Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (7 page)

In the early stages, the voice journal will help you “hear” the characters talk in a way that is unique to them. This is essential for making your cast of characters different from each other.

During the writing, you may also stop and ask what a character is thinking or feeling about the story. This deepens the emotions in the character and helps solidify and intensify conflict.

You should have voice journals for all your major characters and use them freely as you make progress in your novel.

The third letter of LOCK—C for confrontation—is the crux of your novel. The major conflict between your Lead character and the force that opposes him takes up most of the book.

Almost always that opposition should be embodied in another character. Jean Valjean vs. Inspector Javert. Dr. Richard Kimble vs. U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard. Randle Patrick McMurphy vs. Nurse Ratched.

Sometimes the opposition force is larger than one person but is embodied in a representative. In John Grisham’s
The Firm,
the opposition is the mafia (via the law firm that represents it covertly). But when the hammer needs to come down on the Lead, Mitch McDeere, it is in the form of a man named Devasher, the enforcer.

In
Gone With the Wind,
Scarlett is fighting against psychological death—if her Southern way of life goes, she’s lost. So she must save Tara and find a way back to high society.

What opposes her in this quest? Many characters arise, such as the carpetbagger Jonas Wilkerson, who thinks he can retake Tara through tax manipulation. Or the Union soldier who comes to Tara with rape and death on his mind.

And of course, Rhett Butler, who keeps battling for her heart.

All of this struggle is subsumed under Scarlett’s psychological need to get her Old South way of life back.

The elements can be an opposition force, of course. This is as venerable as
Robinson Crusoe
and as simple as a girl lost in the woods (
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
by Stephen King).

However, most of the time your opposition will be a single character who is directly opposed to the Lead.

You must pay as much attention to your opposition character as you do to your Lead. The biggest mistake you can make here is to paint your antagonist in broad strokes and one color. There are few things less compelling than a one-dimensional bad guy.

Let’s take a look at your two basic options.

When you have a traditional hero for the Lead, you basically have a character who is upholding the values of the community. He is doing things we would normally approve of. His goals are noble.

That doesn’t mean he’s perfect, but in general he is someone the community would root for.

The villain is one who opposes the Lead and therefore, by extension, the community itself. We root against him. We want him to fail.

But we can’t stack the deck.

The pure evil, mustache-twirling villain of the old melodramas was a cartoon character. Readers will feel manipulated.

So you have to be fair.

In fact, you have to love your villain.

I like what Harlan Coben said in an interview with
Writer’s Digest
: “I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It’s very thin, it’s made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair. And that’s where I like to play.”

That’s where you should play with your bad guy. To do that:

• Do a complete backstory for your villain. Look for those places in his past that explain why he does what he does in the present.
  
• Allow yourself to find a sympathy factor. If you can make the reader feel this, it lends a powerful current of emotion to the experience. It’s not that you’re approving of the actions of the bad guy, but you’re forcing yourself to see him as less than pure evil.
  
• Justify the bad guy’s position. No matter how bad it seems to you, the bad guy thinks he’s in the right. He does what he does because he believes he’s entitled.
  
• Give at least one beat in your story where the justification is made clear. Again, this will create a crosscurrent of emotion in the reader, and that is what you want.
  

One question that can truly force you into great territory for conflict is: Why do I love my villain? How can I love someone who is doing such terrible things?

Because it’s going to be tough love. It’s going to be as if the villain is your brother or father or son. Or sister, mother, daughter.

What matters in the confrontation phase is an opposition character who has strong reasons to be opposed to the Lead character. The opposition does not have to be evil.

A perfect example is U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard in
The Fugitive.
He is not a bad man; quite the contrary. He is dedicated to the law and is very good at what he does.

He has one job: to bring in fugitives.

Dr. Richard Kimble is a fugitive.

It does not matter to Gerard what the facts of the case are. That’s for the court system. Gerard is law enforcement, and the law says that Kimble is an escaped prisoner.

When Kimble has that one chance to plead with Gerard, telling him, “I didn’t kill my wife!” Gerard has only one response: “I don’t care!”

Is this not similar to Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables?

A final consideration for the confrontation element of your novel is the arena of conflict. Sometimes this is called
the
crucible.
I prefer to think of it as the
bonding agent
, the factor that keeps the two sides locked in mortal combat. The reason neither one can walk away.

This is crucial, because if the reader feels the trouble can be solved by simple resignation, there will be no true worry factor.

Consider the following: A woman is married to a man who beats her. She stays with the marriage as long as she can. Finally she makes the decision to get out. One day when her husband is at work she packs some things and takes the car and drives to another state. There she gets a job and begins a new life.

Where’s the confrontation? Other than a few legal papers back and forth, it isn’t there. Why not? Because the wife solved her problem by moving away from it.

So when Stephen King wrote
Rose Madder,
he knew he had to create a situation that bonded the two together. The husband became a psychopath and a cop to boot. He tells his wife if she ever tries to leave he will kill her. He knows how to get away with it. And he can track her, too, no matter where she goes.

He has kept his wife a virtual prisoner for years. She doesn’t drive, doesn’t know how to look for a job. She’s vulnerable.

When she finally does leave, we know this is not a resignation, but a “death overhanging” quest to get away from her husband.

So what are some ways to create this bond?

If the opposition has a strong reason to kill the Lead, that is, of course, an automatic bond. In a thriller, this might be represented by a secret the Lead has found out, as in
The Firm.
This mafia front cannot allow the secret to get out. Young lawyer Mitch McDeere is on their hit list.

