By Mario Acevedo
The great mystery novelist Raymond Chandler wrote, “When in doubt, have two guys come through the doors with guns.” But what if you’re not writing that kind of a book? How do you keep the narrative tension taut without resorting to the threat of violence? How do you stoke character conflict without slipping into sappy melodrama?
Conflict is at the heart of any good story. And by good, I mean dramatic. And by dramatic I mean two things:
One, the story demands our attention.
Two, the story pulls at our emotions.
We’ve all seen it: spectacles get attention. Anything outlandish, viewed from a position of relative safety (which reading is), creates intrigue. Your audience wants a vicarious experience, so give it to them. Take this example: You’re in a café. You hear a background noise of conversation. Blah, blah, blah. Then someone raises his voice. Another person raises her voice. We have an argument and that escalates into a shouting match.
We bystanders can’t resist the spectacle, and if anything, we want to know more. We want the context. Why are they arguing? What do they want? What is it about their relationship that has caused this public meltdown? What’s the backstory? Are they just being drama queens or are there serious issues at stake? As spectators we’re happy to sit back and absorb the experience.
But spectacles aren’t enough. Once the surprise passes, followed by the bemusement of watching others make fools of themselves, we seldom get emotionally engaged. By tomorrow we will have forgotten the café argument because we weren’t emotionally invested. If we did care, if we did feel empathy for at least one of the participants, we would follow up to see what happened. Call. Text. Check their Facebook postings. Do that and you’ve created what we call in literature a page-turner.
The fight in the café is a great example of external conflict—a physical struggle between adversaries. What’s lacking is our understanding of their inner conflict. We know the insults and the public eviscerations of one another’s foibles (which made watching such delicious fun) are manifestations of inner conflicts. Frustration. Anger. Disappointment. Everyone has an agenda—everyone wants something—and when they can’t have it, an inner conflict emerges. And that inner conflict is the basis for tension.
Tension is the anxiety caused by an expected outcome looming in the future, the inner conflict being that we want everything to be okay. Usually, the situation is unwanted and painful: a tax audit or a breakup. But the situation can also be a welcome one: think of the anxiety before a wedding or the birth of a child.
Tension leads us to suspense, which puts the outcome in doubt. This suspense stokes the inner conflict because the character has a desire—to find love, to get a promotion, to maintain dignity—and there is a serious doubt this desire will be fulfilled.
So we see that tension and suspense are the result of conflict, but how do we portray that conflict?
What we don’t want is a long interior monologue. At some point the characters have to act on their agendas, and that action becomes the catalyst for more conflict.
And how do we express that conflict?
Let’s look at how we communicate our emotions in real life: through conversation and body language, usually subtly but sometimes loudly. Hopefully seldom with guns.
Which brings me to the two novels I’ve chosen for my upcoming eight-week novel seminar: The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown and Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. Both books are excellent examples of how to get into the heads of the characters and understand their agendas. We’ll pick apart the narratives to get at the nuts and bolts of the prose and to understand how the authors engaged us with dramatic conflict. Then we’ll learn to apply these lessons to our own writing. I trust there will be no conflict about that.
