Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (19 page)

There is subtext in Rick’s last reply. There’s something about Paris he does not like. We don’t find out until later what that is:

Heinze, the humorless, charmless Gestapo man blunders in with a challenge. Rick knocks it right back at him. And once again, Renault tries to break the tension:

Rick’s response is priceless. Without giving up his pose of neutrality he jabs with a bit of American attitude:

So far, everyone is in roughly the same position as they were at the start of the scene. The initial jabs have all been met without lasting damage. Renault has succeeded in painting Rick as impartial. Now Strasser, frustrated in his initial queries, shows off a larger weapon—a dossier:

Rick meets the challenge with another sarcastic comment. The match is even to this point, even though the Nazi has the stronger power position:

The scene continues for a few more lines. The Nazi has failed to draw any blood from Rick. The confrontation has occurred but without it breaking into an overt fight (which Rick would have lost). Rick and Renault have won the exchange. Rick hasn’t given the Nazi any reason to close him down. Renault has kept things light enough that Strasser isn’t angered or suspicious enough of Rick to put him out of business.

The subtle use of weaponry above can be contrasted with a more overt duel. Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer was never one for delicacy. Here he’s talking to a cop he knows after being picked up for drunkenness in
The Girl Hunters:

Between the subdued tones of the
Casablanca
scene, and the Ali-Frazier punches of the Mike Hammer exchange, you have an infinite range of possibilities for conflict in dialogue when you see it as a weapon.

Using dialogue as a weapon is also a great way to give the reader
information
. Rather than clunky exposition (simply telling us, in narration or in dialogue, what the author wants readers to know), use a tense exchange. So long as it is organic—that is, true to the characters—it can work seamlessly. Here’s what I mean.

In this first example, the exposition comes through narrative:

That’s fine as far as it goes, but too much of this gets us out of the direct conflict of a scene. The enterprising novelist will then consider dialogue. But sometimes the dialogue looks like this:

Okay, perhaps not so clunky as that. But you get the idea. Many times, especially in the openings of manuscripts, I’ll see this kind of slipping of information to the reader.

The simple and powerful solution is to make such dialogue
confrontational.
That renders the information through conflict, which is the best way to go. Here is the first example rewritten:

A conference student once turned in a chapter to me. It contained the following (used by permission). A woman (Betty) has been planting bombs to avenge the death of her son. She now has a forensic investigator (Kate, who has been closing in on her) tied up and is threatening to kill her:

In this tense moment, Kate has revealed to Betty facts about the case, but the dialogue sounds unnatural. The long line has information stuffed into it, but it feels more like it’s for the reader’s benefit rather than the character’s.

I told the student to go back and cut all dialogue that is not absolutely true to the character and the emotional beats. What would either of them
really
say? Revised, it looks like this:

A great tool for creating instant conflict in dialogue is the Parent-Adult-Child model. I first read this idea in Jack Bickham’s
Writing Novels That Sell
(1989). Bickham, in turn. picked it up from a school of psychology popularized in the book
Games People Play
by Eric Berne (1964). This school is called Transactional Analysis.

As I explain in
Revision & Self-Editing
, the theory holds that we tend to occupy roles in life and relationships. The three primary roles are Parent, Adult, and Child (PAC).

The Parent is the seat of authority, the one who can “lay down the law.” He has the raw strength, from position or otherwise, to rule and then enforce his rulings.

As Yul Brynner’s Pharaoh puts it in
The Ten Commandments
, “So shall it be written. So shall it be done.”

The Adult is the objective one, the one who sees things rationally and is therefore the best one to analyze a situation. “Let’s be adult about this,” one might say in the midst of an argument.

Finally, there is the Child. Not rational, and not with any real power. So what does she do? Reacts emotionally. Throws tantrums to try to get her way. Even an adult can do this. We’ve all seen clandestine videos that prove this point.

So it is a helpful thing to consider what role each character is assuming in a scene. How do they see themselves? What is their actual role? (It may indeed be different than what they perceive it to be.)

Most important of all, how will they act in order to accomplish their goal in the scene?

Answering these questions can give you a way to shape your dialogue so there is constant tension and conflict throughout.

Also consider that the characters might change their roles (try something new) in order to get their way. Thus, this is a never-ending source of conflict possibilities and only takes a few moments to set up.

1. Look at all of your dialogue exchanges, especially ones that run for a page or more.
   
2. Analyze what roles the characters think they’re inhabiting.
   
3. Rework the dialogue by getting each character to be more assertive in their claimed role. (Also note that a character can change roles as a matter of strategy. For example, if the Parent isn’t working, a character might switch to pouting like a Child in order to get his way.)
   

