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#3 Facing up to Conflict

August 8th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

#3 Facing up to Conflict.

In Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Fight Club’, Tyler Durden gives his followers a special task to fulfill before they meet again: to pick a fight with someone in the ‘real world.’ As they find out, most people will go to any lengths to avoid being embroiled in a conflict. In fact the only person that fights back is a priest. Why is it so important for Durden’s muppets to seek out conflict? Why do writers have to do the same with their own muppets?

Conflict fuels change. Durden, and Palahniuk’s, point was that you can’t really begin to gain self-knowledge or realign values to cope with a new situation unless you engage in open conflict with that situation. The same is true for fiction. Palahniuk attended numerous writer courses and seminars while cutting his teeth as an unpublished writer, and this is reflected in ‘Fight Club’s’ central theme of applying plot-generating techniques to ‘real life’ with fistfuls of irony thrown in - well worth a read…

The first point to make here is that fiction requires conflict. Without conflict there can be no change, or no resistence to change. If there’s no change or resistence to change, there’s no fiction. This is so self-evident that very few writers make this kind of mistake when planning their plots.

However, the second point to make leads us to our third biggest plot-writing blunder - ’serial’ or ‘incoherent’ conflict. In such stories, the main conflict is resolved in Chapter 2 only to replaced by a new conflict that is resolved two chapters down the line… and so on. While it might be OK for TV series that runs a new, 30-minute episode every week, a a ‘Serial’ conflict structure never manages to build up enough suspense to keep us turning 400+ pages. A story that is made up of ‘Incoherent’ conflicts - conflicts that don’t involve the main character - will have us wondering what the point of all this conflict really is, and have us throwing our hands, and the book, up in the air.

Why? The answer is simple: motivation.

Popular fiction (as opposed to unpopular fiction) tracks the changes a protagonist is forced to go through to reach her goal. It takes incredible willpower to consciously change - witness how hard most people find giving up smoking. However, if your main character is driven by internal obsession (love, revenge, that sort of thing) she will not be able to avoid the kinds of conflicts that most ‘normal’ people would steer well clear of. In Philip Roth’s ‘The Human Stain,’ Coleman Silk is so driven by his ambition that he reinvents himself and cuts all ties to his family, cultural and even racial roots (I don’t want to give too much away - it’s well worth reading). His classic character flaw forces him to deal with a succession of conflicts. All the conflicts make for a powerful, coherent story because they can all be traced back to the same source - Coleman’s lie.

The other type of conflict propellent is the external situation that forces a normal, non-obsessed person to face up to a conflict that demands qualities and struggle outside of their normal life experience. Ian McEwan’s remarkable ‘Saturday’ shows us what happens when a well-ordered middle-class life is thrown off-cilter by a chance event. The protagonist is forced to contemplate his own value system, examine his own internal conflicts to gain the strength to stand up and fight. It is not until the situation gets very out-of-hand that he comes to realise what he stands for, gain a deeper understanding of his own family and call on the qualities required to deal with his assailant. Sometimes personal revelation is the hardest part of undergoing change - and all that on a Saturday.

Both the ‘Human Stain’ and ‘Saturday’ are character-driven plots that charge forward at a break-neck pace. We become entangled in the protagonist’s dilemmas, we understand their motives and we want to see them emerge unscathed but stronger. In some ways they are facing up to conflicts that we all shy away from in our everyday lives, and their strength and resilience whether in triumph or eventual defeat helps us all to examine our own motives and values without ever having to go through the bad stuff ourselves. It all makes a good paperback well worth the price.