Writing Tips: How To Create More Conflict In Your Story

 

Conflict in your story has to be an emotional ride for your readers. Conflict keeps your readers engaged and turning the pages. You may know this, but you’re still wondering how to implement the information.

What is conflict? A conflict in a story is a problem the main character needs to solve to achieve their goal. Without conflict, there is no story and no character development.

Conflict and high stakes relate to one another. If the character doesn’t resolve the conflict, what is at stake? What would your character lose? This is the question you should ask yourself when you’re thinking about the conflict in your story.

Stakes are essential in a story because it keeps the plot moving, challenges your character, and keeps readers turning the pages. Without stakes your plot will become flat, the pacing of your story will slow down, and the conflict will be non-existent.

Now, with deciding what your story stakes will be, it is important not to overdo it. When the stakes are too high, you risk your plot becoming unbelievable and comical.

To keep your readers engaged in your story, tone it down. Use the pull-back method. If your stake is over the top, write it down anyway. After reading it pull back 30-25% and write it again. This method will help keep your stake high but also prevent your story from being overly dramatic.

There is another concept for conflict, and that concept is death.

Why is death a great concept for conflict and high stakes? Because nobody wants to die. The ultimate fear in our society is death.

We know our time in life is limited and we don’t know when we will die, so we try to live our best lives every day. When something or someone threatens that hope, we try everything we can to prevent that from happening.

Physical death is obvious. It is the death we are all familiar with, but today I will introduce four types of death you can use when you sit down to write your story again. They are professional death, psychological death, social death, and ego death.

1. Professional Death

Professional death is when your lead character’s career or life purpose is at stake. In our society as children, they often ask us, “who do you want to be when you grow up?” Or “What do you like to do?”

There is a saying, I’m sure you’re familiar with: Life is not worth living if you’re not doing what you’re passionate about. Being fulfilled and living your life’s purpose is important in our world. There are claims having a purpose or doing the line of work you love prolongs your life.

Example: Let’s say a detective who's sober for many years has lost his daughter. He has broken his sobriety and is under the influence at his job. His boss has given him a warning he will fire him if he doesn’t get it together.

Your character loves being a detective, but he is going through a hard time. He doesn’t want to do anything else in life. His boss hands him a case giving him one last chance to prove himself; a murder that may link to his daughter’s disappearance. He takes up this case hoping that it will save his job and give him closure in life. If he does not solve this case, he can lose his job and career and when you lose something you enjoy it can feel like death its self.

2. Psychological Death

Psychological death is when a part of your lead character will die if they don’t win the conflict. The most common one is love. This death plays on the emotions of your readers.

With love stories, you know at the end of the story the two characters will be together. During the story, to keep your readers turning the pages, create an illusion of your character experiencing psychological death throughout the book.

To achieve this create obstacles and complications that would keep your lead character from getting their true love.

Psychological death applies not only to love. It could be anything that your lead character believes they can‘t live without and holds your character together. Another example, Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye is trying to remain authentic in his life and believes if he doesn’t he will die.

3. Social Death

Social death refers to the condition of people not accepted as fully human by broader society. Diverse scholars applied the expression to describe racial slavery, political economy, and other examples of social ordering.

A loss of social identity, a loss of social connectedness, and losses associated with the disintegration of the body.

Social death is when a group of people have their identities taken away and forced to assume a new more degrading identity. The person being ostracized will adopt the new identity and believe who they are and they deserve to be getting the treatment they’re getting. They will blame themselves why they’re ostracized.

Example: You can have your main character be part of an ostracized group in your story. With their new identity living everyday life living less like a human. Then your character realizes that this isn’t who they are, and they used to be somebody, and the way he and his people are living isn’t right.

First, your main character will have to reject the conditioning the people in power gave to him and adopt a new identity. This will show internal conflict, then he would have to convince his own people of his revelation. Some people will follow and some wouldn’t.

