inopportune times.

Give your characters flaws that will rub up against other flawed characters.

Great characters are marked by “strength of will.” The stronger the will, the more attractive the character.

Why this works: We all believe, or want to believe, that the free acts of a person have an effect. We want to believe that we can make the world better, or can carve a piece of success for ourselves, or any of a number of other things, by acts of will. We get corrected and set back, but we learn (this is called wisdom) and then we act again.

So we bond with characters who are acting with conscious will toward a specific end.

We’ve already discussed the stakes of a successful novel involving death overhanging—physical, professional, psychological.

A story
objective
takes one of two forms: to get something or to get away from something. The “something” should have death overhanging.

Take
The Fugitive.
The title suggests the primary objective: Dr. Richard Kimble has to
get away
from the lawman trying to capture him. Physical death is on the line because if he is caught he’s going to be executed for the murder of his wife. But there’s also psychological death at play: He knows the real killer of his wife is out there, free, living life. To deny justice to the woman he loved would be an unbearable burden on death row.

Let’s look at professional death. It’s sufficient that it
feel
like professional death to the character. In
The Silence of the Lambs
, FBI trainee Clarice Starling is given a crucial assignment by the head of the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico: Get the notorious serial killer and cannibal-about-town Dr. Hannibal Lecter to give up some information about himself.

For Starling this is a huge opportunity for advancement. It’s crucially important to her. A fact that Dr. Lecter eerily knows by sizing her up in their first meeting. From within his cell Lecter observes:

Not only has Lecter pegged her, but by letting her know that he has done so in such direct terms, the stakes are already raised. If she fails to get him to give up information, it will be a humiliating defeat to her confidence. Perhaps fatal to her future with the FBI.

At least, that’s how it
feels
to her when Lecter ends the interview:

And there you have the stakes of professional (and psychological) death raised in an early chapter of the book. The table is set for emotional conflict.

1. What is your Lead character’s primary objective in the novel? Define it. It should be one thing, to get or to get away from.
   
2. How is death involved? Name one kind of death—physical, professional, psychological—that is primary.
   
3. Write a page or two of voice journal (i.e., first-person narration) explaining why death is on the line. Make up any backstory you need to justify this outlook.
   
4. Edit the paragraph into a form that you can place in your novel. For example, you could place some of the first-person narration in dialogue.
   
5. Find a place before the midpoint of Act Two in your novel to place this material.
   

The reason for this placement is that your character must realize, with full force, what the stakes are before the midpoint. Because after that midpoint he’s totally committed, can’t resign from the action, and must spend the rest of the book in a full throttle attempt to avoid death.

For our character, Roger Hill, let’s put down the essential information. Roger’s main objective is going to be to
get away
from the law and a vengeful relative of someone he’s supposedly murdered. The stakes here are obviously physical death. If the relative finds him and exacts revenge, that’s it for Roger here on earth. If the law catches him, it will either be execution or life in prison without parole.

But what if he does get away? What if Roger managed to live on the lam for years and years? Wouldn’t that be a kind of psychological death? A man without a home, dead to his past? Without his family? I think so.

And certainly his profession is gone. He can’t just waltz in and start being an accountant for big bucks somewhere.

The stakes are really high for Roger.

Now let’s have Roger give his viewpoint in the voice journal:

We are building a solid foundation for conflict here. When you have a Lead readers want to follow, and the stakes are death in some form, you’re at the highest level of grip there is.

And now you need to add one more element to ratchet up the reader interest—an opposition force.

The voice journal is one of the most effective writing tools I know, useful in all stages of writing your novel. It’s a document that is a free-form, stream-of-consciousness journal in
a character’s voice,
talking about things you prompt them with. The idea is to write for at least five to ten minutes without stopping, letting the character speak for herself.