Read Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense Online
Authors: James Scott Bell
Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (20 page)
Prompt the character: What’s your philosophy on life? Let her speak.
Probe a little deeper. Ask: Why do you think this way? What happened to you to make you think this way?
Here’s a bit of journal I did in the voice of Terry Malloy, the character Brando plays in
On the Waterfront:
You wanna know my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you. I don’t care what it sounds like. You don’t get it. Down here it’s every man for himself. It’s staying alive. It’s hanging with the right people so you can have a little change jingling in your pocket. That’s what you need down here, other people to get your back, and you get the guys that wanna hurt you or your brothers.
What? How’d I get this way? That any of your business?
All right, if you’ll shut up about it. I’m only going to say this once. When me and my brother were kids our old man got bumped off. Never mind how. I said never mind how. And they stuck me and Charlie in this dump they call the Boy’s Home. Man, that was some home. The head guy had a whip, a real whip, and he’d tie you down and let you have it. He used to let me have it for nothin’. He just didn’t like me, and I didn’t like him and he liked to take it out on me. I couldn’t do anything to him because I knew the law’d have me out of there and Charlie’d be alone. Charlie’s the smart one, but I’m the tough one, and he needed me around. But boy, someday I’m gonna catch up with that guy and when I do, when I do …
Knowing the thematic unity of your book enables you to use symbolism to deepen the reading experience.
One of the most famous symbols in literature is the billboard in
The Great Gatsby,
advertising the services of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg:
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
What is Fitzgerald trying to tell us with this symbol? Clearly something. A feeling. The eyes are huge and “brood” over the “dumping ground.” Could this be a symbol of God looking at the waste the world has become? Or does the advertisement point to the fading of a society based on commerce?
You may argue about that in your lit class, but surely Fitzgerald meant it to convey something that points to the matters of ultimate concern we’ve been talking about.
Time spent in pursuit of the thematic argument should not distract you from the writing of the book, or cause you endless rounds of frustration.
I’m just writing to entertain,
you might say.
Well, even that is a reflection of what’s going on inside you. I’d urge you to broaden your horizons as a way to accomplish both purposes—to entertain and to capture more readers who begin to see that your book is more than just by-the-numbers scenes.
STYLING FOR CONFLICT
T
hat elusive thing we call “style” or “voice” is another tool you can use to heighten conflict. It basically comes down to language and how we use it. We have choices over words and sentence length. We can adjust the volume in how we put the words on the page, how they look and sound to the reader.
What this means is simply this: The more distinct and variable your style, the more choices you have. And with more choices come more ways to weave conflict into every page.
Can style be developed? Can voice be trained? There are doubters. “No, I don’t think that style is consciously arrived at,” wrote Truman Capote. “Any more than one arrives at the color of one’s eyes. After all, your style is you.”
On the other hand, many famous novelists, such as Somerset Maugham, trained themselves by copying passages of writers they admired. It was all a matter of getting the sound into their heads.
My own opinion is that style and voice are like your golf swing. You can change it. You can find a way to make it better. You can practice and drill so your muscles remember how to do it. But when you get on the course, you don’t think about it. You just play.
No one has come up with an all-encompassing definition of voice. But I’ve heard agents and editors talk about it, and here is some of what they say:
- It’s a combination of character, setting, page turning.
- A distinctive style, like a Sergio Leone film.
- It’s who you are.
- It’s personality on the page.
- It’s something written from your deepest truth.
- It is your expression as an artist.
Clear enough?
Okay, how do you get there? How do you develop a voice and a style that will help in the creation of conflict?
You look at constituent parts of the novel and
go for it.
Here are some suggestions.
“One well-placed detail can save you half a page of description,” writes Monica Wood in
Description
(Writer’s Digest Books). “Telling details can be come upon accidentally in the rush of a first draft, or they can be deliberately crafted, puzzled over, and inserted into places where either your character or plot requires a certain kind of image.”
A telling detail is a single, descriptive element—a gesture, an image, an action—that contains a universe of meaning. Such details can illuminate, instantly, a character, setting, or theme.
In Thomas Harris’s
The Silence of the Lambs
, FBI trainee Clarice Starling has been dispatched by the head of the behavioral unit, Jack Crawford, to interview the notorious killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
Lecter, in his cell, asks to see her credentials. The orderly slips in Starling’s laminated ID card. Lecter looks it over, then:
“A trainee? It says ‘trainee.’ Jack Crawford sent a
trainee
to interview me?” He tapped the card against his small white teeth and breathed in its smell.
The tapping of the teeth is a telling detail, relating of course to the their use in eating people like census takers. Also, the smallness of the teeth gives off a feral vibe, adding to the menace.
But it’s the smelling of the card that really hits home. It tells of Lecter’s longing for a previous life, on the outside. It is a whiff of freedom.
Not only that, it signals his strange power to get to know people intimately without really knowing them at all. It’s a sign that he’s going to try to pull some power away from Clarice Starling. There is conflict to come.
It’s creepy, touching, and dangerous all at once.
The telling detail can give us a glimpse of inner conflict, too. In Raymond Carver’s story “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” a husband and wife are having an intense conversation in the kitchen. The wife is reluctantly going over details of what happened at a party years ago, when another man took her for a ride in his car and kissed her. The husband’s reaction as he listens:
He moved all his attention into one of the tiny black coaches in the tablecloth. Four tiny white prancing horses pulled each one of the black coaches and the figure driving the horses had his arms up and wore a tall hat, and suitcases were strapped down atop the coach, and what looked like a kerosene lamp hung from the side, and if he were listening at all it was from inside the black coach.
