I’m hoping to see a few of you tonight at the library in Chelsea, Michigan! Details on my website. Many more Reggie photos on David’s for you puppy-ophiles.
On February 17, 2011, bluekiwii asked, How do you find out what the major conflict of your story is and why do you stick to it?
I just looked up The Lord of the Rings trilogy on Wikipedia. According to that source, and I haven’t done further research, Tolkien didn’t realize right away that it was all about an evil ring held by the forces of good and desired by arch-villain Sauron. Originally, Tolkien thought Bilbo would run out of the treasure he’d found during The Hobbit and would go adventuring for more. Then Tolkien remembered the ring and developed that idea.
In the case of The Lord of the Rings, conflict is evident. Good and evil fight it out in situation after situation, battle after battle. But conflict can be much softer. Take Pride and Prejudice, for example, my all-time favorite, or any of Jane Austen’s novels. Maybe the conflict is always “the battle of the sexes,” but that trivializes what Austen does. Maybe the conflict is women against society, although against is too strong. In each book, the problem may be a particular woman, beautifully drawn in the Jane Austen way, finding happiness (and often economic security) in marriage against many odds. Or maybe the conflict is the individual in opposition to the family.
Often conflict arises out of a character’s desire and the obstacles to obtaining it. Ella Enchanted runs on Ella’s need to get rid of her curse. Black Beauty is an interesting example of this. Throughout, the horse wants to live and be treated well, but he’s a horse and can do little to influence his fate. It’s quite an achievement to write an exciting book about a passive main character. In most stories about animals, the animal manages to take matters into his own hooves or paws or mandibles or whatever.
I’d be hard pressed to say what the major conflict in my book, Fairest, is. Aza would like to be beautiful, but she doesn’t do much to get what she wants, because success seems unattainable. The conflict could be a girl against her own body. Possibly, but it doesn’t play out exactly that way. Mostly she’s struggling against the selfish and screwy Queen Ivi, and there’s also her budding romance with Prince Ijori, and also the politics of a kingdom under despotic rule.
The point is, you may not know what your major conflict is. You may write the whole story and not know. Your readers may debate the issue. As I said in my last post, holding reader interest is what counts, not what the major conflict is or anything else, and there are many ways to accomplish that.
I don’t know if you have to stick with one conflict. In my book, The Wish, Wilma gets her wish to be the most popular student in her middle school. The first part of the book is about her adjustment to popularity; the last part deals with what happens when she discovers the catch to the wish. There’s also the love interest with an unpopular boy. The theme throughout is popularity, but the story looks at the topic through a variety of moments. (If you read it, notice that the dog, an important character, is an Airedale coincidentally named Reggie.)
Another example, in my opinion, is Gone With the Wind. Initially, Scarlett O’Hara wants forbidden love; later she wants to survive. Then, later still, it’s back to love, or I’m not sure what she wants at the end.
The conflicts that I stick with, at least temporarily, are the ones that lead me to further incidents and more action – the ones that stimulate ideas. For instance, suppose we’re writing a science fiction story about space exploration. Inga is our heroine. Do we want her to have her own spaceship? Could be. Technology in the world of our story has advanced to the point that a single person can do everything to run a spaceship. If she lands on an unexplored planet alone, she’s in the middle of it with no one to turn to for help. Assuming the planet is populated with an alien life form, she has only her own resources to lean on to figure the aliens out. The advantage of this is that there’s no one to save her if she gets into trouble. The disadvantage is the absence of the complexity of personalities acting on one another. Such complexity may arise once Inga gets to know the aliens, or maybe not. If I were going to write this story, I’d think about what kind of aliens they might be and what crew mates she might have, and as I wrote notes, one of the two options would excite me, would start me thinking, more than the other, this could happen and this and this. That’s the one I’d go with, and eventually I’d start writing.
Please notice: I’m not saying that I stick to a certain major conflict because it’s good. I try not to make such judgments while I’m writing, because if I start making them, I’m more likely to think it’s bad. I keep going with something when I can. I’ve been bewailing the number of times I’ve restarted Beloved Elodie, and that’s because I reach a point where I recognize the thing isn’t working, not because I think it’s bad. In my longest attempt so far (about 250 pages) I came to a dead end when I realized that the mystery I’d set up couldn’t be solved. The next-to-longest attempt, about 140 pages, I abandoned because I’d forgotten to include any suspects. Basically when I’m onto something that I can stick with and get to the end, I do.
