I\u2019m hoping to see a few of you tonight at the library in Chelsea, Michigan! Details on my website. Many more Reggie photos on David\u2019s for you puppy-ophiles.<\/p>\n
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><\/p>\n
I just looked up The Lord of the Rings<\/i> trilogy on Wikipedia. According to that source, and I haven\u2019t done further research, Tolkien didn\u2019t 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\u2019d found during The Hobbit<\/i> and would go adventuring for more. Then Tolkien remembered the ring and developed that idea.<\/p>\n
In the case of The Lord of the Rings<\/i>, 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<\/i>, for example, my all-time favorite, or any of Jane Austen\u2019s novels. Maybe the conflict is always \u201cthe battle of the sexes,\u201d but that trivializes what Austen does. Maybe the conflict is women against society, although against<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
Often conflict arises out of a character\u2019s desire and the obstacles to obtaining it. Ella Enchanted<\/i> runs on Ella\u2019s need to get rid of her curse. Black Beauty<\/i> is an interesting example of this. Throughout, the horse wants to live and be treated well, but he\u2019s a horse and can do little to influence his fate. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d be hard pressed to say what the major conflict in my book, Fairest<\/i>, is. Aza would like to be beautiful, but she doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t play out exactly that way. Mostly she\u2019s struggling against the selfish and screwy Queen Ivi, and there\u2019s also her budding romance with Prince Ijori, and also the politics of a kingdom under despotic rule.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know if you have to stick with one conflict. In my book, The Wish,<\/i> 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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n
Another example, in my opinion, is Gone With the Wind<\/i>. Initially, Scarlett O\u2019Hara wants forbidden love; later she wants to survive. Then, later still, it\u2019s back to love, or I\u2019m not sure what she wants at the end.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019d 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\u2019s the one I\u2019d go with, and eventually I\u2019d start writing.<\/p>\n
Please notice: I\u2019m not saying that I stick to a certain major conflict because it\u2019s good. I try not to make such judgments while I\u2019m writing, because if I start making them, I\u2019m more likely to think it\u2019s bad. I keep going with something when I can. I\u2019ve been bewailing the number of times I\u2019ve restarted Beloved Elodie<\/i>, and that\u2019s because I reach a point where I recognize the thing isn\u2019t 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\u2019d set up couldn\u2019t be solved. The next-to-longest attempt, about 140 pages, I abandoned because I\u2019d forgotten to include any suspects. Basically when I\u2019m onto something that I can stick with and get to the end, I do.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not a very analytic writer. I don\u2019t think about what my major conflict is, at least not in those terms. I\u2019m 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\u2019re 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\u2019ll get to the end eventually.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cThe Twelve Dancing Princesses.\u201d 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\u2019re the heroines of the story. I couldn\u2019t write it, and I had to move the story in a new direction, to what eventually became The Two Princesses of Bamarre<\/i>.<\/p>\n
At least as important as the major conflict is what you do with it. For instance, a brother and a sister are feuding. That\u2019s the problem. But how are they feuding? Sending each other angry emails? Subtly ruining one another\u2019s lives? Gathering armies to conquer the other one\u2019s half of the kingdom? Having a pillow fight?<\/p>\n
Here are a few prompts on the theme of major conflict:<\/p>\n
\u2219 Write about the feuding brother and sister. Write the seeds of the feud and how it\u2019s expressed.<\/p>\n
\u2219 Write a story in the Black Beauty<\/i> mold. Write about a helpless main character and make it exciting. This is hard<\/i>. See what happens.<\/p>\n
\u2219 Decide for yourself whether Inga is alone in her spaceship. If you\u2019re so inclined, try it both ways and see what happens to the story.<\/p>\n
\u2219 Rethink The Lord of the Rings<\/i>. Write what happens if Frodo claims the ring for his own.<\/p>\n
\u2219 Lord of the Rings <\/i>again. Write a story that follows the action of the final book. Come up with a new major conflict.<\/p>\n
Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m hoping to see a few of you tonight at the library in Chelsea, Michigan! Details on my website. Many more Reggie photos on David\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[189,140,141],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":455,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions\/455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}