Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (5 page)

1. Carve out half an hour of time for this game.
   
2. Write a string of first lines on a page, leaving a space between them.
   
3. Try various ways of opening, from dialogue to character actions.
   
4. Feel free to expand an opening line into a paragraph.
   
5. When you’ve done ten or more, stop and look them over. Which ones grab you?
   

Criminal defense lawyers are particularly reviled these days. But they have an essential part to play in our justice system. Their job, especially for public defenders, is a hard one, because, in fact, most clients are indeed guilty.

So the question they’ll get most often is, “How can you defend someone you know did it?”

The answer is, they believe in the Constitutional right to trial. That is what they are defending. So most criminal defense lawyers I know are passionately sold out to the guarantees affording those accused of crimes. This lets them do their job to the utmost, which they must if the system is to work. The Constitution of the United States is their passionate center.

What is yours? In every idea you come up with, there is the seed of your own passion if you dig down deep enough.

Let’s take a homeless lawyer for a moment. What if he is particularly upset about the way the homeless are treated in his city? How do
you
feel about it? Define that for yourself and then heat up the passion. Or you can substitute in the feelings you get about something else.

Make a list of the ten things you care about most. Then take some time to write a paragraph or two about
why
these things matter to you. Use this list as a springboard for ideas to write about.

When all else fails, there is one idea-generating game you can play anytime, anywhere. In fact, you can use this game when you’re in the middle of a project and don’t know what to write next.

You simply open a dictionary at random and plop your finger down on the page. Take the word you find and write for two minutes on whatever it brings to mind.

Then step back, analyze, and turn those notes into a basis for conflict.

I’m going to do this right now, totally spontaneously.

The word I turned to was
flash.
I wrote this:

Now I step back and look at this thing, all inspired by the word
flash.
Is there an idea lurking here that gives me a little juice?

Well, yes, the idea that Bugsy Siegel buried a million dollars somewhere.

I think I am going to leave this poor, wet woman in the cabin all alone. I hope she finds a story to be in someday.

But for now, I’m thinking there’s an ex-cop whose father knew Bugsy Siegel and on his deathbed whispered about the million bucks. Suddenly, out of nowhere, some very bad people want to talk to this ex-cop.

And I’m off to story nurturing.

This process took all of five minutes. There is no way I would have arrived at Bugsy Siegel’s millions on my own. The word
flash
led to a scene that led all the way to a random comment, which became the plot idea.

That’s the fun of the dictionary game. You never know where you’re going to end up. Once you have a trove of plot possibilities, it’s time to think about creating the solid foundation you need for conflict to be at its peak in your story. That’s the subject of the
next chapter
.

W
hen you begin to construct a novel full of conflict, tension, and suspense (and why write any other kind of novel?), you work from the bottom up.

That is, if you want individual scenes with conflict, and individual beats with tension, you don’t plug those things in at random.

You construct a solid foundation that will yield the conflict you need at every point in the story.

Without the right foundation, your story will lean away from interest, like that tower in Pisa. The poor architect, once construction started, couldn’t do anything about the too-soft soil. He couldn’t prop it up or counterbalance.

It was doomed to lean forever.

Don’t let that be true of your novel.

There are four elements that will make your foundation solid. I summarize these with the acronym LOCK:

1. Lead worth following
   
2. Objective (with death overhanging)
   
3. Confrontation
   
4. Knock-out ending
   

Now some of you are NOPs, No Outline People. You are also called “Pantsers,” as in Seat-of-the-Pants writers. You like to frolic freely through the tulips of your imagination. Every morning you prance feral and wild in the fields, falling in love with your writing, enraptured with the wonder of it all.

And some of you are OPs, the Outline People. Your spiritual father is the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz. Everything regimented and in place, for that is how you win the war!

Both sides have something to commend them, and it’s possible to dwell in between. No matter what your preference, however, you still can’t shirk the foundation.

That means you, Pantser. Even you. And believe me, if you get these right at the start, your dancing will be a whole lot more satisfying and your novel a whole lot stronger.

You can’t just throw random people together and think up some trouble and call it conflict. That may work for a page, but only because the reader is asking: Who are these people and why should I care about their trouble?

That’s the first, nonnegotiable key to conflict in fiction: The reader must care about the people it’s happening to. That creates an emotional investment in the characters and a desire to see where the trouble leads.

So you begin with a Lead worth following.

Readers become tied to the world of a story not through ideas or setting or style, but through characters. And the most important character is your Lead (or protagonist). The successful novel has at least one Lead character readers think is worth following.

First you need to know what kind of Lead you’re creating. You have three choices.

