Chapter Twenty-Two

Strengthening the Conflict

How to Fuel Your Novel with Complications

Jack Smith

Conflict is the engine that makes the story run. It is essential to creating a strong character, one who's more than a portrait, one who becomes real by undergoing struggles and coming to some realization about self or world. This is what makes the character interesting—as well as the story. We would find it utterly boring to read a story where no conflict occurred, where everyone got along just fine, where no one lost her job, no one lost out in romance, everyone had absolutely everything they needed, no one ever got ill or died. Serious fiction, like life, includes many rug pullings. We may not want the grim, but we do want to experience fiction that deals honestly with humans and their condition, and clearly the lot of humans is not sheer pleasure or endless happiness, but pain as well.

You will surely be working with characterization as you deal with important aspects of conflict—the two elements are not separate but intricately entwined.

RAISING THE STAKES

Are the stakes high enough? What is the character’s investment in his goal? First, the stakes need to be high enough that the reader cares. Secondly, they have to be believable, given everything we know about this character in these circumstances.

We can think of stakes in relation to one or more human needs and desires:

• Material: In Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, works in horrible conditions at a meatpacking plant. The stakes are certainly high for this character—his basic survival is on the line. It may seem too obvious to point out that we have a different expression of material need in D.H. Lawrence’s short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” But I mention it only for contrast to emphasize that you must consider the makeup of your character, her circumstances, and so forth, in deciding the stakes. What’s at stake must be firmly grounded in character. What is at stake in Lawrence’s story? More and more money is required—an endless supply of it. The stakes may not seem as high as those in Sinclair’s novel, but they are indeed very high because of the mother’s desperate desire for money and social class. Without this desire we couldn’t accept Paul riding to his death on the rocking horse.
• Emotional: Romantic love stories set the stakes high when characters are miserable in love: They must have their beloved or perish. But would a character kill for love—thinking that this is the only way to achieve what she wants? Certainly, the stakes are high enough here to generate reader interest, but now the burden falls on the writer to make sure this action is believable. In A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, Ron Hansen makes us believe that Ruth Snyder is able to convince Judd Gray, driven by his lust for her, to kill her husband, whom she loathes.
• Psychological: A character may be vulnerable in terms of self-esteem and a sense of personal worth. In Alicia Erian’s Towelhead, her young female protagonist, Jasira, finds no genuine love in either parent. She seeks an outlet for her sense of personal emptiness and engages in increasingly dangerous sexual rebellion. Clearly the stakes are high in this story: Will Jasira discover who she really is and steer a path toward self-affirming behavior? For readers, this issue matters, and Erian grounds her character’s crisis of self in both character and circumstance.
• Intellectual or cultural: Why are the intellectual and cultural so important to this character? What would happen if he were deprived of intellectual stimulation, art, or culture? Thomas Hardy explores this question with great force in Jude the Obscure. For Jude Fawley, Christminster represents the august halls of learning and culture. Much is at stake. To enter the lofty fold, he devotes himself to study and to breaking free from his social class limitations as a stonemason, though in Hardy’s naturalistic novel, fate has other plans for him.
• Social: For Madame Bovary, the need is both emotional and social. Steeped in sentimental novels and stuck in a marriage with a boring country doctor, Madame Bovary craves the excitement and social engagement of the grand balls. Her dull, provincial conditions are intolerable to her. She longs to be a gentlewoman. The stakes are truly high for her. It’s a life-or-death proposition for Madame Bovary, and she will have nothing but this life she has sought out. When things go sour, she ultimately kills herself by ingesting arsenic.

When the stakes are high enough, the reader is interested in the character. Of course, readers expect struggle—and this is where a worthy antagonist comes in.

MATCHING THE PROTAGONIST WITH A WORTHY OPPONENT

In attempting to achieve what they want, or to avoid what they don’t want, protagonists often struggle against antagonists—persons, groups, or whole systems.