Much of the dialogue I see in manuscripts seems loose and without real purpose. That is a waste of potential conflict. When you follow the guidelines in this chapter, your dialogue will take on an added verve that agents and editors appreciate.

I
once read a blog post by an acquisitions editor for one of the big publishing companies. She was asked what it is that causes her to turn down a book. She gave several factors, then came to:
Not remarkable/surprising/ unputdownable enough.
“This one is the most difficult to articulate,” she wrote, “and yet in many ways it’s the most important hurdle to clear. Does the proposal get people excited? Will sales reps and buyers be eager to read it—and then eager to talk it up themselves?  As my first boss used to warn us green editorial assistants two decades ago, the type of submission that’s the toughest to spot—and the most essential to avoid—is the one that is
skillful, competent, literate, and ultimately forgettable.” 

Pretty telling, don’t you think?

So is there a secret weapon for unforgettable fiction? Writers from time immemorial have searched for it, consciously or unconsciously.

Mark Twain found it. So did Charles Dickens.

Raymond Chandler used it. So does Michael Connelly.

Ayn Rand got it, and so did Jack Kerouac. That’s why two of their novels,
Atlas Shrugged
and
On the Road,
continue to sell tens of thousands of copies a year, well over fifty years after they were first published. Even though they are about as different as two novels can be.

So what is this secret weapon?

I call it the
thematic argument.

Most writers I know shudder at the word
theme
. I call it the “scary word” when I teach workshops. It brings to mind high school English papers that completely baffled you. Maybe you were told to coax out the theme of
The Red Badge of Courage
and what you came up with was completely wrong (you left out any mention of courage, a badge, or the color red).

You were clueless. And when the teacher gave his point of view on the matter, you thought to yourself,
I missed that completely. I must be a dunce.

So now you’re writing a novel and you are apprehensive about even thinking of theme. You want the story to just go. Let others worry about what your work means.

Maybe you’re like so many writers who will allow the theme to work itself out. You’ll find it at the end.

This is a perfectly legitimate way to do things, but what I’m going to suggest will be applicable to you whether you know your theme at the start or much later, upon rewrite.

If you can find the thematic unity of your book and present it in a way that is natural to the story, you will create a page turner no matter what your genre.

The key is to know what is of ultimate concern to you, and how to create conflict through “the argument.”

This will create a unified story that transcends the immediate satisfaction of the reading experience.

Think of theme as an argument the character has within himself. It’s a bit like inner conflict, only it’s a step above. It’s an argument about life, how it should be seen, how it should be lived.

Let’s take an example.

A Christmas Carol
is about a misanthrope who is redeemed via the agency of three spirits. They show him his past, present, and future, just the right scenes to get Scrooge to turn his life around.

What is the theme of the story? One way to phrase it is, the life worth living is the life lived with generosity toward others.

So what is the argument going on inside Scrooge?
Money is the only thing that means anything in this life. People are untrustworthy schemers and liars, and you have to keep them all at arm’s length. They’ll rob you blind if you don’t. And if the poorer ones die out at a rapid clip, that will reduce the surplus population and make things much better for me.

And so on.

The “meta-argument” runs through the entire story.

In fact, a great move as an author is to have your Lead character, at some point in the first act of the novel, make an argument
against
the theme.

In
The Wizard of Oz,
for example, Dorothy argues to Toto that there must be a place where there is no trouble, the place she wants to live. Maybe it’s a place over the rainbow. Let me sing a song about it.

At the end of the film, though, she has learned, there’s no place like home.

In
It’s a Wonderful Life,
what does George Bailey learn at the end? That no man is a failure if he has friends, and those friends are right there in his hometown, a hometown he’s always wanted to get away from. So, early in the flashback sequence, we have young George in the drugstore with Mary and Violet, and he tells them he’s going off on adventures, and he’s going to have a couple of harems, and maybe three or four wives.

When you finish your novel and you have solidified your theme, find a place early on for that counterargument and put it in. This provides a nice arc for the story. It shows how the thematic conflict has been settled.

Curly in
City Slickers
said the secret of life was “one thing.”

Some philosophers call that “ultimate concern.”

A guy sitting at the bar might say it’s what you’d die for.

Whatever you call it, it’s the thing or belief that unifies your life and gives it meaning.

And even if you reject meaning itself, that’s a viewpoint. You can’t avoid it.

So why not battle some of this out in your fiction?