The positive Lead is what we would traditionally call the hero. He or she, broadly speaking, represents the values of the community. The community in this case is us, the readers. We support the Lead in his pursuits.

This was the purpose of the heroic myths. By going out into the dark world and conquering the monsters, the hero was representing the audience and their collective conscience.

This does not mean the Lead character is perfect. It only means that we are on his side. We want to see him victorious.

Robin Hood, even though he’s an outlaw in the world of his story, is positive because he’s on the right side. He stands for justice and protects the weak.

David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. We root for them. Clarice Starling in
The Silence of the Lambs.
Mitch McDeere in
The Firm.
Luke Skywalker. Each of these characters is in the midst of troubles, trying to do the right thing.

A negative Lead is one who is doing things that are antithetical to community values. He might be a total misanthrope, like Scrooge, who spends his days counting his own money, exploiting poor clerks, and railing against charities and Christmas.

Or she might be a self-centered coquette like Scarlett O’Hara, who wants what she wants when she wants it.

The question here is, how do you hook the reader with an emotional investment in such characters? Why, for example, would we be willing to follow a man as unpleasant as Scrooge through an entire story?

The answer is in the emotions of hope and desire.

If you introduce your negative Lead correctly, you can raise the hope that he will change his negative ways. This is, in fact, a hope for redemption. One of the most powerful emotional moments we can have in our lives is when we are shown mercy for a wrong committed, and change as a result.

Take a recent movie example. Walt Kowalski as played by Clint Eastwood in
Gran Torino.
Walt is an old, crotchety, short-tempered bigot. He hates the “slopes” who have moved in next door. Hates what’s happened to his formerly all-white, working-class neighborhood.

So why should we care to watch a character like this?

In a word,
redemption
. We watch a negative Lead to see if he will be redeemed or receive the “just desserts” of his actions.

But we must be given reasons to watch up front.

That’s why Eastwood begins his movie with Walt standing by his wife’s casket. He’s just lost her, so there is an immediate sympathy factor. That is intensified as his granddaughter comes into the church dressed inappropriately, and we hear Walt’s two sons talking in ways that indicate family estrangement.

Then there’s the scene where Walt opens up just a bit to the young priest, telling of his time in Korea, the horror of it, and how intimately he knows death. He admits that he may not know as much about life.

That’s enough to carry us through all the antisocial acts and utterings.

So the conflict in Act One between Walt and his neighbors, the local gang, and the boy is set in the context of a man who has decency inside him, waiting to get out again.

The other strong emotion relating to a negative Lead is the desire to see the character get what she deserves. In other words, wanting to see justice done. In this way, once again, the values of the community are vindicated: When bad people do bad things they are ultimately caught and punished. Our world is restored to order.

Of course, you can have a negative Lead “get away with it” at the end, which is another statement about the world. Just know that the number of successful novels written with that sort of ending is not very many.

The antihero Lead is one who does not care about the community. He is living apart, according to his own code, and does not wish to get involved in anyone else’s troubles.

Unlike the negative Lead, the antihero is not actively pursuing goals that would have a deleterious impact on others, except occasionally by chance.

The antihero may actually live apart from others, as does Ethan Edwards, the character played by John Wayne in
The Searchers.
He comes out of the wilderness, alone, and goes back to the wilderness, alone.

But an antihero may also be among people, yet still not caring to get involved with the real troubles of the community. Rick in
Casablanca
runs a popular saloon in French- occupied territory in World War II. He is allowed to run it because he takes no sides in the war effort. In fact, he says, “I stick my neck out for nobody.” That is the quintessential guiding philosophy of the antihero.

Or think of Dirty Harry Callahan, the San Francisco police detective. He is a professional. His community is the law enforcement community. But he doesn’t like their rules and regulations, so he “lives apart” from them. Which is why he is in constant trouble.

The conflict in an antihero story comes when he is dragged into the troubles of others and is forced to deal with it. Then, at the end, he can either rejoin the community or reject it once more.

At the end of
Casablanca
, Rick has rejoined the community. Having been dragged into the trouble involving Viktor Lazlo and his wife (Rick’s former lover), Rick resolves matters and walks off with his new friend, Louis, to get involved in the war effort again.

Dirty Harry, on the other hand, rejects his law enforcement community. At the end of the film, having caught the bad guy by going outside the book, Harry takes his badge and throws it into San Francisco Bay, symbolically resigning from the community. (However, a studio executive ran down and recovered it and gave it back, because the film made too much money for Harry to resign permanently.)

The antihero is popular with American readers and audiences. He appeals to their frontier spirit and rugged individualism.

