Craft - Pt. 4 / Conflict

No life is complete without it. There are forces constantly backing us into different corners and the way we handle ourselves during these conflicts is what helps shape who we are as individuals. Conflict in fiction should be taken as seriously as the conflict(s) in your own life. This is the push/pull of individual vs. idea and can often be the epitome of the will in action.

When beginning with the idea for "Impasto," I had to figure out who my players were (since I usually start with characters first). If "Event X" is the driving momentum of the story, the reason the story exists, then Conflict for me comes shortly after. It is the action/reaction conversation the characters have with themselves or with others in the story. "Event X" affects the characters in different ways, evokes different (and often surprising or frustrating) emotions in the people you've created on the page. My married characters have a fractured history to them that I felt was necessary in order to create later conflicts in the book. The unwed characters as well, but there is a certain kind of emotional bond within a marriage or civil union that can create deeper, more meaningful conflicts. This is simply my own personal opinion. Arguments can certainly be made for other kinds of interpersonal relationships (friend to friend, lover to lover, parent to child, etc.)

When you know the full history of the characters you're creating, it's easier to have these conflicts rise up naturally in the text to block the forward progress of the characters. Conflict complicates, and complicated characters are so much more interesting and engaging to read on the page. When they make hard choices or act in a surprising way, conflict helps to further engender the characters with the reader. They become easy to relate to because the reader understands the character's mindset based on history and past actions during minor conflicts (a non-injury car crash, being dumped by a lover, a paycheck not arriving on time, etc.).

I've been reading the Lemony Snicket "A Series of Unfortunate Events" book series for the last couple of months. I'm on book 8 now and still enjoying them. It's a children's series about three orphans who get moved from foster home to foster home while being chased by a man named Count Olaf, who is trying to kill them in order to get their inheritance. As separate novels, each book is fairly formulaic with the others in the series. But the children are constantly put into situations where they have to act like the adults in order to save themselves. The adults are painted as either dimwitted and friendly or intelligent and evil. For the age range of these books, it works. In the name of Conflict, it becomes very easy to have these dimwitted adults unintentionally block the forward progress of the children in keeping Count Olaf away from them. Snicket creates intentional conflicts to continuously show us the character of these children, which always ends up propelling the story forward.

"The Hunger Games" trilogy is another set of books based towards young adult readers that does a great job of inserting well-placed and ethically interesting conflicts in the paths of the characters. Set in a future dystopian society, two kids are chosen from each of the 12 remaining "districts" that make up this post-war U.S. and forced to fight in arena battles to the death. The one winner, who has killed off the rest of the contestants, is given a home to live in and food enough for their district to survive on until the next round of Hunger Games. I'd love to give a deeper synopsis of the book, but I genuinely don't want to ruin it for those of you that haven't read them yet. Suffice it to say, while there were a few tiny plot holes here and there, I was so engrossed in the story that I went through all 1200+ pages in the course of two and a half days. I almost called in sick to work purely to finish the last novel. Everyone I've recommended this series to has fallen in love with it.

Collins does some really amazing layering of conflict upon conflict upon conflict in order to bring out interesting nuances in the actions of her characters. With so much going on, it can be easy to weigh the prose down and drag the story on and on, but Collins keeps it moving quickly without the solutions being easy to choose or carry out. She complicates the hell out of every character, which builds them up into well rounded individuals while making the reader sympathetic to their situations. The conflicts draw the reader in closer so that when the hard choices are made by the characters, we're right there with them, torn and hopeful that the decision is the right one.