1. Write down the one thing or person you would die for.
   

2. Write a diary entry, for your eyes only, on why this is so. What is it in your past that brought you to this point? Imagine a circumstance where this choice is presented to you. What feelings does it evoke in you to contemplate death for what you have chosen?
   

   This is the sort of feeling that is a clue to what your fiction should have pulsing through it.
   

3. Write down five characteristics you most admire in other people.
   
4. Under each of those, write a short paragraph on why you picked that trait. Is there someone you know who exemplifies these?
   
5. Write out your obituary. That’s what I said. Write out what you would want to appear in a story written about your death. No, this is not morbid. It’s one of the best ways to get at the beating heart of your own existence. This is the stuff thematic arguments are made of.
   

Use the
feelings
these items evoke and place them in your characters. Note this: Your characters do not have to be exact analogues of you. But when they care about something, it should be with the same ultimate concern you care. Lasting, memorable fiction is about extremes of passion. Those extremes may be controlled by the characters to one degree or another, but they should be running underneath the surface.

Now you’re ready to put ultimate concern in your books.

One cannot get too far into the Harry Potter series without realizing it is a narrative treatment on the ultimate question of good vs. evil. How that resolves is a question that will be debated by readers, philosophers, theologians, and college professors. But it is obviously on the mind of J.K. Rowling.

Is Harry a Christ figure? Or is he a stand-in for all of us as we confront not some evil without but evil within?

Is the epic about the conquering of a dark force outside, or, as Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite put it in a
Washington Post
piece, “The Theology of Harry Potter,” “an incredibly intimate struggle … with the friend, the neighbor, and ultimately with oneself”?

What sorts of questions does a detective novel raise? They will vary by author, of course. But the best will have the questions clear in their minds. Raymond Chandler certainly did and expressed it in his famous essay “The Simple Art of Murder”:

You may not be able to express your own thematic through-line as eloquently as Chandler, but the attempt will only help you as a writer.

Try it. As directly as you can, write down what questions your book is raising. This exercise may even help you find new streams to explore. As Madeleine L’Engle once put it, “Slowly, slowly, I am learning to listen to the book, in the same way I listen to prayer.”

But everything must ultimately be filtered through the characters. They should never be only a mouthpiece for you, the author. John Gardner, the novelist and writing teacher, explained it this way:

But what about Ayn Rand? Her novels are filled with speeches, most notably the long address of John Galt in
Atlas Shrugged.
Does that work?

For many it does, as continuing sales numbers attest. What this may tell us is that questions of ultimate concern do still matter to a large block of readers. Rand was only trying to fundamentally shift Western Civilization (that’s all!). And a large portion of the reading public gave her a listen.

If you want to write philosophical rants like Rand, you can certainly give it a whirl. But almost always it is best to have the characters truly interacting with each other, not slyly preaching to the reader. So make sure:

1. You make each character a truly complex creation; and
   
2. Justify every position. That is, each character must have a reason, or motivation, for doing what they are doing. We may not like it, but they believe they are right. You have to make that clear. And you have to be fair.
   

Then, when the thematic argument breaks out between the characters, it will seem natural and not forced.

But is there any room for a rant with thematic significance? Of course, if done with what people call “voice.”

Teachers talk about it. Agents and editors say they are looking for it. But no one can truly define it. We’ll cover it more in the
next chapter
. But for now consider the importance of voice and theme working together.

Jodi Picoult does this well in the voice of Anna, a teenager in
My Sister’s Keeper
who has a most bizarre backstory. She was conceived to be a serial donor for her older sister, Kate, who has leukemia. This raises all sorts of bioethical issues. No wonder, then, that thirteen-year-old Anna is given to ponderings like this:

If you have a series character who has established a strong worldview and voice, you can even start a novel with a thematic refrain.

Take Burke, the hardest of hard-boiled protagonists, from the series by Andrew Vachss. Burke is obsessed with the protection of victimized children. And if you hurt any of his adopted family, you will not last long in the world.

Does Burke have a worldview? Oh my, yes. And it has a name. Here is the opening of the last Burke novel,
Another Life:

Are you getting the sense Burke has an opinion?

A defining philosophy might be a simple as lawyer Mickey Haller in Michael Connely’s
The Brass Verdict.
Haller begins the novel with a reflection:

Does your Lead character have a defining philosophy? A way of looking at the world? An attitude? She should. She must.

Do a voice journal exercise. The voice journal is a free-form document you write in the character’s voice, first-person POV. Even if your novel is written in third-person POV, do the voice journal as if it’s the character speaking.