Read Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense Online
Authors: James Scott Bell
The main highway is about a mile from my apartment. I can hear the trucks at night, hauling whatever it is they haul up north toward Stockton or down south toward San Diego.
Put those lines at the top of a fresh page.
3. Now make up a character alone, in trouble, in that setting, and write a couple of paragraphs where the setting, not another character, adds to the conflict:
She stumbled up to the shoulder of the main highway. The gravel bit into her knees. How had she gotten here?
The honk of a giant truck kicked her heart. Then the lights of the oncoming monster blinded her. She threw herself backward, falling on the incline. Above her the truck slammed by, showering her with bits of tiny rock.
Try that for every one of the settings you’ve described. What you’re doing is training your mind to be on the lookout for ominous locations, which are anywhere you choose.
5. Now pick a location you’re unfamiliar with. Do you live in New York? Try Sioux City, Iowa, or Kent, England. Do some online research. Familiarize yourself with the place via travel sites, blogs, firsthand accounts.
6. Now repeat steps 1 through 3 for this new location. You will be pleased, if not downright amazed, how these exercises get you juiced about writing. That’s the magic of conflict.
7. Look at your Work in Progress (we’ll just call it WIP from now on). Go to every passage where you describe the physical location. Highlight in yellow each line that is neutral in description—that is, where the description is not adding to the tone you’re after.
Example: You’re writing about a runaway teenager arriving at a house in the dead of winter:
Icicles were under the eaves.
That’s okay as far as it goes, but you can do more:
The icicles pointed down like accusing fingers.
Highlight in red every passage that does “double duty,” that sets up a feeling or tone of conflict as well as describes.
8. Eliminate or change every passage in yellow until there are only passages in red.
Note that the conflict does not have to be outright dread (though there’s never anything wrong with that!). Even a feeling of discomfort in the character can be enhanced, thus adding to the inner conflict of the passage:
The sun beat me with unforgiving heat.
The car still smelled like Henry. She could almost hear his accusing voice from the passenger side.
You don’t have to stay at home. You can read about a setting. When something catches your eye, do a little research. One day I read a news report in
The
New York Times
that began with this paragraph:
New cracks in Hawaii’s surface continued to spew lava on Monday in the latest punctuation of Kilauea Volcano, the mythical home of the Hawaiian fire goddess Pele … The fissures prompted the closing of parts of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, including Chain of Craters Road and other trails and a campground in the area. The observatory also warned of lethal levels of sulfur dioxide near the vents. However, because the eruptions were in a “very remote area” of the park, they did not pose a threat to people or towns, said Janet Babb, a geologist with the observatory.
But in my brainstorming, there very definitely will be a threat to people and towns.
Now I can do some research on volcanoes, the campgrounds mentioned, and so on. That doesn’t mean I have to stay in Hawaii.
What if there’s an eruption of something under the earth in a campground in Arizona?
Why not? What does that suggest?
Brainstorming will tell me.
Related to setting is the
story world.
This takes not just the physical locale, but describes what happens within a certain milieu.
For example, if you are writing a legal thriller, your story world will include law offices, courtrooms, and places where lawyers hang out. You want to do research on what happens in these places, looking for natural conflict points.
If you want to write about the CIA, get to know the culture.
If you want to write about a church choir, get to know what happens behind the pulpit. Plenty of conflict points can be found there, as well.
A great place to find out about story worlds is on specific blogs. I once wrote a series of thrillers where the hero had to hide out at a Benedictine monastery. I found a couple of blogs written by Benedictine nuns. Their description of the day-to-day in the monastery was invaluable.
Story world is different from setting, which is strictly the physical locale. Instead we’re talking about what goes on in a character’s sphere—what social, professional, and personal contacts she has and how they affect her.
If you write in a historical genre you simply move the search for conflict to the past. You can do double duty here by giving a sense of place and, most important, how a point-of-view character perceives it.
In a historical novel dealing with Los Angeles in the 1920s, I had a character from the Midwest arrive in the City of Angels:
He passed through the depot, getting stares from some of the passengers and well-wishers there. He was dirty to be sure, but hadn’t they seen a guy down on his luck before?
He walked on and found himself in a place that looked like Mexico after all. A plaza and active marketplace marked the spot. Most of the people were brown skinned. A street sign announced that Doyle was on Olvera Street.
Further on he walked and seemed to pass through a curtain into a completely different realm.
Streetcars and automobiles clanged and chugged down busy thoroughfares. A thick river of people ebbed and flowed on the sidewalks—men in suits and straw skimmers, women in walking dresses and wide-brimmed hats. Signs attached to every building announced businesses and amusements—Boos Bros. Cafeteria, Loews State Theatre, Nerney’s Grocery and Meat Market, Woolworth’s Five and Dime Store, the National Hotel, Moline’s Auto & Supplies, F. W. Pierce Furniture and the towering edifice of the U.S. Post Office.
What manner of place was this?
Doyle stopped at a corner and fished a crumpled newspaper out of the trash can. It was a few pages from the
Los Angeles Times
. Some listings about real estate in a place called Lankershim—Many lots at $1450! A wonderland to come! Gateway to the beautiful San Fernando Valley!—and a caricature of a man calling himself Saving Sam, who sold automobile tires. He had a little mustache, this cartoon character, which made him look like one of those snake oil salesmen from the Old West dime novels. Doyle supposed Los Angeles was where the new hucksters were flooding. It was wide open, and there were plenty of sheep ready for fleecing.
The description is filled with detail but also the character’s feeling of being a fish out of water and perhaps a mark for con artists.
Let the readers know how your characters internalize the setting.
What sort of demographic does your Lead character inhabit? If it’s an upper-
crust, Ivy League educated set, does she belong there? Is she rebelling against it? Or has she come from the “wrong side of the tracks” and can’t quite fit in?
