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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 Palahniuk attended numerous writer courses and seminars while cutting his teeth as an unpublished writer, and this is reflected in ‘Fight Club’s’ central theme of applying plot-generating techniques to ‘real life’ with fistfuls of irony thrown in - well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.

#4 Enter Deus Ex Machina; Exit Reader

July 31st, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Enter Deus Ex Machina; Exit Reader

Ben Elton was being steered away from committing the crime of ‘Deus Ex Machina’ by a master of plot-writing. ‘Deus Ex Machina,’ translated literally as “god out of a machine,” is an unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event which drops into the story from nowhere. Its sole purpose: to resolve a situation or untangle a plot. Is your hero bound and gagged next to a time-bomb? Have a passing rat chew through the rope! Or maybe he’s in a dimly-lit basement surrounded by very pissed off gun-toting enemy agents? Have his watch emit an ultra-high frequency sound wave that pops the room’s single light-bulb!

The reaction of your target audience? Groan. The suspension of disbelief collapses taking all your carefully crafted characters with it.

Although this plotting boo-boo bears a Latin moniker, it was the Greek dramatists, notoriously Euripides, who applied the ‘technique’ with such great frequency and gusto. At the time, it was quite acceptable - the ‘God on the Machine’ was the actor playing Zeus who was lowered onto the stage by crane at the critical moment. The first recorded criticism came from Aristotle no less who argued that good tragedy should be plausible. True enough. And that was 2000+ years ago. In today’s world, unless you’re writing a ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’-style romp, you simply cannot get away with such blatant coincidence.

So, how do you fix it?

It all comes down to considering what a plot actually is. If you see it as a chain of events that sweeps your main character along from beginning to end, there’s a strong chance you’re going to be employing gods on cranes. As we’ve already seen in this series of articles, plotting an effective story stems from the motive of your characters: what they want, the obstacles preventing them getting it and what they have to do to overcome them. Once we are engaged in the character’s struggle, be it internal or external, we will not tolerate something outside the frame of the story bursting in to do what the main character couldn’t. Aristotle was right - we demand the story to be plausible, but we also demand that it is meaningful, that our main character wins or fails on her own terms.

Another aspect of the blunder is the appearance made by the machine itself. We don’t want to ’see the plot’ or hear it creaking. Not only do most kidnapping destinations not come complete with gnawing rats, nor MI6 operatives carry watches that emit UHF sound-waves tuned to the exact frequency to shatter a light bulb, we really don’t want to see the author’s little tricks. They get in the way. They spoil the fun. Why? Because as a reader, you’ll feel duped. You lowered your guard and committed to the author’s story world. Then the author let you down. She betrayed your confidence. And there’s only one form of revenge: close the book. Forever.

To wrap up, there are no short cuts to story resolution, or at least there haven’t been since about 350 B.C. It might help to picture your story as a well-constructed building. A Deus Ex Machina would be equivalent to not bothering to put a roof on. Even if your readers don’t roll their eyes and lose confidence in your ability to constuct a complete edifice, they’ll notice the draught. Nobody hangs around in a draughty house for long.

#6 (Dull) Beginning, (Sagging round the) Middle and (Lame at the) End.

July 23rd, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Dull, sagging and lame. Who would want a life like that? Who would want to be like that? Yet, it’s amazing how many stories sitting in slush piles around the world seem to have been modelled, at least partially, on this the ‘Dull beginning, sagging middle and lame ending.’

Beginning

When you sit down to read a new story, you expect to be drawn in from the first page or so. You expect to be entertained. The last thing a writer wants to do is give off ‘hold-on-a-moment-I’ll-be-right-with-you’ signals. If your reader loses patience, you lose your reader. To hook your reader from the first page, it’s a good idea to start your story where the main character’s problem/dilemma/conflict starts, or just before. You can make your back story wait until later, but you can’t do the same to your reader.

Editors going through slush piles get tired of two types of beginning:

1. the protagonist is on a journey contemplating the journey’s end and what is in store there. Editors often cite this as an example of a dull opening. If what’s in store is so interesting, start your story there. Even if it isn’t so interesting at least you’ll only have to write about it once.

2. a one-liner, often ending in an exclamation mark, that is uttered by the main character. This is not so bad in itself aside from the facts that we have no context, no idea how the voice is supposed to sound and it can make the author’s desire to make an early impact a little too transparent. No, the real problem is that 80% of the rest of the stories in the editor’s slush pile will use the same device. In light of this, it’s a good idea to wait until you are an established writer whose stories soar high over slush piles directly to the editor’s desk before you kick off with this one.

As a rule, it is a good idea to come up with a couple of principle questions that your story is going to answer, then pose them, or encourage the reader to pose them, early on.

