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One of the biggest troubles plaguing fiction writers is a lack of conflict in the plot structure of their story. Almost every writer has trouble with conflict, trouble that’s all out of proportion to the mental problems the subject presents. You can jot down notes, you can talk intelligently about various parts of the story structure, yet when you sit down to write, your story’s conflict is virtually non-existent.
How does this happen?
I suspect it’s because when you sit down to write, you have a good idea of what constitutes a conflict, but you also have an aversion to the actual step-by-step development of that conflict. Building a conflict is hard unless you’re a drama queen, and believe me, I know plenty of those. For those of us who are logical human beings, however, deliberately creating problems is unnatural. Our day-to-day life consists of avoiding trouble at all costs, and when trouble arises, it consists of finding the path of least resistance to solve the issue at hand. Humans are lazy creatures in that respect; we gravitate towards the easiest and quickest solution. It’s practically encoded into our DNA.
Therefore, when our characters are faced with fictitious problems, we are as easy on them as we wish life would be on us. We grow to love our characters, so we hurry to fix things for them as quickly as possible. As writers, we wield god-like power, so when any difficulties appear, we use that omnipotence to resolve our characters’ problems willy-nilly. It’s at that point when our story’s conflict falls flat on its ass.
I believe the simplest solution (see what I did there?) is to plan this stuff out ahead of time, and specifically what kind of conflict you’re going to build your story around. There are three basic conflicts in literature:
1. Man vs. Nature: Nature as an antagonist offers wonderful material to work with. Jack London was a genius at this type of conflict. He truly knew how to use the Alaskan wilderness or a storm at sea to challenge the stamina and resourcefulness of his characters. And sometimes, they didn’t always survive. I think one of the most poignant, brutal deaths I ever read was the way the arrogant man slowly froze to death in “To Build a Fire.” Jungles, wild animals, fog, hurricanes, floods — if you pit your protagonist against any of these, he or she will have to fight heroically merely just to survive, let alone achieve his or her objective.
2. Man vs. Himself: I suppose the obvious example of this is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But to be honest, my personal favorite is The Dark Half by Stephen King, a story where an author is terrorized both physically and mentally by his evil pseudonym made flesh. Basically, your main character is both the protagonist and antagonist. This is a fairly sophisticated conflict that requires a lot of psychological introspection, I can’t lie. But it also tends to be the most interesting, at least in my opinion. Some of the scariest books I ever read were of the man vs. himself variety, mainly because it requires you to closely examine the interior of the human mind, and the human mind is one scary, jacked-up place.
3. Man vs. Man: I think this might be the most common conflict in all of literature because as the name implies, your protagonist is pitted against another character, and in some instances, multiple characters. For example, your protagonist might set out to defeat a gang of robbers in the Old West, or a particularly ruthless Mob family, or an army of goblins ruled by an evil overlord. They can be anything you wish, as long as they’re united against a common good. Stories of this kind can be highly effective just so long as the group your main character fights deserves to be destroyed. Nobody’s going to compliment your genius as a writer if your protagonist lights an orphanage on fire on Christmas Day. Trust me on this.
Anyway, a good story is essentially the history of a conflict. It starts with the realization of a problem, and, as it proceeds, the conflict grows into a climax before falling into a resolution. Between the beginning (the protagonist’s desire to accomplish something) and the end (whether he or she is successful), there must be several points leading to a turning point in the conflict. This series of peaks must ascend, each one more critical and intense than the one before it. Naturally, the climax of the story is the most dramatic; it causes the resolution and, if the story is any good, brings the conflict to a satisfying end.
Or, to skip the English teacher lingo, think of it this way. You decide what kind of story you’re going to write — horror, romance, adventure, drama. You decide what kind of person your protagonist is going to be, and you decide what he or she wants. It should be something that the reader wants too, if he was in your protagonist’s shoes, in order to maintain interest in the story. Now, you let that character take a step towards their ultimate goal. And then, as sadistically as you can, laughing and rubbing your hands in twisted glee, you hurl something at that person. The bigger that something, the better.
I may seem like an asshole for commanding you to go full-on sociopath on your characters, but trust me when I tell you that’s the point. Sociopaths have no emotional affect, and that’s why they’re effective sadists. If you want to be a writer, you have to be just that when it comes to conflict. I can’t sugar-coat it for you and pretend otherwise. You have to divorce yourself from your emotional attachment to your characters, otherwise any problem you create will be flat at best, boring at worst. If you want to be a good writer, you have to take perverse joy in working out ways to frustrate your protagonists. Be mean. Mistreat your characters. And do so with nerves of steel, with the coldness of a serial killer. Feelings are the enemy of good literary conflict.
