I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it’s the engine of the novel.
– Monica Ali
I remember years ago when I was in high school or maybe even middle school one of my friend’s mom was an artist, a painter. We were over at their house for dinner one evening and somehow we got onto the subject of Shakespeare. I made a rather elementary statement that I’d like to write a story without any conflict, that is to say without any problems or issues. Immediately my friend’s mom, the artist, replied emphatically, “Well there wouldn’t be a story then!” I thought about that comment for many years, and frankly it appears I’m still debating it over in my head today, because it has come to my dire attention that the novel I’m working on currently may not have enough conflict in it. There might not be high enough stakes if you will. This is a rather serious issue to have after being nearly 60,000 words into the thing, and suffice it to say I am feeling a bit worked up about it all.
The thing is the more I write, the more I learn both about writing but also especially about myself. If you recall from an earlier post of mine, which you can find here, I began writing poetry and only recently – say the last couple of years – did I begin to branch out into short stories and novels. And it is because of my poetic roots that I feel I struggle most with this idea of conflict and the larger concept of story arcs. In poetry there are very few rules regarding structure or form or plot. You of course can utilize them in your poems but it not the heart of poetry as plot and structure are at the heart of all novels. As a poet, I am a romantic, and as a romantic I love life and nature and beauty and the sounds and senses of things. That in and of itself is the story, if you will. John Keats states at the end of the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It is to this creed and others like it that my heart is most aligned. Many of the great novelists today it seems to me found their heart in the 19th century English novel with writers like Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, and George Elliot. And to be fair I have read and enjoy these authors as well, but I admit I don’t frequent back to them as I do the romantics.
It seems to me that because of my poetic and romantic tendencies I am less inclined to think my way into conflict as a good novelist should. In short I think I have a conflict with conflict. I don’t want to squeeze my characters into tight spaces, or chase them up into a tree and throw rocks at them as the saying goes. Admittedly I am becoming more and more aware that I need to do more of this perhaps, but I confess it is not my first inclination. I am a sentimentalist likely to a fault. I am a cheerful, romantic, who loves nature and God and beauty all around and the unique and sometimes awkward, unexpected, or contrasting ways they manifest in the world around us. That is what I see, what I love, what I live for. And I’d like, if at all possible, to somehow write novels about all that. The tricky thing as I say is that I don’t really see where the conflict lies there. What is the issue? What is the problem? I fear I am too gratifying to myself, my sentiments, and my poetics.
To write for conflict means that I must look for the negative, the obstacles, and the resistance to all that I love, to what my characters desire and yearn for, to all that is good and beautiful. I need to write with a more hard-boiled approach to conflict and antagonism that anyone like Keats or Wordsworth, Emerson, or Thoreau would advise. And to be fair I am not much of a conflict-oriented type of person. I tend to approach life in more non-confrontational ways. However all that being said, my writing persona must be marketably different than my real-life self. My writing self must feed on conflict and pain and suffering and antagonism and in challenging my characters constantly, refusing to give them the satisfaction of having and experiencing whatever they want. I must continually defer and defer and defer their gratification as I keep pushing conflict between them and their happiness until the story crescendos into a climax of great confrontation, transformation, and regeneration.
Funnily enough it would appear that my very own process with writing is going through its own stages of rising action and may be reaching its zenith here, facing conflict head on, ready to transform, adapt, and evolve into what hopefully shall amount to a more formidable, entertaining, and seamless story.