Middle

The middle is crucial. You are going to send your protagonist down a path that will test her strengths and exploit her weaknesses to provoke a meaningful change. The story should reach a crisis point within the framework you’ve set up and lead to some form of closure. This ‘closure’ is an important plot device. It is one of the reasons novel reading is such a popular pastime. There is little or no closure in real life. Processes rarely end and results are rarely final. The kind of closure you can find in a storyl can provide a very welcome relief from reality - so much so that it has become ingrained into the structure of the novel and is often the key to evaluating how satisfactory a story is.

Again, the trick is to pose the right questions. How are you going to challenge your main character? What elements of the external plot are going to have a direct bearing on the protagonist? How central to the story is the resolution of the main character’s internal conflicts (tip: it should be pretty damn central)? How are the protagonist’s weaknesses going to hinder her attempts to resolve the crises of the external plot, and how interesting can you make these attempts?

In short, the middle is about putting the main character on the rack. As the Guardian wrote about McEwan’s recent novel ‘Saturday,’

‘Since his debut collection of stories, First Love, Last Rites, McEwan’s fiction has always dwelt at the heart of places we hope never to find ourselves in: the vacancies left in lives by the kidnapped child or the lost lover; the mined no-man’s-land that follows extreme violence or sexual obsession. His subject has always been damage and the way the darkest events in a life will drain the rest of love. For McEwan, happiness has rarely gone unpunished.

‘Thus, when Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes from his bed before dawn, feeling ‘alert and empty-headed and inexplicably elated’ and sees a plane coming down over the Post Office Tower, trailing a fireball from its wing, it seems a portent every bit as doom-laden as the sighting of comets in Shakespeare. Worse, Perowne’s world is, on this Saturday morning, entirely sure on its axis. McEwan quickly establishes him as a man of profound competence and one who never stops counting the blessings of a loving marriage and a pair of beautiful and talented children. You can hardly bear to watch.’

‘Saturday’ is a great example of a novel with a feisty middle, where the man on the rack is extremely likable and the rack is given a few extra twists. Of course, the ‘rack’ is just an analogy - you don’t have to torture your main character, but you do have to put them through something that is important and life-changing. Raymond Carver once said something like, if you’re going to write about a moment in a person’s life, you’d better make damn sure it’s one that matters. Far from sagging, your middle should soar.

End

Consider a faith-challenged priest. In the climax he solves the murder of the bishop and gets the cardinal hauled off to jail. But if the book ended there, we’d only have the answer to the external story question (who killed the bishop?). The internal story question (will the priest regain his faith?) has been left hanging.

The end scene should show, in an actual or symbolic way, what has changed because of the events of the story - specifically, how the protagonist has changed. Our priest will have regained his faith, or become convinced the loss is permanent, or in one way or another found his own answer to that internal story question. The more this scene is focused on providing the answer to that question, the more closure the readers will experience, and as we’ve already seen, closure = satisfaction.

The final scene, however short, should restore the world of your story to some semblance of equilibrium. For instance, the priest might attend the investiture of the new bishop, a humble and holy man, and experience in the ancient ritual his own return to faith. The priest’s world has not been thrown permanently off-kilter by the crisis and the protagonist’s courage in facing the conflicts has prevented a cataclysm.

You need to illuminate the changes, or the story will seem meaningless. A story is a dynamic sequence of events. It goes somewhere, often goal-directed, and leaves many ripples in its wake. It is not a static picture, and it should never be an inconsequential series of events.

What is the theme of your book? The ending ought to reinforce that theme, especially if the climax did not. For example, say the theme is, ‘We must create our faith anew if we lose the faith that was given to us.’ The climax, reached as the priest solves the murder inquiry, is external to that theme. We need further resolution - an additional scene to shed light on how the process of solving the murder (external conflict) has changed the protagonist’s understanding of faith (internal conflict). Maybe after the investiture, the priest, fighting his doubts, walks to the baptismal font and re-baptizes himself, showing that he is trying to create his new faith.

If, on the other hand, the internal issue was one of guilt and not lost faith, the priest could go to the confessional instead of the baptismal font. If the worldview is a cynical one, presenting the proposition that all those in power are likely to be corrupt, then the new bishop could be greedy and hypocritical instead of humble and honest, and the cycle of deceit, murder and revenge would begin again.

A great ending will show a tangible gesture or action that illustrates how the internal conflict has been resolved and what significance it carries beyond the story’s end. It is often a small event, one that closes the story rather than opening another one - you wouldn’t want your priest to walk out of the church, meet a woman on the steps and think, “Hey, all this celibacy just isn’t right for me after all…” Your final event should have emotional resonance, leaving your readers feeling what you have crafted your story to get them to feel - peace, empowerment, sadness or outrage.

The ending is the last experience your readers will have of your book, so make it a memorable one. Resolve the conflicts, restore the world’s balance, reinforce the theme, reflect the protagonist’s growth, and give the readers the final emotion they need to look up from your story feeling satiated. Make sure you can type ‘THE END’ in good conscience, knowing that you’ve provided an ending that is much more than an anti-climactic afterthought.

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