Then he will have to face the conflict with the people in power who don’t want your main character to fight back but want to keep things the way they are. With the example of social death, there is conflict coming from all sides.

4. Ego Death

Ego death is a loss of subjective self-identity. It is a term with significant ties to spirituality, mythology, and mysticism.

Ego death is a symbolic transition that results in a person being spiritually awakened.

The ego is our identity which we have created for ourselves. The ego is made up beliefs of ourselves like our personality, talents, and skills. When we form thoughts about ourselves that we agree with we form a self-image which contributes to the ego.

Ego death is where you have a dissociative experience of self. Everything you’ve identified with fades and a person panics and tries to hold on to these beliefs because without them they would cease to exist.

Example: There are ways to create conflict with the concept of Ego death. You can create a lead character that has everything he/she wants in life, but then realize their self-identity is a false illusion. Now your character doesn’t know what to do with themselves and wants to find answers.

The character is experiencing conflict because everything they once knew and believed can’t be trusted. You can go further and brainstorm how this new realization creates conflict with your character’s family, friends, job, and environment. How does your character resolve the conflicts?

Culled from The Creative Penn

How Goes the Flow in Your Story?

 

Story passages have a rhythm, a pattern, a sound. Yet I don’t want to talk about rhythm so much as I do flow.

Rhythm can affect flow, but it’s only one element that can. Let’s look at other story elements that can interfere with flow.

Stories should flow, move along without impediment, and lead ever forward. Stories should draw the reader deeper into the tale and ultimately dump him out at the end, satisfied at having taken the adventure with your characters.

Yet a smooth flow isn’t inevitable. The writer has to work to create it. And a writer could inadvertently disrupt flow, could accidentally drop roadblocks into the story, obstructions that keep the reader from smoothly following the tale.

Impediments

These obstructions come in several forms. One impediment is simply bad writing. When the reader can’t follow the meaning or the sequence of events, when he has to go back several lines or paragraphs or pages to figure out what’s going on, that reader isn’t following a smooth story flow.

Challenging a reader can be good. Frustrating a reader with sentences that make no sense or storylines that lack logic is never good. Let your plot and characters rile your readers; let the mechanics of writing remain invisible.

~  Stilted writing is another impediment. Stilted writing can come from a writer’s insistence on not using contractions or from the use of formal words, especially in dialogue. If a character is loose and easy, don’t put formal or fancy words in his mouth when he’s in an argument. If you have to look up the word, it’s likely that such a character wouldn’t know it and certainly wouldn’t use it when he was emotional. Yes, be creative in your use of words. But maintain your character’s personality with his words.

Use contractions, no matter your time period. Humans have contracted and combined words for thousands of years. Find a different way to highlight or differentiate speech of a people group or era.

If you want one character to use a more formal tone and not use contractions, make sure all the others do use contractions. And keep non-use of contractions to a minimum. Your readers will thank you.

~  Repetition of ideas or information can impede flow. Instead of it easing readers through a passage, repetition can slow them down. They start to think, “Haven’t I already read this? Didn’t the author tell me this before?” Once readers start thinking about the story mechanics and setup rather than the plot, they’ve been pulled from the fiction. You don’t want readers thinking of the words on the page—you want them thinking of what those words on that page mean in terms of what’s happening. That is, you don’t want readers thinking of the individual words at all, not even about how wonderful they are. You do want readers swept away by the meaning or tone of the words as they relate to the story.

~  Confusion is another block to good flow in a story. If readers are confused about characters because they’re too much alike or about who is doing what or about the possibilities of the actions you’ve described, story flow is interrupted.

Always keep the reader in mind. He wants to get lost in your story, has picked up your book for just that purpose. Don’t make it difficult for him when instead you could keep his attention with just a bit more diligence on your part. Use one of your editing passes to look for confusion.

Note: If you trip over any sentence or passage or even a single word, fix the words that trip you up. The reader will have more of a problem than you do, so if anything snares your attention as you read, that’s a sure tip-off that the words need work.