Psychological death can also come into play. In the Bette Davis movie
Now, Voyager,
the domineering mother seeks to “kill” the nascent independence of her daughter, which is brought about by her falling in love. She tries all sorts of manipulation to make this happen.

When a lawyer takes a case, she is duty bound to see it through. A detective assigned to a murder can’t just walk away. There are professional duties that tie the Lead to the action.

The readers know and accept professional duty as a bonding agent. Just make sure you show how important the job is to your character.

A daughter is kidnapped. A father will move heaven and earth, and any number of bad guys, to get her back (e.g.,
Firestarter
by Stephen King). This is a moral duty, and no one would expect the father to resign from the action.

A friend can have a moral duty to another friend. This is what makes Neil Simon’s play,
The Odd Couple,
work. The obvious question raised about Oscar letting Felix upset his happy life as a slob is this: Why doesn’t Oscar just kick Felix out of his apartment? It belongs to Oscar, after all. The living situation isn’t working out. In other words, why can’t the problem be solved (and the bond of confrontation removed) by simply asking Felix to go?

Simon’s brilliant answer was Oscar’s moral duty to his best friend, because Felix is suicidal. His wife has left him. All his friends are worried Felix might harm himself. So Oscar has Felix move in so he can keep an eye on him and cheer him up.

Moral duty is a strong bonding agent.

Sometimes the locale itself may hold the confronting parties together.

Casablanca is such a location. People cannot get out of Casablanca without the proper papers, and intrigue swirls around within the walls of Rick’s café.

A snowbound hotel full of ghosts is another example (
The Shining
)
.

A city where a person’s life work is located may be another such bond. A cop, for example, is bound to his venue.

Ask yourself this question before you begin plotting in earnest: Is there an obvious way out of the “death struggle”?

Can either side solve the problem by resigning, relocating, or making some other simple change?

Close off all avenues of escape. This is the only way confrontation and suspense can build.

One aspect of the opposition we haven’t mentioned is whether we know who it is or not. In a mystery or thriller, it is common for the opponent to be hidden from the Lead until the final battle.

Mysteries traditionally bank on the unknown. Think of the clever criminal trying to avoid the little gray cells of Hercule Poirot. He gathers his clues then gathers the suspects to reveal the truth.

But the same riff can be part of a thriller where the Lead has no idea where the danger comes from, or why it’s focused on him. The “reveal” can happen well into the book, or even at the end.

Hollywood movies usually show us both sides, as in
Speed,
which cuts back and forth between those on the “bus that cannot slow down” and the crazy bomber played by Dennis Hopper. From the perspective of the cop and the passengers, they are dealing only with a voice.

In a novel, you have the choice of what to reveal.

When you go to a concert, after shelling out for tickets and dressing up in your evening best, you don’t want to sit down and listen to an orchestra of oboes.

Nor do you want to have every instrument play exactly the same note.

What you hope for is the pleasing sound of different instruments coming together in just the right ways, creating the notes and resonance that add up to a great musical experience.

That’s what we call orchestration. It is the assembling of parts for a desired effect.

In a novel, the parts you use to orchestrate conflict are called characters.

That’s where it all starts. If you create bland, undistinguished characters, your chances of building page-turning conflict will fail.

One of the great strengths—perhaps the greatest—of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels is her orchestration of characters for conflict. It begins right in the first chapter of the first book,
One for the Money,
where we meet Joe Morelli, a literal bad boy who grows up into more bad boyness.
He’d grown up big and bad, with eyes like black fire one minute and melt-in-your-mouth chocolate the next.

Notice that Evanovich builds conflict right into the description of Joe Morelli. This will show up in Stephanie’s own conflicted feelings about him as the stories progress. Within three pages we’re told that Morelli, who “specializes in virgins,” has his way with Stephanie behind a case of chocolate eclairs in the Tasty Pastry.

Then disappears from her life for three years.

Until the day Stephanie sees Morelli in front of the meat market. She is driving her father’s Buick and guns it, jumps the curb, and bounces Morelli off the hood. She gets out and asks if anything’s broken. He says his leg. She says, “Good,” gets back in the car and drives off.

Now that is how you characterize for conflict! In just the first few pages we have a distinct description, action, and confrontation. Running a car into someone is sort of the definition of conflict, wouldn’t you say?

But Evanovich doesn’t stop there. Even as Stephanie must deal with Morelli, there’s another man in her life, another bad boy named Ricardo “Ranger” Mañoso. Orchestrating for conflict, Evanovich makes Ranger
Cuban-American, former Special Forces, slick black hair in a ponytail, and a buff don’t-mess-with-me body.

The first time they meet, it’s to establish a working relationship. Ranger is going to train Stephanie in the ways of the bounty hunter. And their first case is brining in, you guessed it, Joe Morelli.

Now we have a triangular conflict, set up from the very start.

Of course, the Plum novels are peppered with great supporting and minor characters, who add up to endless possibilities for conflict. Plum herself is “the blue-eyed, fair-skinned product of a Hungarian-Italian union.” The other characters she runs across are cast to be different.

Like Lula, African American filing clerk, large and in charge, crammed into Spandex.

Or Grandma Mazur, seventy-something grandmother who, in her skivvies, resembles a soup chicken.

And all down the line. Evanovich gives us all the color and spice and potential conflict because of her great characterizations.