What is going on in the husband is revealed completely in the images and in how he relates to the images. There is no need for Carver to
tell
us how the husband feels.
That’s the power of the telling detail.
How do you find them?
- Identify a highly charged moment in your book.
- Make a list of possible actions, gestures, or setting descriptions that might reflect upon the scene.
- List at least twenty to twenty-five possibilities as fast as you can. Remember, the best way to get good ideas is to come up with lots of ideas and then choose the ones you want to use.
- Write a long paragraph incorporating the detail, then edit the paragraph so it is lean and potent. The telling detail works best when it is subtle and does all the work by itself.
In Cornelia Read’s
A Field of Darkness,
Maddie Dare is trying to solve the mystery of a decades-old murder of two young women, with her cousin a suspect.
Most of the book is written in full paragraphs. But this scene is rendered in compressed form to heighten the tension. I’m leaving out some details so there won’t be a spoiler:
I pushed against the scarred wood, expecting to find it locked. Instead it swung inward, easily, so I stepped into the darkness.
The door closed behind me.
I couldn’t see. I blinked.
There was no sound, only a smell.
Thick and rancid. Sweet.
I was alone in the dark with something dead.
I backed toward the door. Didn’t want to see, didn’t want my pupils to dilate in the gloom.
Too late. Shapes emerged, sharpening.
The walls … the bar’s solid length … The mass laid out along it – …
Compressed sentences. Sentence fragments. And they’re set off all the more because it’s not Read’s usual style.
The same effect can be delivered in dialogue. Here is an exchange between Will Graham, the forensic specialist, and Dr. Hannibal Lecter in
Red Dragon:
“Your hands are rough. They don’t look like a cop’s hands anymore. That shaving lotion is something a child would select. It has a chip on the bottle, doesn’t it?” Dr. Lecter seldom holds his head upright. He tilts it as he asks a question, as though he were screwing an auger of curiosity into your face. Another silence, and Lecter said, “Don’t think you can persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.”
“I don’t think I’ll persuade you. You’ll do it or you won’t. Dr. Bloom is working on it anyway, and he’s the most—”
“Do you have the file with you?”
“Yes.”
“And pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Let me have them, and I might consider it.”
“No.”
“Do you dream much, Will?”
“Good-bye, Dr. Lecter.”
“You haven’t threatened to take away my books yet.”
Graham walked away.
“Let me have the file, then. I’ll tell you what I think.”
Notice how the clipped dialogue feels like a sparring match. There is the “sidestep,” too, as discussed in chapter ten. These are tools you will become familiar with as your writing career continues.
Here’s a simple exercise. Look at the pages of your manuscript where the conflict is supposed to be at a high level. Does this section contain large blocks of text? See if you can shorten sentences or dialogue exchanges in order to increase the sense of opposition.
Look at the imagery Robert Crais chooses in the first chapter of
L.A. Requiem:
That Sunday, the sun floated bright and hot over the Los Angeles basin, pushing people to the beaches and the parks and into backyard pools to escape the heat. The air buzzed with the nervous palsy it gets when the wind freight-trains in from the deserts, dry as bone, and cooking the hillsides into tar-filled kindling that can snap into flames hot enough to melt an auto-body.
The Verdugo Mountains above Glendale were burning. A column of brown smoke rose off the ridgeline there where it was caught by the Santa Anas and spread south across the city, painting the sky with the color of dried blood. If you were in Burbank, say, or up along the Mulholland Snake over the Sunset Strip, you could see the big multiengine fire bombers diving in with their cargoes of bright red fire retardant as news choppers crisscrossed the scene.
Notice:
buzzed with nervous palsy; freight-trains in; dry as bone; cooking the hillsides; tar-filled kindling; melt an auto-body; dried blood; bright red.
Your word choices ought to be just right for the tone of your book and the individual scene.
How do you get at the right words?
Stephen King has stated that any word you have to pluck from a thesaurus will be the wrong word.
There’s more than a little bit of wisdom in King’s admonition. If you are substituting words that are unfamiliar to most readers, or even to you, because they sound good, the stuffy-reading-experience alarm may sound.
It’s also been said that you must write to an eighth-grade reading level, or thereabouts, in order to have a popular book.
But there is an exception. If you know the words you are using, if they have become part of you, a little elevated usage in the right place is not a bad thing.
You don’t want to have readers running to the dictionary. But you don’t have to spare them a little brain power if the context calls for it.
The more words you know, the better able you’ll be able to select the right ones for the conflict at hand. This is what style comes down to: the shaping of words for your desired effect.
Certain practices can expand your style world:
- READING POETRY:
Ray Bradbury advocates reading some poetry every day. It expands the mind and the rhythms in your mind. You have an inexhaustible supply of poetry to choose from. Here is a starter kit: Billy Collins, Robert W. Service, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Maya Angelou, Theodore Roethke, Tom Clark, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Stanley Kunitz. - REWRITE GREAT PASSAGES:
New writers can learn their craft by typing out, word for word, passages from their favorite writers. This is not in order to become copies of the masters who came before, but to learn what it feels like to write effective prose. And each author model has a particular strength to demonstrate. - LISTEN TO AUDIOBOOKS:
Hearing words read to you is a valuable way to get them into your head. You don’t even have to listen to whole books, unless you want to. Find audio of authors you admire and listen to scenes several times. Let the cadence of the words take over and do their work in your writer’s mind. - READ OUTSIDE YOUR GENRE:
Challenge yourself. Read some nonfiction and the type of fiction you don’t normally favor. Get out of your comfort zone and keep up the mental calisthenics.Then sit back down and write the best story you can. You’ll have all sorts of new ways of doing so. You’ll have style.