Please don't get me wrong. Certainly, emotions play a vital role in the writer’s life. Robert Frost correctly asserted: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” What he meant by that was that a story — well, in his case, poetry — must be strongly felt by the writer before it can be strongly felt by the reader. But a writer must understand her emotions and have complete mastery over them so that the magic which she works will exert its spell over her readers and not over her.
“Okay, so how do you do this, P.D.?” you ask.
Simple. Plan it. I always say you should know the end of your story before you even sit down to write it. It’s a process I share with Edgar Allan Poe, who said in “The Philosophy of Composition” that you first need to hammer out what effect you want to have on your readers, and then every word, from start to finish, should move steadily towards that end. Not only will this focus your thoughts, it will also, to a certain extent, help you narrow down your choice as to the parties involved. Additionally, it will help you figure out if your story will be man against nature, man against himself, or man against man. And all of it will happen before you have an emotional attachment to your characters, the destroyer of good stories everywhere. Only when you plan will your story have direction and purpose, and a water-tight conflict and resolution.
Look, planning your story is like studying a roadmap. You’re probably not gonna wing it and go blindly from Los Angeles to Orlando on vacation; no, you’re going to get directions first. The same is true of writing. Be firm with yourself and don’t start drafting until you’ve developed a solid plan that will take you from point A to point B, and until you’ve taken a gander at your literary GPS. If you start writing before you know where you’re going, there is only a slight chance that you’ll accidentally wind up in the correct destination. Personally, that’s not something I’d count on. I’m too damn neurotic and control-freaky. And here’s why. You’ll get off on a tangent, and after you wander aimlessly for a while, hopelessly lost on some Hillbilly Hell backwoods country road, you’ll probably call off your trip and head back home long before you make it to Disneyworld. And even if you do stick with it and work on your story in a hit-or-miss fashion, there will be too many things wrong with it, and you won’t even be able to tell what those things are.
That’s because words, once they’re put on paper, have this awful tendency to be holy — especially to the young writer — carrying with them a sacredness that makes them too beautiful to change. And even if she should suspect a flaw here and there — well, what mother is going to love a crippled child any less than a healthy one? What usually happens is that she becomes even more protective, and there’s no reasoning with her when it comes to revising.
The best way to overcome this emotional resistance towards stirring up trouble is to understand that you have it, and consciously overcome it by sitting down and thoroughly planning what the conflict will be. And then, when you hammer out a concrete plan, stick to it!
But herein lies one of the most important differences between a serious writer and a not-so-serious writer. The not-so-serious writer dreams and waits for inspiration to do the work. She has a tentative idea in her head, but nothing solid. The serious writer, however, knows that she has to do the work herself, and then she does it. The not-so-serious resists planning out her story; the serious writer has long ago made story-planning a part of her writing ritual.
And by the way, planning a story doesn’t mean you’re creating a formulaic story that imitates, if not outright copies, other formulaic stories by other writers. Our skeletons basically look identical, save for a few small differences here and there, because they’ve evolved to serve a specific purpose. The skeletons of good stories, similarly, don’t look that different from one another either. In fact, Joseph Campbell noted that all adventure stories involving the hero archetype shared the exact same foundation; he charted the hero’s cycle in numerous stories, and called his discovery the Monomyth. The point is that you, the writer, make the story unique. You clothe these skeletons with flesh, blood, muscles, and tendons called character, theme, setting, style, voice, and every other component of a work of fiction. Frodo Baggins and Luke Skywalker may have begun with the same template, but they’re not even remotely alike.
And even if you start with a common template, your story will be as varied as you are. You bring the sum total of your experiences and knowledge with you to the table, and those things greatly color how you write. And it’s not just that something has happened to you, it’s how you decided to deal with that something when it happened that gives you knowledge. And all of this wealth is what will determine the theme of your story and all its component parts, and it will be the thing that takes a common conflict and makes it unique.
But the bottom line is to plan, plan, plan, and not only plan, but do so devoid of emotion. Be as mean as you humanly can to your characters; treat them like guinea pigs in a science experiment. Stow the touchy-feely, self-help, yoga crap, and only whip it out for the heat of actual composition. That way, you can have a sound story and sell it to your readers, too.
How does this happen?