I’m not a very analytic writer. I don’t think about what my major conflict is, at least not in those terms. I’m more engaged in events as they happen and as far ahead as I can see. Sometimes I know what the ending is going to be. There are writers who work out what they’re doing ahead of time, who think of rising action and falling action, who number their crises and know exactly when the last lap should begin and the resolution should be formed. My method is more muddle and a dim belief that if I crawl along I’ll get to the end eventually.
I can imagine starting a story and finding that I object to where I seem to be going on, I guess, ethical grounds. Something like that happened to me when I tried to write a novel based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” I discussed this in my post on fairy tales, my favorite post for the comments it sparked. In the original fairy tale, the princesses are complicit in the deaths of an untold number of young men, and yet they’re the heroines of the story. I couldn’t write it, and I had to move the story in a new direction, to what eventually became The Two Princesses of Bamarre.
At least as important as the major conflict is what you do with it. For instance, a brother and a sister are feuding. That’s the problem. But how are they feuding? Sending each other angry emails? Subtly ruining one another’s lives? Gathering armies to conquer the other one’s half of the kingdom? Having a pillow fight?
Here are a few prompts on the theme of major conflict:
∙ Write about the feuding brother and sister. Write the seeds of the feud and how it’s expressed.
∙ Write a story in the Black Beauty mold. Write about a helpless main character and make it exciting. This is hard. See what happens.
∙ Decide for yourself whether Inga is alone in her spaceship. If you’re so inclined, try it both ways and see what happens to the story.
∙ Rethink The Lord of the Rings. Write what happens if Frodo claims the ring for his own.
∙ Lord of the Rings again. Write a story that follows the action of the final book. Come up with a new major conflict.
Have fun, and save what you write!
Rina says:
Anyone who writes on prompt number 5, come back and tell me; I'm curious.
Also, a question: what about several different types of conflict? What if there's internal conflict going on – the hero is feeling guilty about something he couldn't help – and external conflict against an enemy – and maybe then bad weather strikes and you have three types on conflict going on at once? Does anyone have any suggestions about balancing it out so that the long-term conflicts (guilt, enemy) seem as important as the short-term ones (bad weather)? (Does this make any sense at all?)
Basically, what I'm asking is, how can I make sure that different conflicts all seem important to the story and get proportional "air-time"?
– Rina/Rose
Naomi Ruth says:
Oh, Conflict. It's one of those things I almost always, always forget about. It's there (most of the time) but I keep pushing at it with a stick because I'm having too much fun with the characters and their personalities. It's always good to be reminded that one needs Conflict (and Conflict that moves the story along).
F says:
That fairytales post was my favourite too! And it helped spawn my 2010 NaNoWriMo based on The Twelve Princesses! (Now that you mention it, I forgot to make them evil…oops. I meant to, if that counts for anything…haha.)
I haven't had much time to focus on writing recently, but when I do, wondering whether the plot is following the 'correct rules' is indeed something that occurs to me. And the more I read your blog, Mrs. Levine, the more I'm convinced that there is no /wrong/ way to write things.
Also, best of luck on writing Beloved Elodie! It can get very frustrating, not being able to get the story right, and I admire you for starting over after 250/140 pages!
gailcarsonlevine says:
Rina–I've added your question to my list, but I hope others will weigh in too.
Charlotte says:
@ Rina– I'm thinking it might work to heap on reminders of all the conflict at once. When I'm feeling down, I don't usually just focus on the cause of my slump–I'll also be inwardly complaining about every bad thing that's ever happened to me, from the grass stains I go on my jeans when I was 10 to whatever terrible mark I got on my last physics assignment. What immediately comes to mind in a story perspective is Ella, and how even when she's with the elves you know she's still under the curse. I picture her getting caught out in the rain, having been locked out by Hattie. She paces around, fuming at Hattie and getting soaked and cold, and then Char comes along and offers her his umbrella, and she would rather get wet and see him stay dry, but she has to take it because of the curse. Hattie, obedience, and rain all roll together and put Ella in a miserable mood. Good luck, Char!
So I guess my point is that it's fine–good, even–to lump different kinds of conflict together in one scene.