What makes a worthy opponent? It’s certainly not one who is easily defeated with little or no struggle. Readers expect an antagonist mighty enough to cause a rug pulling.

Antagonists are often single individuals with goals of their own that compete with the protagonist’s goal. If the resolution is difficult, if antagonists relentlessly stand their ground, they are certainly worthy opponents. Several examples from literature come to mind, and they are all quite different. The Scarlet Letter has the arch-villain Roger Chillingworth, who sets out to avenge his lost honor and destroy Arthur Dimmesdale. Daisy Miller has Mrs. Walker, who shuns Daisy for her uncultured, unseemly behavior in Roman society. Whereas Chillingworth is a melodramatic figure of evil in Hawthorne’s romance, Mrs. Walker is a much more realistic figure who is under the illusion that she is doing the right thing to ostracize Daisy from the Europeanized American community in Rome. Put another way, as an antagonist, she is more misguided than evil.

For the most part, we shouldn’t think of an antagonist as “the villain” and the protagonist as “the hero.” It’s best to avoid such simplistic designations. Antagonists can, of course, be very bad people, but be careful not to turn them into clichés. Read your draft carefully for stereotypical treatment. If you find you’ve rigged things in favor of the protagonist by creating cardboard-character antagonists, look for ways to give them human dimensions. The antagonist doesn’t have to be sympathetic, but your reader should be able to appreciate the workings of his mind (if he is a point-of-view character) or be fascinated by his actions (if he is presented from an omniscient viewpoint). If you make antagonists somewhat empathetic, your reader will appreciate the conflict between protagonist and antagonist a lot more. Don’t draw the lines too narrowly between the two. Don’t create a Roger Chillingworth.

The lines can certainly be blurred in a novel where two protagonists see each other as antagonists. This happens in T.C. Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done. In this novel, an animal rights activist goes head-to-head with an environmentalist. These two point-of-view characters are sufficiently developed, each presented sympathetically as worthy opponents in a battle not easily resolved. If either character was much less developed than the other, the writing would undoubtedly come off as preachy, as if the author sided with one character over the other. But Boyle avoids this. Through each protagonist’s lens, we see the other as antagonist. 

Antagonists can also be whole systems: social, economic, and political forces pitted against human beings. We find such examples in naturalistic fiction written by writers like Emile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane. In the worlds created by these writers, it’s easy to see that these antagonists are worthy opponents. In Zola’s Germinal, it’s the well-entrenched capitalistic system that oppresses the poor, half-starved coal miners; in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Chicago and New York, immense cities, determine the destiny of their inhabitants; in Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, the Civil War is a machine itself, much larger than any of the soldiers who fight in it. 

If your novel deals with large societal forces like these, you need to decide what victory or defeat might possibly mean. Are you thinking like the naturalists, who hold that individuals have little or no power over such environmental forces, and that they tend to be pawns shaped and molded by forces much larger than themselves? Or are you thinking that individuals can mount a struggle regardless of the odds and achieve some kind of personal dignity? If characters have no power at all, they become merely pathetic. If they mount a valiant struggle and lose, we might see them more as tragic figures. The reader will probably find a tragic figure more sympathetic than a pathetic one—depending, of course, on one’s philosophical orientation.

Though fiction involving struggles against such huge external forces isn’t exactly popular today, it’s possible that part of your novel might include a conflict that goes beyond individual relationship conflicts—probably not the same kind that Dreiser or Zola or Crane concerned themselves with, but perhaps a struggle against an irresponsible corporation (Pork Rite in my novel Hog to Hog), against local government (county government in Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog), or—turning to a nineteenth-century classic—against a corrupt institution (charity school in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre). It’s important to decide how you will handle the struggle. The best way is to represent both sides as realistically as you can—assuming you’re writing realism. Use individual antagonists to represent the larger societal institution that your protagonist is battling against, but give them enough human dimensions so they don’t come off as melodramatic villains. If you’re writing satire, as I did for my novel, you still need to give your characters human dimensions, though satire is a form based on exaggeration and gross distortion. Even so, painting characters with a broad brush can put readers off.