I suspect it’s because when you sit down to write, you have a good idea of what constitutes a conflict, but you also have an aversion to the actual step-by-step development of that conflict. Building a conflict is hard unless you’re a drama queen, and believe me, I know plenty of those. For those of us who are logical human beings, however, deliberately creating problems is unnatural. Our day-to-day life consists of avoiding trouble at all costs, and when trouble arises, it consists of finding the path of least resistance to solve the issue at hand. Humans are lazy creatures in that respect; we gravitate towards the easiest and quickest solution. It’s practically encoded into our DNA.
Therefore, when our characters are faced with fictitious problems, we are as easy on them as we wish life would be on us. We grow to love our characters, so we hurry to fix things for them as quickly as possible. As writers, we wield god-like power, so when any difficulties appear, we use that omnipotence to resolve our characters’ problems willy-nilly. It’s at that point when our story’s conflict falls flat on its ass.
I believe the simplest solution (see what I did there?) is to plan this stuff out ahead of time, and specifically what kind of conflict you’re going to build your story around. There are three basic conflicts in literature:
1. Man vs. Nature: Nature as an antagonist offers wonderful material to work with. Jack London was a genius at this type of conflict. He truly knew how to use the Alaskan wilderness or a storm at sea to challenge the stamina and resourcefulness of his characters. And sometimes, they didn’t always survive. I think one of the most poignant, brutal deaths I ever read was the way the arrogant man slowly froze to death in “To Build a Fire.” Jungles, wild animals, fog, hurricanes, floods — if you pit your protagonist against any of these, he or she will have to fight heroically merely just to survive, let alone achieve his or her objective.
2. Man vs. Himself: I suppose the obvious example of this is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But to be honest, my personal favorite is The Dark Half by Stephen King, a story where an author is terrorized both physically and mentally by his evil pseudonym made flesh. Basically, your main character is both the protagonist and antagonist. This is a fairly sophisticated conflict that requires a lot of psychological introspection, I can’t lie. But it also tends to be the most interesting, at least in my opinion. Some of the scariest books I ever read were of the man vs. himself variety, mainly because it requires you to closely examine the interior of the human mind, and the human mind is one scary, jacked-up place.
3. Man vs. Man: I think this might be the most common conflict in all of literature because as the name implies, your protagonist is pitted against another character, and in some instances, multiple characters. For example, your protagonist might set out to defeat a gang of robbers in the Old West, or a particularly ruthless Mob family, or an army of goblins ruled by an evil overlord. They can be anything you wish, as long as they’re united against a common good. Stories of this kind can be highly effective just so long as the group your main character fights deserves to be destroyed. Nobody’s going to compliment your genius as a writer if your protagonist lights an orphanage on fire on Christmas Day. Trust me on this.
Anyway, a good story is essentially the history of a conflict. It starts with the realization of a problem, and, as it proceeds, the conflict grows into a climax before falling into a resolution. Between the beginning (the protagonist’s desire to accomplish something) and the end (whether he or she is successful), there must be several points leading to a turning point in the conflict. This series of peaks must ascend, each one more critical and intense than the one before it. Naturally, the climax of the story is the most dramatic; it causes the resolution and, if the story is any good, brings the conflict to a satisfying end.
Or, to skip the English teacher lingo, think of it this way. You decide what kind of story you’re going to write — horror, romance, adventure, drama. You decide what kind of person your protagonist is going to be, and you decide what he or she wants. It should be something that the reader wants too, if he was in your protagonist’s shoes, in order to maintain interest in the story. Now, you let that character take a step towards their ultimate goal. And then, as sadistically as you can, laughing and rubbing your hands in twisted glee, you hurl something at that person. The bigger that something, the better.
I may seem like an asshole for commanding you to go full-on sociopath on your characters, but trust me when I tell you that’s the point. Sociopaths have no emotional affect, and that’s why they’re effective sadists. If you want to be a writer, you have to be just that when it comes to conflict. I can’t sugar-coat it for you and pretend otherwise. You have to divorce yourself from your emotional attachment to your characters, otherwise any problem you create will be flat at best, boring at worst. If you want to be a good writer, you have to take perverse joy in working out ways to frustrate your protagonists. Be mean. Mistreat your characters. And do so with nerves of steel, with the coldness of a serial killer. Feelings are the enemy of good literary conflict.
Please don't get me wrong. Certainly, emotions play a vital role in the writer’s life. Robert Frost correctly asserted: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” What he meant by that was that a story — well, in his case, poetry — must be strongly felt by the writer before it can be strongly felt by the reader. But a writer must understand her emotions and have complete mastery over them so that the magic which she works will exert its spell over her readers and not over her.
“Okay, so how do you do this, P.D.?” you ask.