What makes a character worth following? How is the reader calculating the benefits of reading the whole book?

Since the novel is an emotional experience, it follows that the Lead character must create emotion in the reader. Your ultimate task as a novelist is to play on that emotional investment—keep the reader hooked by heart.

Without that emotional investment, nothing you do with conflict, action, or suspense is going to matter. The reader simply won’t care.

Some call this the give-a-hoot factor.

From whence comes the hoot?

The approach to creating a Lead character varies widely from writer to writer. Some advocate the filling out of dossiers that ask numerous questions about background, social life, beliefs, physical characteristics, family, and so on.

Others prefer to create characters on the fly and get to know them only as the writing progresses. In this way characters grow organically to fit the needs of the story.

Most writers, I suspect, are somewhere in between. They like to do some initial work on character background, then get to the writing and fill in as needed.

Whatever your preferred method, I am going to suggest that you begin to use the element of conflict at each stage. In this way you’ll create that trouble factor that will make your Lead worth following. (Note: This approach can be tweaked and used for all your main characters.)

Begin by asking yourself what sort of feeling you want your character to engender in the reader.

Do you want the reader cheering? Feeling sorry? Getting angry along with the Lead? Loving the Lead? Or looking at her like she’s a train wreck waiting to happen?

Who are some of your favorite Lead characters in fiction or film?

Make a list, then mine that list for a clue to what you want the reader to feel.

My own list would include: Philip Marlowe, Harry Bosch, Aram Garoghlanian, Shane, Kinsey Millhone, Martin Riggs, Roger Thornhill, and Spartacus.

Each of those names creates a certain feeling in me. Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson’s character in
Lethal Weapon
) evokes sympathy and fascination with his suicide wish. That mixes with his extreme competence at his work. He’s a man who wants to die in action but is so good at that action he keeps winning.

Therein lies your first clue to using conflict to create an unforgettable character: Find two feelings that don’t generally go together and fit them into your Lead. This initial conflict immediately makes the character more compelling.

Even if you did nothing else before you started writing, this exercise will be a huge step in your writing.

Let’s try one from scratch.

We’ll be writing a suspense novel about an ordinary man who is mistaken for a long-idle serial killer. That’s your “What if …” concept.

So what sort of feeling do you want? I’d say we want to feel sorry for this guy. He will be like that Hitchcock hero Roger Thornhill in
North by Northwest
. Perfectly innocent, successful, enjoying life. Until a mistake makes the bad guys think he’s an agent for the U.S. Government. He’s kidnapped, almost killed. And then he goes to the U.N. looking for answers from a diplomat who gets a knife in the back.

We choose feeling sorry and scared for our hero, and then we’ll add to that a certain sympathy factor because he’s got attitude in the face of danger, even a little humor.

In homage to Hitchcock, I’ll call him Roger Hill. He’s thirty years old.

What sort of work or vocation does your character engage in that is a field for possible trouble?

For our ordinary man hero, what kind of work shall we think up for him?

What if he’s an accountant? You pluck that out of the air and think about it for a moment.

Where can we find conflict in his work? Let’s make him an associate with one of the big four accounting firms. Working horrendous hours. Maybe he’s been assigned to a major corporate client, using up half his billable hours every year on this one entity.

What does the stress of that work do to his family life? What if he discovers malfeasance in the corporate books and has to disclose it? What if he’s got a rival who is set on bringing him down a few pegs so he doesn’t make partner?

That’s how you do it. Brainstorm the conflict possibilities right off the bat. Don’t stop with Occupation: Accountant.

Let’s try some more on Roger’s past.

Where did he go to school?

Roger grew up in a nice burb of Los Angeles, upper end of the middle class. Went to a private high school on the west side.

What sort of conflict can we mine there?

What if Roger was into sports? Say he was on the basketball team. But he had a coach who hated him for some reason. What reason? Maybe Roger reminded the coach too much of his own wayward son, who ran away from home and died in the streets during a robbery attempt. Maybe Roger had the same sort of what-the-hell attitude the coach’s son had. The coach was determined to get Roger to submit to his will through attacks on Roger’s manhood. (Remember the drill instructor in Stanley Kubrick’s
Full Metal Jacket
?)

Just this one imagining beyond the fact that Roger went to a private high school has given us a rich vein of background to mine.

What sort of a man is Roger now, after going through that experience?

One more dossier question: What’s Roger’s romantic life like?

Well, after a few relationships Roger became engaged to the beautiful Katrina Honerkamp. She came from money. She was everything Roger wanted in a woman. But two months before the wedding she announced it was off. She’d fallen for somebody else, an actor who thought himself the next best thing to Johnny Depp.