~  Dialect can get in the way of a smooth read and impede flow. Use a single word or phrase to establish dialect, or let the reaction of other characters reveal that someone speaks in dialect. Spelling out dialect in dialogue most definitely slows a read.

~  Redundant phrases may not only impede a reader’s journey through a story, they can also drive readers crazy.

She nodded her head in agreement.

She nodded. (We know it’s her head and we know a head nod signifies agreement.)

“Yes, I can do it,” she said in agreement.

“I can do it.” (Yes by itself is also acceptable and often preferable, but a simple yes doesn’t always reveal the character or her attitude or emotion.)

What about possible responses to this question?

“Do you think he can handle the new duties as well as take on Mr. Big?”

“Yes, I think he can handle the new duties as well as take on Mr. Big.” [Sounds like an essay that’s been padded for word count, doesn’t it?]

“He’s good.”

“He can do it.”

“Mr. Big won’t know what hit him.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“He’ll slip right in, get us set up. Don’t worry so much.”

Responses that don’t repeat the question allow the story to move forward. They reveal something about the speaker and can also reveal information about a character that the speaker is talking about.

Note: If a question is not answered right away and either story time or distance on a page separate question from answer, repetition or a reminder of the question is not only allowed but encouraged. The goal is to keep the reader flowing with the story—don’t lose them when a few words will keep them on track.

~  Unnecessary punctuation can impede flow. If a reader is confused by punctuation that’s out of place, he’s not flowing with the fiction. Brush up on punctuation and put it to work for you.

Keep in mind that periods are full stops. Too many too close together will produce stilted passages.

~  Time and the order of events can contribute to a smooth flow or create chaos, at least in the reader’s mind.

The order of events can have to do with both logic and the unfolding of plot, and sometimes you just don’t want to tell the story in a linear fashion. But once again I’ll remind you of the reader. Challenge him if you want to, but don’t forget that a human is trying to follow your story. Most readers expect story to present oldest events first and then follow with subsequent events. If you have a purpose for not following such a pattern, remain aware of reader expectation.  And be sure to compensate for that expectation.

~  Breaks affect story flow. Choose your sentence, paragraph, scene, and chapter breaks with care. The way the chunks of words are broken and interrupted and connected will affect the flow.

Longer sentences create a different feel than do short, choppy sentences. But long sentences with many digressions can also be choppy.

~  Fit words to story, to character, to genre, and to reader. We all want variety in our words, but words that don’t fit can jar the reader. And books that should be accompanied by a dictionary place a burden on the reader.

No, there’s nothing wrong with using a well-chosen word, even if it’s not a common one. But what is your goal? To use the best words for the story or teach your readers a new word? Think cohesion in terms of story elements. Think readability for the audience.

~  Combine sentences to smooth the read. Not all phrases need to be separate. You can combine in dozens of ways to smooth the feel and sound of sentences. Use conjunctions and punctuation and variety in sentence structure to please both the ear and the eye.

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Writing is not only about tricks and tools and forcing words into patterns that tell a good story in an entertaining manner. Sometimes you just simply need to write, to let the words flow from your subconscious to the page. And that flow is as important to the feel of your story as the flow achieved through attention to the mechanics.

Write with freedom; compose your plots and dialogue unfettered. You can always rein in phrasing that’s too loose. But if you don’t write loose at least some of the time, you’ll never achieve the particular flow that comes through letting go, letting yourself fling words on the page with no thought to meaning or logic or consequence.

Planning each word has its place. But so does working without a plan. Be sure you tap into both methods so your writing gets the benefits of both.

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Ensure that your plots flow without impediment and that readers flow right along with the story. Don’t be shy about getting help—ask beta readers how a passage flows. Ask them where they get tripped up in a chapter.

Pay attention to flow, to the forward motion of your stories. And remove impediments—no matter how small or how involving—so your fiction moves easily, without bumps that jar readers out of the fantasy you’ve crafted for them.

Culled from The Editor's Blog