Simple. Plan it. I always say you should know the end of your story before you even sit down to write it. It’s a process I share with Edgar Allan Poe, who said in “The Philosophy of Composition” that you first need to hammer out what effect you want to have on your readers, and then every word, from start to finish, should move steadily towards that end. Not only will this focus your thoughts, it will also, to a certain extent, help you narrow down your choice as to the parties involved. Additionally, it will help you figure out if your story will be man against nature, man against himself, or man against man. And all of it will happen before you have an emotional attachment to your characters, the destroyer of good stories everywhere. Only when you plan will your story have direction and purpose, and a water-tight conflict and resolution.
Look, planning your story is like studying a roadmap. You’re probably not gonna wing it and go blindly from Los Angeles to Orlando on vacation; no, you’re going to get directions first. The same is true of writing. Be firm with yourself and don’t start drafting until you’ve developed a solid plan that will take you from point A to point B, and until you’ve taken a gander at your literary GPS. If you start writing before you know where you’re going, there is only a slight chance that you’ll accidentally wind up in the correct destination. Personally, that’s not something I’d count on. I’m too damn neurotic and control-freaky. And here’s why. You’ll get off on a tangent, and after you wander aimlessly for a while, hopelessly lost on some Hillbilly Hell backwoods country road, you’ll probably call off your trip and head back home long before you make it to Disneyworld. And even if you do stick with it and work on your story in a hit-or-miss fashion, there will be too many things wrong with it, and you won’t even be able to tell what those things are.
That’s because words, once they’re put on paper, have this awful tendency to be holy — especially to the young writer — carrying with them a sacredness that makes them too beautiful to change. And even if she should suspect a flaw here and there — well, what mother is going to love a crippled child any less than a healthy one? What usually happens is that she becomes even more protective, and there’s no reasoning with her when it comes to revising.
The best way to overcome this emotional resistance towards stirring up trouble is to understand that you have it, and consciously overcome it by sitting down and thoroughly planning what the conflict will be. And then, when you hammer out a concrete plan, stick to it!
But herein lies one of the most important differences between a serious writer and a not-so-serious writer. The not-so-serious writer dreams and waits for inspiration to do the work. She has a tentative idea in her head, but nothing solid. The serious writer, however, knows that she has to do the work herself, and then she does it. The not-so-serious resists planning out her story; the serious writer has long ago made story-planning a part of her writing ritual.
And by the way, planning a story doesn’t mean you’re creating a formulaic story that imitates, if not outright copies, other formulaic stories by other writers. Our skeletons basically look identical, save for a few small differences here and there, because they’ve evolved to serve a specific purpose. The skeletons of good stories, similarly, don’t look that different from one another either. In fact, Joseph Campbell noted that all adventure stories involving the hero archetype shared the exact same foundation; he charted the hero’s cycle in numerous stories, and called his discovery the Monomyth. The point is that you, the writer, make the story unique. You clothe these skeletons with flesh, blood, muscles, and tendons called character, theme, setting, style, voice, and every other component of a work of fiction. Frodo Baggins and Luke Skywalker may have begun with the same template, but they’re not even remotely alike.
And even if you start with a common template, your story will be as varied as you are. You bring the sum total of your experiences and knowledge with you to the table, and those things greatly color how you write. And it’s not just that something has happened to you, it’s how you decided to deal with that something when it happened that gives you knowledge. And all of this wealth is what will determine the theme of your story and all its component parts, and it will be the thing that takes a common conflict and makes it unique.
But the bottom line is to plan, plan, plan, and not only plan, but do so devoid of emotion. Be as mean as you humanly can to your characters; treat them like guinea pigs in a science experiment. Stow the touchy-feely, self-help, yoga crap, and only whip it out for the heat of actual composition. That way, you can have a sound story and sell it to your readers, too.
Literature
Gizen
人間の
欲に限りは
あるのかな
問い掛けるのに
答えを望む
Ningen no
Yoku ni kagiri wa
Aru no ka na
Toikakeru no ni
Kotae wo nozomu
Is there
A limit to
The human greed?
You ask, and yet
You desire the answer
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This post reminded me of the Dresden files, because when it comes to torturing his characters Jim Butcher is very, very good. I read somewhere that for the first book of the series he was a bit worried about how much he tortured his main character, but by the fifth one he was cackling evily when writing another apparently unsurmontable problem for Harry Dresden. And that's what makes that particular series so much fun to read. 
So I guess it's true, as writers we shouldn't fall so in love with our characters that we forget to torture them a little.
So I guess it's true, as writers we shouldn't fall so in love with our characters that we forget to torture them a little.