Thoughts, anybody?
welliewalks says:
@Rina- I agree with Charlotte. When someone is in a bad situation (or just grumpy), they tend to think of everything that's bad. Things just get heaped on and heaped on. They start thinking about their hardest present conflict and then things get heaped on- the weather, a comment someone said a while ago, a paper cut, turnips… It can go on and on.
bluekiwii says:
The concepts in this post helped me alot. I always thought that novels must have one main conflict propelling the whole story forward, so the idea that the conflicts can change and evolve as the story moves along was both reassuring and insightful. The passage on how you write–building the story scene by scene, focusing mainly on capturing the reader's interest, and then later thinking of further possibilities to extend the story–helped me a lot, since I could visualize how one story was being built. I think I'll try it the way you do it and see if that helps me. Overall the advice and detail in this post was great. Thank you!
@Rina
It helps if you think of all how all the conflicts he currently has are linked (think a cause and effect chain). For example, the main character could feel guilty for failing to save someone. His guilt not only causes angst in descriptions but his guilt may also lead up to him making mistakes–hesitating to make choices, being wishy-washy, panicking instead of having a cool-head– when he has a showdown with the enemy. Suddenly, the unpredictable happens, an earthquake hits as he is fighting the enemy, and he has to run to save someone from having a building crash on top of them. By viewing each of the conflicts as being caused by another you can then order which one will have their "air time" at a certain point of the story. It helps to think of conflict as a snowball on top of a hill: its small at first but then as it continues rolling down the hill it gains more snow and gradually gets bigger until it can cause a lot of damage, hence I nicknamed this cause-effect piling of conflicts as the "snowball effect".
Phillip says:
@Rina
If your story of internal conflict and man v. man conflict is something the reader would really care about, maybe the bad weather is just setting up the other conflicts.
An example would be if a daughter feels bad about not talking to her dad in a while. She goes to visit only to find he doesn't even want to see her anymore because of something she did, and maybe she is mad about something he did. If she wants to leave and then the tornado comes and they are forced to be in a tiny tornado shelter together, the tornadoes are going to be in the back of their mind while they worry about how the two will come together again. then maybe when you want to remind the readers of the tornado, the characters realize this is as bad as the May 3rd (really bad) and they might not even make it out alive.
In this, the bad weather is just setting up the conflicts to actually make a story out of the other two.
I don't know, just a suggestion.
-Jill
Rina says:
Thanks everyone! I totally agree about the Snowball Effect. It happens to me too!
I shall remember that.
Oh, and a further question: Do you ever feel overwhelmed by all the introspection that characters do these days? How much is too much?
April says:
@Rina
It's too much when it gets boring to read—a pretty easy line to draw. If you can't tell yourself because you're too close to the story, hand it off to someone else. They'll definitely be able to say, "By this point I started skimming," or "Here's where my eyes jumped ahead."
Grace says:
I will totally have to try one of those Lord of the Rings, prompts…
I'm glad to know its okay write the whole story and not know what the main conflict is(as long as you keep things interesting, of course), I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me, haha….
Thanks for the post, Ms. Levine 🙂
Jenna Royal says:
I loved the idea of the fighting brother and sister, and all the ways they could be having their dispute, from subtle pranks to entire kingdoms at war. A really cool idea.
I'm the kid of person who tends to have a vague idea of where I'm going by the time I've written chapter one. I like having a sense of where I'm headed, but not so much that there are no surprises along the way. I guess all my stories have one or more steady plots – I've never really had an idea that involved a series of small plots. One example of a book with no real plot is one in the Anne of Green Gables series. I think it was book six or seven … Perhaps Rainbow Valley? It was a series of plots, but if there was one main plot, I was unaware of it. There was always conflict of some sort, and they usually overlapped so the reader was never left with nothing to worry about, but I don't think there was one main issue.
@Rina – I agree with what the other people said about the different conflicts. Different problems lead to new things that have to be resolved, and it cab get pretty complicated. It might help to envision yourself or someone you know in a situation like the one your character is in and ask how he/she might react, what seems realistic, and where you are going too far. I loved what Charlotte said about Ella, how all her troubles could pile up and make her miserable. We all know what that is like! It's so easy to think about all your troubles when you are feeling low.
welliewalks says:
hello!
Just wanted to say that I got Bird By Bird and it's great! I also love the writing books, Writing Magic (who doesn't?!), Juicy Writing by Brigid Lowry, and other books.