Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (2 page)

W
hat is the goal of the novel?

Is it to entertain? Teach? Preach? Change the world? Make the author a lot of money?

All of the above?

Certainly there is nothing wrong with entertaining fiction. Nor, if the author truly feels passionately about something, trying to get a message across. Sure, even change society for the better, like Harriett Beecher Stowe and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

A writer may care about style and the poetry of words. Or defying convention and experimenting with form.

It’s even okay for a writer to make money!

But in the end, none of these objectives will work to their full potential unless they forge, in some way,
a satisfying emotional experience for the reader
.

By satisfying, I don’t necessarily mean happy. Tragedy was the original intent of drama. But as Aristotle pointed out, the idea was to create emotion and then
catharsis,
thus making the audience better citizens. So the inner experience of the audience was primary.

Genre and tone don’t matter so long as the emotions of the reader are engaged, intensified, and ultimately, after the last page, given a certain release. When you do all that you have a book that lingers in the mind long after it’s over and causes people to talk about your fiction.

And that’s the best form of marketing there is. Perhaps the only kind that works over the long haul.

Now, what jazzes certain readers may be the power of an idea. Or riffs of style. But those things work for
those readers
by gripping them emotionally.

Take Ayn Rand, for example. She touted a philosophy she called “objectivism,” which is based on “the virtue of selfishness.” Her novels are full of speeches on that subject. Even though that’s directed at the mind, those who respond to her work
feel
she’s offering a correct view of the world.

Amish fiction, a popular genre of recent years, appeals to readers who yearn for simpler times and admire strong religious convictions. It
feels good
to leave the chaos of the modern world for a little while.

On the other side of the spectrum is a novel like Elie Wiesel’s
Night,
which creates emotions like horror (real-life horror, which is the scariest of all) and deep sadness. It succeeds not because it catalogues bad acts, but because the readers’ emotions are yanked through the wringer, by way of identification with the characters.

Why is romance consistently the best-selling genre in the fiction world? Because the readers of that genre desire to
feel
something. Maybe it’s because they’re not feeling it in their actual lives and romance novels provide a vicarious experience. Maybe some are of a certain profile that loves the idea of love and wants to see it vindicated. Whatever it is, these stories sell because they provide a satisfying emotional experience for a large number of readers.

How about the genre books that are specifically designed to be short and make you cry? Again, it’s a matter of emotion. Somebody reading a Nicholas Sparks novel wants to go through a box of tissues. Sparks caters to that market. A big market.

But no matter the type of novel, you have to make it an emotional ride. Conflict and suspense are your tools for doing that.

The stakes in an emotionally satisfying novel have to be
death
.

That’s right, death. Somebody has to be in danger of dying, and almost always that someone is the Lead character.

This applies to any genre, from light comedy to darkest tragedy.

Here’s why: There are three kinds of death: physical, professional, psychological. One or more of these must be present in your novel.

This is obvious, isn’t it? If your Lead character will actually die, as in stop breathing, he had better win in the arena of conflict. Because if he doesn’t, he’s toast.

Obviously the stakes are the highest here. Win or die.

Choose a thriller at random and you’re almost always going to find physical death at stake.

It might be because the Lead character has happened upon a secret that the bad guys don’t want revealed, such as the idealistic law student Mitch McDeere in John Grisham’s
The Firm.

Or maybe the Lead character is in the “trouble business,” like Jonathan Grave, the covert rescuer in John Gilstrap’s series that begins with
No Mercy.
In each book, somebody dies if Grave and his team do not succeed.

But physical is not the only kind of death that creates compelling fiction.

When the novel revolves around the Lead’s calling in life, the failure to win should mean that her career is over, her calling a waste, her training a fraud, her future a cloud. It must mean that there is something on the line here that will make or break the Lead in the area of her life’s work.

This is the thread that makes Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series so compelling. Harry has a working rule that obsesses him. As he puts it in
The Last Coyote,
“Everybody counts or nobody counts. That’s it. It means I bust my ass to make a case whether it’s a prostitute or the mayor’s wife. That’s my rule.”

For Harry, there’s no getting around this drive, so every case becomes a matter of solving it or
dying professionally.
He is in danger of being drummed off the force at times or in not being able to go on.

Make the job and the particular case matter that much. A lawyer with the one client he needs to vindicate (as in Barry Reed’s
The Verdict,
made into the hit movie starring Paul Newman); the trainee whose law enforcement career could be over before it begins (as in Thomas Harris’s
The Silence of the Lambs);
a cop with a last chance case involving horrific killings (
The Night Gardener
by George Pelecanos).

Dying on the inside. We say that about certain events. We should say it about the Lead character. Imminent danger of dying psychologically if the conflict isn’t won.

Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye.
If he doesn’t find authenticity in the world, he’s going to die psychologically. (Does he? At the end, we’re not sure, but it’s close.) In fact, if he doesn’t find this reason, we’re pretty sure actual death—by suicide—is inevitable.

Psychological death is crucial to understand, as it elevates the emotions of fiction like no other aspect.

This is the key to all romances, isn’t it? If the two lovers don’t get together, they will each miss out on their soul mate. Their lives will be incurably damaged. Since readers of most romances know they’re going to end up together, it’s all the more important to create this illusion of imminent psychological death.

This is also the secret to lighter fare. The people in the comedy need to think they’re in a tragedy, usually over something trivial. But the “something trivial” has to matter so much to the characters that
they
believe they will suffer psychological death if they don’t gain their objective.