Create a background for your character that is in conflict with the current social setting. In Tom Wolfe’s
I Am Charlotte Simmons,
a girl from a conservative Southern town enrolls in an elite college. Her first encounter with fellow students at Dupont is when her father, who has a mermaid tattoo on his forearm, is helping Charlotte move her things into the dorm. The mermaid stands out prominently:
Charlotte caught two of the boys in the mauve shirts sneaking glances at it. One said to the other in a low voice: “Nice ink.” The other tried to suppress a snigger. Charlotte was mortified.
It becomes immediately apparent that the manners and customs at Dupont are completely foreign to Charlotte. When she is finally back in her dorm room with new roommate Beverly, Charlotte observes Beverly dressed up for a night out:
She was wearing black pants and a lavender silk shirt, sleeveless and open three or four buttonholes’ worth in front. It showed off her suntan …. She had put a peach-colored polish on her nails; it looked great on the tips of her perfectly tanned fingers.
“I’m meeting some friends at a restaurant,” she explained, “and I’m late. I’ll put away all that stuff when I come back.” She gestured toward a mountain of bags and boxes piled this way and that.
Charlotte was astonished. The very first day wasn’t even over, and Beverly was
going out to a restaurant.
Charlotte couldn’t imagine such a thing.
But that’s nothing compared to her first visit to the co-ed bathroom, where she hears a
prodigious pig-bladdery splattering sphincter-spasmed bowel explosion, followed by, in rapid succession,
plop, plop, plop
and a deep male voice …
Then another male voice from an adjoining stall comments on the noises, and the two voices go back and forth. When she tries to wash up and scurry out, she sees in the mirror two guys:
Each had a can of beer in his hand.
But that was not allowed!
And so on. Wolfe wastes no opportunity for Charlotte to run up against some strange practice brought on by her new situation. Explore those areas in your own character’s life. Social conflict is some of the best material in fiction, because it affects the inside of the character as much as the outside.
Come up with a character who has an obsession. This is the advice of Ray Bradbury, who then counsels that you follow the character wherever he starts to run.
And he will run into obstacles. He will run into people who want to stop him, throw him off his game, maybe even kill him. (Remember, there are three kinds of death. Start thinking about those now.)
What are the chief obsessions? Love, sex, money, power, fame, validation, and revenge.
For each of these there are innumerable variations on the theme. A ten-year-old girl and a fifty-year-old man can both be obsessed with fame, but for entirely different reasons. Getting deep into those reasons provides fertile soil for a story with conflict.
Make a list of the types of characters who would oppose the character’s obsession: family members, rivals, friends, enemies. From this cast, you will be able to select the best opposition for your Lead character.
I once read a thriller about a small town where people were being transformed into animal-like creatures who feasted on human flesh. One of the characters in the town, a child, was convinced her parents were not really her parents anymore.
As I read that I thought of one of my favorite movies,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(the 1956 version). At the beginning a little boy is running away from his mother because he doesn’t believe she is his mother anymore.
And I’m thinking, this novelist is liberally borrowing from the movie.
Then a bit later in the novel, it’s revealed that the animal-people are the result of biological experiments by a mad genius.
And now I’m thinking, the author has borrowed H.G. Wells’s plot for
The Island of Dr. Moreau.
I thought I’d caught this author, but then he gave me one last twist. He had a character think that the whole thing reminded him of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, and another referred to
The Island of Dr. Moreau.
He was winking at readers like me, who knew what he was doing!
And this author does know what he’s doing. His name is Dean Koontz. The book is
Midnight
.
Do don’t be afraid to borrow, steal, update, or combine old plots and pack them with conflict.
What issue in life really gets you mad? Maybe it’s political. You have plenty of issues to choose from here! It could be social or legal or spiritual.
Make a list right now of those issues that you find yourself thinking about most of the time. Now think about making that issue either the central element of your plot or a subplot strand in your novel.
But here’s the secret: You must be fair to both sides. If you aren’t you’ll get preachy and melodramatic.
Let’s take a hot-button issue like abortion. It hard to imagine something that makes for a more contentious debate.
No matter what your view, you task as a writer is to “walk in the other person’s shoes.” To see things from both perspectives and justify each position in the minds of the characters. You are not arguing before Congress. You’re writing stories about complex human beings.
If you are fair to both sides, even while advocating for one position, your book is going to be much more meaningful than if you made things pure black and white. Trust me on this. Real conflict over an issue is found in the gray areas.
Dean Koontz, in his 1981 book
How to Write Best-Selling Fiction
, had some advice for creating story line:
Sit at your typewriter [yes, he used the word typewriter] and, without a great deal of cerebral exercise, pound out a gripping opening sentence or paragraph. It is not necessary or even desirable to think about where the story will go or what it will be about before you type that opening. Just do it. The less planning you put into this exercise, the more freely you allow these narrative hooks to just roll off the top of your head, the greater the likelihood that the experiment will succeed.
As an example, Koontz tells how he was doing this exercise one day and typed the words: “You ever killed anything?” Roy asked.
He stared at the line for a moment and it seemed to him that Roy would be a boy of fourteen. Suddenly everything seemed to unfold in his writer’s mind, and he wrote two pages in ten minutes, a conversation between Roy and a younger boy named Colin. The ideas just kept flowing and Koontz wrote a quick outline. The book,
The Voice of the Night,
became a hit under one of Koontz’s numerous pseudonyms.
All because of playing the first-line game
Joseph Heller wrote this line, without knowing anything else: “In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid.” This became the genesis of his massive satirical novel,
Something Happened.
(The line was moved further in by Heller once the book was finished, but it was the line itself that suggested the larger work.)