Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (17 page)
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Authors: James Scott Bell
Boom! How will Jeff handle his current “present” in the past, knowing what happens in the future? That’s what keeps us reading the book as Jeff confronts more people, family, and events he’s already been through.
A similar riff is in the film
Groundhog Day
, with Bill Murray repeatedly reliving the same day. The past itself is the conflict here, as it is in Grimwood’s novel.
John Harvey is one crime writer who has managed to please both readers and literary critics. It’s easy to see why. In
Ash & Bone
, retired Detective Inspector Frank Elder must return to action to solve an old case. But life has not gone well for Frank the last few years.
His marriage fell apart. Bad enough. But worse was what happened to his daughter. The guilt haunts Frank still:
Three years now since his marriage to Joanne had imploded and he had retired from the Nottinghamshire Force, off with his tail between his legs, almost as far west as was possible to go. More than a year since his daughter Katherine had been abducted by Adam Keach. Abducted, raped, and almost killed. Katherine, sixteen.
What happened to her, Frank, is your fault. You nearly killed her. You. Not him
.
Joanne’s words.
Because you had to get involved, you couldn’t let things be. You always knew better than anybody else, that’s why.
Of course, he had dreams.
But none so bad as Katherine’s.
You’ll get over this, Frank. You’ll come to terms, find a way. But Katherine, she never will.
In the spring, before the trial, she had come to visit him, Katherine. They had talked, walked, sat drinking wine. In the night, he had been woken by her screams.
“These dreams,” she said, “they will go, won’t they? I mean, with time.”
“Yes,” Elder had replied. “Yes, I’m sure they will.”
Wanting to protect her, he’d lied.
Now she refused to speak to him, broke the connection at the sound of his voice. Changed the number of her cell phone. Didn’t, wouldn’t write.
Your fault, Frank.
This emotional weight from Frank’s backstory hovers over the present, complicating his personal life and affecting his work.
In Cornelia Read’s
A Field of Darkness
, Madeline Dare, a woman from old money and the upper crust, believes her very proper cousin may in fact be the killer of two young women—a crime that had gone unsolved for two decades. Talk about secrets.
But that’s just the start as Maddie sets out to find the truth about what really happened.
Or take
Trail of Secrets
and
Garden of Lies
by Eileen Goudge. Both are built on secrets and lies that construct the plots.
Phyllis Whitney, the noted suspense writer, gave wise counsel in her gem of a book
Guide to Fiction Writing
(1988):
“In the planning stage, I make sure that all my characters have secrets that will be revealed gradually during the course of the novel. Such secrets will motivate all sorts of unexpected action and furnish the surprise element that I’m trying for. Before I ever get to the writing, I examine my characters for those secrets they may be hiding, and I plan ways in which such secrets may affect the lives of other characters in the story. Secrets make a wonderful source to draw on for the element of surprise.”
- Make a list of the names of your primary and leading secondary characters.
- Next to each name, list three or four possible secrets they might have. Look especially for secrets that could have an impact on some of the other characters.
- Choose the best one from each list and brainstorm ways they might come out in dramatic, surprising, or shocking fashion in the novel.
- Write three or four scenes where a secret is revealed. See if you can work one or more of those scenes into your manuscript.
INNER CONFLICT
T
he least interesting of Lead characters is the one who is absolutely sure of what he’s doing. No doubt about it. And forward he goes. Because no one acts like that in life. We all have questions and doubts and fears. That’s why inner conflict is such a powerful force for bonding reader and character. It humanizes the character and gives us an emotional connection.
Think of this interior clash as being an argument between two sides, raging inside the character. Like the little angel and the little devil that sit on opposite shoulders in a cartoon, these sides vie for supremacy.
For inner conflict to work, however, each side must have some serious juice to it.
Here’s what I mean.
Back to Roger Hill. He has learned a secret about some very bad guys, a secret that could lead to the destruction of the United States itself.
What should Roger do with this secret?
Go to the FBI, of course. Look up the number of the local field office and call this in pronto.
That’s one side of the argument.
What’s holding Roger back?
Well, what if they want him to come in and answer some questions? And Roger has a ticket to the Laker game that starts in a couple of hours.
If he goes in, that will make him late for the game. Maybe he’ll miss the game altogether!
Is that inner conflict? Yes, but it’s weak. Terribly weak. Because it’s not strong enough to overcome the other side, unless Roger is an absolute loser of a hero (and you wouldn’t have written him that way to begin with).
So let’s jack up the other side a little.
Suppose the bad guys know Roger has the secret. And they immediately get a message to him via cell phone.