For example, Oscar Madison in
The Odd Couple
loves being a happy-go-lucky slob. He loves not cleaning up his apartment, smoking and eating whenever he wants, playing poker to all hours, and so on. When neat freak Felix Unger moves in, that life Oscar loves so much is threatened. In Oscar’s mind, it’s so bad he gets close to wanting to kill Felix.

Being a happy slob matters to Oscar. We believe it even though it’s trivial, and there’s the comedy.

Or take any episode of
Seinfeld
. It’s always about how important something stupid is to the characters. Like the soup in “The Soup Nazi” episode. Oh, the soup! If Jerry doesn’t get this soup, he will die inside. In fact, there comes a moment when Jerry must choose between his girlfriend, who has offended the soup Nazi, and the bowl of soup.

It’s a painful battle going on!

He chooses the soup.

Psychological death is powerful in any genre.

Let’s say your story is about someone accused of absconding with company funds. He’s an embezzler. I wrote such a story,
Watch Your Back
. In the book, Cameron Cates works for a big insurance and investment company. He devises a way to set up a false account and to transfer funds to an offshore bank.

What if there was no way he could get caught? The suspense would be mild: “Gee, how much does he get in the bank before the company stops the flow?”

Is that enough? Hardly. Thus the risk of being caught, not only by the company but the FBI, must be apparent and explicit from the start. Because getting caught in those terms means the virtual death of a long prison stretch.

John Howard Lawson pointed this out nearly eighty years ago in his classic volume,
Theory and Technique of Playwriting
. In it, he says that a conflict that fails to reach this magnitude is a conflict of “weak wills.” Lawson says, “In the Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, the point of maximum strain is generally reached in the death of the hero; he is crushed by the forces that oppose him, or he takes his own life in recognition of his defeat.”

Yes, death. Physical in classic tragedy. But also professional and psychological today.

Lawson also defines the character of drama as conflict “in which the conscious will, exerted for the accomplishment of specific and understandable aims, is sufficiently strong to bring the conflict to a point of crisis.”

This crisis, I would simply add, involves a type of death.

Do these two things:

• Think about what is at stake for your Lead character in the main conflict of the book. Define it right now. Write that down.
  
• Define what kind of death can be overhanging the action. You have to choose one as primary. You can have another from of death that comes into play during the story, but only one should arc over the story line.
  

EXAMPLE:
You’re writing a thriller about hit men chasing a former colleague who has stolen money from the “big man.” Obviously physical death is in play. It’s possible to include a subplot about the Lead’s personal life as a matter of psychological death. Maybe there is someone he has to forgive, or who had to forgive him, in order to make him whole. But the primary mode of death that covers the story is physical.

EXAMPLE:
You’re writing a legal thriller about a prosecutor with a highly publicized case his bosses at city hall want him to win … only he becomes convinced the defendant is innocent. If he says anything about it, it will be the end of his career. Professional death.

Or it’s a defense lawyer who is used to settling cases for easy resolution and fees, who gets a client accused of shoplifting. Does this involve professional death? Not yet. You have to devise the story elements that will make the case so important that it will at least feel like professional death to the lawyer.

How can you do that? You can figure out ways the client means something personal to the lawyer. Maybe it’s on older woman, the one who used to take care of him when he was a kid. He’s her only hope. She has no money and no family left. The case starts to matter to him.

Or the shoplifter is a kid who is headed down the wrong road, maybe a road the lawyer was once on. He decides to try to be the one to help the kid, who is from a horrible home. The kid does something worse while he’s out on bail, something that might mean long imprisonment. Now the lawyer has to save the kid or it will feel like he’s failed in his professional duty.

Maybe this is the story of a big-time lawyer who thinks he’s lost his mojo as a trial lawyer. Maybe this little shoplifting case is his way back to getting his confidence so he can handle bigger cases again. But if he loses, well, it’s all over. He’ll never be able to walk into a courtroom again.

The point here is to ratchet up the elements of the story so it feels like a setback is going to be horrible for the work life of the professional.

EXAMPLE:
Your story is about a thirty-year-old divorced woman who moves to a small town to start all over again. What in her background makes this essential to her psychological well-being?

Maybe her husband has kept her from pursuing her dream of being an artist. In her new town she’s determined to do the thing she loves most. But if she fails, the dream dies. She has limited funds. How is she going to gain the means to live and also fund her art?

What if her father lives in this town and she has come to reconcile with him after years of separation? What if he’s dying? If she does not get some sort of closure, she will carry an open wound with her the rest of her life. That’s a kind of dying on the inside.

EXAMPLE:
You’ve written a wild, comedic novel about a professional wrestler who decides to become an opera singer. How can you work death into it? In comedy, it’s usually something trivial that the character has elevated to enormous importance.

What if he has fallen in love with a woman who is obsessed with opera? She thinks wrestling is only for Neanderthals. To win her love (psychological death at stake), he signs up for opera lessons.

This exercise at the beginning of your novel-writing process will save you a great deal of time and stress down the line. The stronger this foundation in death, the higher the stakes of your story. And the fixes will be easier when it comes time to revise.

My working definition of a successful novel is this: t
he emotionally satisfying account of how a character deals with imminent death.

Once you understand that, you can build, organically, the links in the chain of emotional conflict. The chain looks like this:

Remember, suspense does not always mean a bomb under a table or a team of bad guys behind the hotel door. Suspense is any unresolved tension in the story that makes the reader want to see what happens next.