BUILDING THE CONFLICT

Conflict enters the story in the form of a complication—a disturbance of an existing equilibrium. This complication can be something good, but only apparently good: It could be followed rather quickly by rug pulling. Consider the bag of money Moss finds in No Country for Old Men. That discovery is followed by quite the rug pulling. If the complication is something bad, it doesn’t have to be monumentally bad. No one has to be maimed or killed. But, as we’ve already discussed, it does have to matter enough to your character for readers to get caught up in his apparent concern over it—whatever the impediment might be.

The conflict should be introduced early enough in the story that it has plenty of time to grow, or develop. In stories beginning with exposition, it may be introduced there. Otherwise, it could come out in an opening passage of narrative summary. It doesn’t have to happen right out of the gate, but we do look for it fairly early. It might not appear to be that serious at first, but we suspect it must be in some way and that its seriousness will become apparent later. We should be hooked enough to want to read on to see how serious it becomes.

Conflict must be developed in the very fabric of the story. Once we know the conflict, we should feel it threading its way from scene to scene—or at least we must feel it looming, hovering over the world of your characters. But, as I’ve already suggested, this does not have to be a story with gripping conflict such as Richard Bausch’s In the Night Season, in which killers arrive with an agenda. It can be a brewing marital conflict, as in T.C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle, in which John Milk’s relationship with his wife, Iris, is threatened by his involvement with the sex guru Alfred Kinsey. Whether John and Iris are arguing or breaking up, this conflict is sustained throughout the novel. It builds, and it undergoes different permutations.

As you revise, working to build and rebuild conflict, think of the different ways that conflict works: through speech and silence, through action and nonaction. Characters sometimes speak of it and share their thoughts with those they think they can trust, or they make mistakes and discuss their troubles with those they later realize they cannot trust.

Characters may remain silent, their troubles brewing in their minds. Internal conflict is essential in character-driven stories. But avoid long passages of exposition, unless these passages are particularly compelling. However you handle this, give a strong sense of interior engagement with perceived troubles.

Dramatic action is essential to heightening conflict. Characters must act and react. What should happen in a scene is determined by the nature of the conflict and the specific needs of the character or characters. Some very quiet stories do not include uproars and do not end with explosive showdowns, but still manage to have strong emotional impact. Note the conflict apparent in this excerpt from Man Martin’s Days of the Endless Corvette, which won the 2008 Georgia Author of the Year Award for First Novel:

We feel the tension, that third rider, but it’s muted because the two characters say little. The style of the prose itself feels quiet. 

Look for ways to shift the attention now and then away from the central conflict: scenes where characters are not speaking or acting out of concern for the major conflict, their attention apparently directed elsewhere. Such lulls in the storm can be purposeful. Often people do not speak of the big conflicts but pick at each other over little things. Characters might even approach the central conflict but draw back. Major conflicts are painful to deal with and often frustrating. This consternation can advance character and, perhaps unbeknownst to readers at this point, actually increase the conflict. Sometimes what is not said is more disturbing to stakeholders than what is said. Or perhaps this lull can be an opportunity to develop a subplot in your novel.

Furthermore, scenes dealing with minor conflicts can accomplish two basic things: They can broaden the main conflict of a novel in ways that may not become apparent until later, and, in the absence of this focus on the main conflict, they can create suspense. The reader will want to know what connections exist between these minor conflicts and the main one. And secondly, when will the main conflict surface again? We still feel the key conflict hovering in the air; we know it’s not far off. 

Another useful tool for building conflict is foreshadowing. Look for ways to hint at actions that will occur later in the story or novel—later chronologically, or later in the narrative, which could take the form of a flashback. Foreshadowing can appear in a scene or in the mind of a character. Drop hints along the way, teasing, creating more and more suspense. A character can start to make a statement and then drop it. Another character can make a veiled reference to it.