If you even think about going to law enforcement with this, we will kill your niece. You know, the pretty cheerleader with the bright future? We’re watching …
Okay, now we’re talking true inner conflict. It is a battle of
shoulds.
On the one side are all the reasons Roger should call this in. He’s a patriot. He loves America. He believes in law and order. He doesn’t want to see people get killed.
On the other side are the reasons he should not. In this case, it’s one very potent reason—the death of a beloved family member, an innocent.
A powerful technique is to put two competing emotions against each other in the same moment. There’s a moment like that for Frank Elder in John Harvey’s
Ash & Bone.
Elder is a retired inspector coming back to help on the murder of a woman he was once intimate with. Complicating that is his teenage daughter who is on a downward spiral Elder can’t seem to stop. She won’t let him get close to her, which tears him up inside.
When Elder gets the news his daughter has been arrested for selling heroin, he’s at the limit. He calls his ex-wife:
“How is she?”
“She’s all right. I mean, I suppose she’s all right. It’s difficult, Frank, you don’t …”
“I’m driving up, leaving now. I just wanted you to know.”
“Don’t, Frank.”
“What else d’you expect?”
“She won’t talk to you, you know.”
Elder wanted to hurl the phone into the far-flung reaches of the car park. Instead, he pocketed it carefully and made himself stand for some moments, perfectly still, controlling his breathing, before reaching for his keys.
Elder’s rage is tempered by his controlled physical reaction. This inner battle of emotions is seen on the page in action terms as well as through interior description.
- Find the place in your manuscript where your Lead feels the most intense emotion.
- Now, what is an emotion that would be in conflict with what the character is feeling? Where does it come from?
- Write a paragraph in which your Lead feels the opposite emotion in conflict with the intense emotion, and provide a physical action to demonstrate the conflict.
For example:
John exploded with rage. He picked up the hammer and started smashing the furniture. Every stick that reminded him of Mary he whacked.
Converts to something like this:
John exploded with rage. He picked up the hammer. He raised it over the coffee table that had been their first purchase together. And froze. Smashing it would be like smashing the part of his life that had once been good. Killing the memory of love. A memory that was keeping him sane. His gut turned over like a pig on a spit. And then he brought the hammer down with all his might.
In Stephen King’s
Rose Madder,
Rose Daniels is married to a wife
beater. A cop who knows how to hit her so it doesn’t show up. For fourteen years she’s lived with this, because he provides for her and because she knows that if she tries to get away, he can track her down. She has accepted her lot.
Until one morning when she notices a spot of dried blood from being hit the night before. A new thought hits Rose then. While she had considered that he might someday kill her if this went on, the new thought asked the question, What if he doesn’t kill you? What if this will go on and on and on?
And then the “deep part” of her tells her to get out:
“That’s ridiculous,” she said, rocking back and forth faster than ever. The spot of blood on the sheet sizzled in her eye. From here, it looked like the dot under an exclamation point. “That’s ridiculous, where would I go?”
Anywhere he isn’t,
the voice returned.
But you have to do it right now. Before …
“Before what?”
That one was easy. Before she fell asleep again.
A part of her mind—a habituated, cowed part—suddenly realized that she was seriously entertaining this thought and put up a terrified clamor. Leave her home of fourteen years? The house where she could put her hand on anything she wanted? The husband who, if a little short-tempered and quick to use his fists, had always been a good provider? The idea was ridiculous. She must forget it, and immediately.
And she might have done so, almost certain
would
have done so, if not for that drop on the sheet. That single dark red drop.
Then don’t look at it!
The argument goes on, for another page, intensifying:
She got up suddenly and with such force that the back of Pooh’s Chair hit the wall. She stood there for a moment, breathing hard, wide eyes still fixed on the maroon spot, and then she headed for the door leading into the living room.
Where are you going?
Ms. Practical-Sensible screamed inside her head—the part of her which seemed perfectly willing to be maimed or killed for the continued privilege of knowing where the teabags were in the cupboard and where the Scrubbies were kept under the sink.
Just where do you think you’re—
She clapped a lid on the voice, something she’d had no idea she could do until that moment.
Even as Rose grabs her purse and makes for the door, the inner voice of Ms. Practical-Sensible screams at her to stop. Not just that, she makes arguments:
It WILL hurt!
Practical-Sensible screamed.
If you take something that belongs to him, it’ll hurt plenty, and you know it! PLENTY!
“It won’t be there anyway,” she murmured, but it was—the bright green Merchant’s Bank ATM card with his name embossed on it.
