Category: conflict

The Conflict Count

This question has come up a few times, so let me say it here: The prompts in Writing Magic and on this blog are yours to use. If the resulting fiction is published I want to hear about it so I can cheer along with you, and a print acknowledgement, if you can, is always appreciated.

On August 31, 2011, Lexa wrote, How much conflict is too much/not enough?

My story has one main conflict— Lana’s parents are killed and she finds out she has powers. The problem is nothing else ever happens.

This happens in all my novels— there is a huge, tragic conflict that I really enjoy writing, and then it’s all perfectly easy to fix it by using a spell, fighting the king, etc., after ___ pages. I find myself keeping on saying ‘Have Lana’s flashlight blink out. Make Brielle’s wings unusable. Make Demi too tired to fight’ and as a result, my story is a lot more interesting, but my reviewers say it’s “Laying it on a bit thick” and that it “Seems forced”. Please help!
I’m divining two questions here: how much conflict, and how to avoid making problems seem forced.

We find major and minor conflict in most stories . Let’s use my quest novel The Two Princesses of Bamarre as an example because it’s simple and there’s only one major conflict, finding a cure for the Gray Death.

Not that there can’t be more than one major conflict. In Little Women, for instance, there’s Jo’s relationship with Laurie, Beth’s health, the family’s poverty, the challenges that each sister presents to herself. That’s four, and I may have missed some; the result is that the book is somewhat episodic. Jo is the main main character but each of the others takes center stage sometimes. Maybe the single major conflict is a family’s struggle to bump along in the absence of the father, although that seems pretty loose.

In Beloved Elodie (I’m liking the name again), the major conflict shifts when the biggest problem gets resolved and another urgent one pops up.

If you’re writing humor, always the wild card, the sky may be the limit for major conflicts. You can toss in the downfall of civilization, lost love, dead siblings, drowned cats, a curse on green-eyed men, and the spontaneous combustion of cookbooks!

I don’t know how many major conflicts are too many in a non-humor novel, but I certainly wouldn’t want to need more than the fingers of one hand to count them. In fact, I’d worry if I went beyond three, Louisa May Alcott notwithstanding.

Returning to Two Princesses, I included many sub-conflicts: monsters, Addie’s timidity, the king’s uselessness, the developing romance with Rhys, even the equipment Addie takes along to help her. Each of these sub-conflicts themselves subdivide in various ways. There are four kinds of monsters –  dragons, specters, ogres, and gryphons – and each presents a different threat. Addie’s timidity and the king’s coldness and cowardice take different forms in different situations. Addie’s magical gear presents diverse problems too. The seven-league boots bring her perilously close to an ogre, and her magic spyglass eventually irritates the dragon Vollys.

Can you have disaster overload? Sure. Anything can go on too long. This may be sacrilege, but, in my opinion, The Lord of the Rings trilogy could do without a battle or two. Which leads to another potential pitfall: sameness. We want to vary the troubles. Lexa, I like the flashlight failure and the wings malfunction and the exhaustion, because each is different from the others. If I were reading I’d be off balance, not sure what to worry about next.

However, for your inventiveness to work you don’t want the crises to erupt out of the blue. The out-of-the-blue-ness may be why your readers say your stories seem forced. Set-up is crucial. Maybe not in the case of the flashlight, because flashlights are prone to give out, but for the wings and the tiredness, the reader should have been given a hint that the wings could stop working (I’m guessing these aren’t organic wings) and that Demi’s energy sometimes flags.

I love tucking in hints like this because I love fooling the reader. You want to suggest possible trouble while making the reader not pay attention at the same time. So, for example, fifty pages earlier when Brielle receives her wings from master wing-maker Yuri and he says, “They will not fail you,” Lana mutters, “Yuri’s pride goes before Brielle’s fall.” Then the two skip off to look at Yuri’s other amazing creations. The reader is lulled, but when the wings give out, he remembers. Along with alarm for Brielle he feels a zzzt! of pleasure when he makes the connection.

In Two Princesses I didn’t think about major and minor conflict. I never do. And Two Princesses was one of my books that was the most miserable to write. As I’ve said here and on my website, I was trying to write a novelized version of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” which has an entirely different conflict. I came to the Gray Death very gradually. Initially it was just the reason the princesses’ mother was dead. And I no longer remember how I arrived at the monsters.

The point is, you don’t need to think it all out ahead of time or plan out your conflict levels unless your mind works that way. Maybe just decide what you want your main character’s problem to be. Lexa, it’s great that that part comes so easily to you. Start writing or outlining, whichever you prefer; consider what obstacles you can throw at your main, imagine a few secondary characters with troubles of their own, and keep going. As for the hints ahead of time, you can go back and write them in, as I often do.

In the case of Lana, the death of her parents is probably permanent, and she’ll have to keep dealing with it. Your summary suggests some interesting questions: How did they die? Does Lana want revenge? Or does she want to save others or herself from suffering the same fate? Who else has powers? How are these other powerful characters using theirs? What powers?

Here are three prompts:

∙    Let’s set up a situation not so different from Lana’s. Josie’s best friend dies of suffocation, but whatever smothered her is gone. A week later another girl dies the same way. Meanwhile Josie finds that blushing enables her to teleport but only when she’s really embarrassed. She can’t fake it or squeeze her cheeks to make them red. Write Josie’s quest to discover what happened to the two victims. You can change either the cause of death or Josie’s strange power to suit your story needs. Build in at least three obstacles to Josie’s success.

∙    Take the funny road with the disaster deluge above. Write a story that involves the downfall of civilization, lost love, dead siblings, drowned cats, a curse on green-eyed men, and the spontaneous combustion of cookbooks! Handicap your main character with double vision, an inability to pronounce the letter t, and a fear of metal.

∙    The fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty” is simple. After the last fairy ameliorates the awful gift of her predecessor, the conflict is over. The finger pricking is expected and the hedge is no obstacle for the prince. Dream up more conflict. Make the prince and princess earn that wake-up kiss.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Seeking conflict

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!