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The Good Fight
You've seen it all over the place. You've had it drummed into your skull by teachers and mentors and writing magazines and bloggers. Conflict is the cornerstone of creative writing. And it is. If there's no conflict, there'a no point to reading further. Your characters are standing around agreeing with each other. Peaceful, but nobody really lives that way. Everyone's life is a struggle in some form or another. People want to read about people under adversity who are unwilling to fail against circumstances that insist upon their failure. They want to take in some of that strength for themselves.
The Writer Giveth...
As a writer, you give your own set of characters conflicts central to the story. Where do you start building their conflicts? With the elements of their world which your characters expect. The same elements, actually, which you must change, or deny to them, in order to create the conflicts which define them.
Define and Dandy
The fights we fight and why we fight them and against what odds all define who we are. Someone who is willing to argue with a five-year-old over finding a penny on the sidewalk is defined by that action. Also defined is someone who refuses to let a child take up smoking. In both cases, the character believes strongly in something. The critical factor for any conflict, in life or literature, is that a sequence of key events before the current conflict has led the character to believe what they believe about the world. Those key events in your character's backstory could be anything from religious training to childhood friendships to adult mentors to the bully that beat them up in third grade. Our expectations of our world are rooted in our experiences, either actual or those taught to us by others. When those expectations are not met, conflict arises as we try to reconcile what we think we know about the world with what is happening at that moment.
Your Roots Are Showing
So it should be with your characters. The clearer you can make the roots of their conflicts, the more essential and understandable and real that conflict becomes. And when their conflict becomes real, your characters do, too.
Try this: look through a newspaper's police calls section. As you read the entries, think of what your character would say or do in those situations. Then ask yourself why. And expect an answer. Or else.
John Christian Hager is the author of the Turning Springs series of e-books and stories, which can be found by searching the words Turning Springs at Smashwords dot com. John is an award-winning writer and playwright who lives in northern Illinois in the USA.
Immunity saved him from the Spanish Flu
4 years ago