Don’t you take that! Don’t you dare!
But she found she
did
dare—all she had to do was call up the image of that drop of blood.
The scene takes up almost four full pages. In lesser hands it would have been Rose Daniels grabbing her purse and the ATM card and marching out the front door. But King makes it a scene of conflict and suspense, conflict all within the mind of one character.
Crosscurrent emotions are almost irresistible in characterization. Inner conflict and opposing feelings are human and emotional, and connect us to the character in powerful ways.
Imagine this during the most intense physical and emotional circumstance known to us—the act of lovemaking. Anita Shreve renders an unforgettable and shattering moment through crosscurrent emotions.
The narrator of Shreve’s
All He Ever Wanted
is a professor at a small New England college. Nicholas Van Tassel has finally won his obsession, the ironically named Etna Bliss. She has told him she does not love him but has consented to marry him anyway. Unaware of her past, Van Tassel now enters the marriage bed. The narration is in the heightened language of the period (the story is narrated in 1933, looking back to events in the early part of the century):
Though one can never be absolutely certain about such a thing, human anatomy being as variable as it is, I was sure that entry into my new wife’s body had been made easier by another before me. Even as I was experiencing those moments of the greatest physical pleasure a man can know, I was composing questions that would haunt me for years.
Who
? I cried silently. And
When
? I shuddered in the way that all men will do and then rolled onto my back. … There would be no life conceived on this night. The act would, instead, give birth to jealousy—intense and fruitless and all-consuming. Love, which just moments before I had thought too domestic and tame a word for my nearly transcendent feelings for Etna, was replaced by something for which I have never been able to find a suitable name: the helplessness that descends when a cherished object has been stolen, the anger that one feels when one has been deceived.
A novel or film must move the emotions of the audience, or it is less than it can be. Or should be. Story is first and foremost an emotional experience. If it isn’t, it’s something else. It’s words on a page or pictures on a screen.
Conflict, to have value and power in a story, must engage the emotions.
Consider two openings:
Paul Osborn sat a table sipping red wine. For no particular reason he looked up and saw a man he recognized. It was someone who knew his father.
Compare that to the actual opening of Allan Folsom’s T
he Day After
Tomorrow:
Paul Osborn sat alone among the smoky bustle of the after-work crowd, staring into a glass of red wine. He was tired and hurt and confused. For no particular reason he looked up. When he did, his breath left him with a jolt. Across the room sat the man who murdered his father.
The difference is in the emotion, direct and indirect. Folsom tells us directly how Osborne is feeling—tired, hurt, confused. Telling us is not always the best way to get at emotions (see below), but in this case it’s merely setup. At least it gives us something of an emotional peg to land our attention on.
Other words contribute:
alone
and
jolt
.
But it’s the final line that hits us. We don’t have to be told anything. We can fill in the blanks for ourselves. Pow! We need to see how Osborn will react.
Everyone knows the age-old advice: Show, don’t tell. It’s solid, but needs explanation. You can’t really show a whole novel, or it would be two thousand pages long. Telling is used as a shorthand when the action is at a lower intensity level.
Years ago, I came up with an intensity scale.
Here’s what it means: When a scene is at a moment of lower intensity, you can get away with “telling” us what the emotions (or any beats) are. It’s your choice. If Mary is entering a room where she’ll get into a terrible argument with John, she might do it this way:
Mary was nervous as she entered the apartment.
Or you could choose some showing:
Mary fumbled with her keys as she unlocked the apartment door. Her hands were shaking.
The second way is more intense. If that’s what you want, fine. That’s why you choose according to the intensity scale:
But to create real emotional conflict for the reader, you have to show it. You cannot say that John was angry at Mary and expect that the emotion will translate to the reader.
To create an emotion in the reader, create the emotion on the page.
Don’t name it, make it.
Here’s a simple example:
John was angry at Mary. (Tell)
John slapped Mary. (Show)
In the novel we’re constructing, let’s say our hero, Roger, needs to talk to his old boss, a man he never really got along with. We can render it purely by showing:
Roger’s pulse quickened as he knocked on Harrington’s door. Heat rushed to his head. He saw Harrington’s face in his mind that time Harrington chewed him out in front of everyone. The memory stirred all of Roger’s nerve endings, sending him into a tremble. He opened and closed his fists. He took in a deep breath. His heart rate started to normalize. He had to talk to Harrington, so he clenched his jaw and knocked again, harder, hurting his knuckle. It throbbed.
Do we really need all that at this point in the story? Only if the past was much more dramatic than presented and only if those feelings were going to be a major part of the plot.