Conflict is also built by echoes of different kinds. Characters are reminded, or remind others, of past developments. Repetition creates emphasis. Together, foreshadowing and echoes knit the action together into a strand or plot thread.

MAKING CONFLICT SUBTLE AND COMPLEX

If you hammer home the conflict too bluntly to make sure that your reader gets it, you will lessen the impact of your fiction. It’s best for conflicts to be subtle, and at times even perplexing, just as life is. We can’t always say what it is that disturbs us about something. If it’s a remark, is it what was said? Is it the way it was said? Is it something underneath what was said, some innuendo? In some cases, conflict is quite clear: a robbery at a bank, a physical assault, a messy divorce. But even in these cases, the reasons might vary and be very complex.

Consider Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a classic play built around a number of complex conflicts. To oversimplify, we could say that Biff’s conflict with Willy amounts to Willy’s rigid expectations for his son. However, there are several other conflicts bundled into this larger, more obvious conflict: Biff’s knowledge of Willy’s cheating on Linda, Willy’s ill treatment of Linda, Willy’s living a lie and expecting Biff to do the same—and more. Conflicts between people are usually complex, and the more you represent this complexity in subtle ways (by suggestion rather than direct statement), the more you will intrigue your reader. If the conflict can be summed up too easily, it will seem too simple, too ordinary—and not worth the reader’s attention or interest.

MAKING ABSTRACT CONFLICTS CONCRETE

An abstract idea is large in scope: war, poverty, salvation. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress takes the abstract idea of salvation and makes it an arduous journey on foot. The abstract conflict—salvation versus damnation—is more important than anything concrete in the story. And yet the concrete does serve the purpose of making the abstract more real to the reader.

If your work tends to focus on certain abstract levels—ideas and themes—be sure to make these ideas concrete through dramatic event and intensity. The idea informing Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” would surely not have the impact it does on the reader without the dramatic unfolding of the annual lottery.

RESOLVING THE CONFLICT BELIEVABLY

A conflict that is resolved too easily doesn’t amount to much. The stakes can be high, but regardless of how high they are, and how worthy the antagonist, the conflict is suddenly over, and the character walks happily on. The reader, knowing life doesn’t work that way, naturally feels cheated. This is all it came to? This is what I’ve spent my time for?

If John and Iris’s marriage isn’t going so well in The Inner Circle, T.C. Boyle doesn’t cheat it by giving us a happy ending—they still face issues that are probably irresolvable. It’s tempting to tie things up for your reader, to provide a happy ending. If you do this, make sure it’s earned and not forced. Perhaps on the surface things are better, but not underneath. Some conflicts could still emerge later on, coming up through the floorboards—who knows when? An indefinite kind of ending will seem more believable to readers, unless they’ve lived a very sheltered life. But most people haven’t.

Examine your draft, and note how you lead up to the ending. A strong ending provides closure, but it won’t work if it feels engineered. To write the fitting ending for your novel may call for you to distance yourself from the work for a bit, and it may take several attempts. When the ending provides a sense of closure without shutting down all questions, you’ve nailed it.

Jack Smith has published three novels: Being (2016), Icon (2014), and Hog to Hog, which won the 2007 George Garrett Fiction Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 2008. He has published stories in a number of literary magazines, including Southern Review, North American Review, Texas Review, Xconnect, In Posse Review, and Night Train. His reviews have appeared widely in such publications as Ploughshares, Georgia Review, American Book Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, the Missouri Review, Xconnect, and Environment magazine. He has published a few dozen articles in both Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market and The Writer magazine. His creative writing book, Write and Revise for Publication: A Six-Month Plan for Crafting an Exceptional Novel and Other Works of Fiction, was published in 2013 by Writer’s Digest Books. His co-authored nonfiction environmental book titled Killing Me Softly was published by Monthly Review Press in 2002. Besides his writing, Smith was fiction editor of The Green Hills Literary Lantern, an online literary magazine published by Truman State University, for twenty-five years.