Finding the Rhythm of Conflict
As a writing teacher, I’ve read manuscripts so full of conflict, so much happening that I have to pause and breathe. The conflict overwhelms everything, and there’s no moment of meaning, where the reader understands the effect on the inner life of the character going through it.
I’ve read manuscripts equally devoid of conflict. Page after page of description or a character’s inner life, history; pleasant dialogue; setting that sparks nothing. Very little change is possible here too; there’s nothing pushing against the character externally. No conflict to make the character want to change the status quo that’s so comfortable.
The first kind of story is overloaded with external conflict. We do need some—and action stories have a lot. But there need to be moments where we readers witness the effect of that external conflict, how it creates internal conflict, which creates a decision. A change.
My husband dies (external) which makes me lonely and unsafe (internal) which causes me to marry a very different sort of man (change). (Olive, Again, Elizabeth Strout)
The second kind of story needs both external and internal conflict. Something needs to happen externally—we have to get outside the character’s head and feelings, see them objectively in the world, facing an event. Once the external conflict occurs, there’s a reaction inside, an emotional response. That generates the change.
My father remarries (external) and my new stepmother hates me (internal) so I have to prove myself even more (change). (Hang the Moon, Jeannette Walls)
Finding the rhythm of conflict
We’re about a week from home, making our way slowly, loathe to give up the camper van life of the past two months. I’m worrying I won’t continue some of the practices I began on the trip, especially morning yoga. I practiced on a small wooden dock overlooking a pond that was alive with snowy egrets, mallards, bass, turtles, and a carp named Big Bob. Each morning, before it got too hot, I gathered my yoga mat and my phone and went to the dock. One of my dogs usually came too, curling up under one of the dock’s benches. I practiced for about an hour, using videos. It was bliss.
Being outside made it all work. Breeze from the pond, a fountain splashing, the birds, leaves of the live oak above me when I lay on my mat. I created a rhythm that sustained me. But leaving broke that rhythm, so I’m wondering how to keep it going in a northern early spring.
My yoga teacher spent the first few minutes on the rhythm of the breath, and over the weeks I began noticing rhythm in everything. How to get it, how to follow and nurture it, how it supports me.
I’m creakier now than I’ve ever been, less flexible too, but the rhythm of the practice brought back some limberness. Good timing too, before gardening season hits.
Yoga is supposed to engender deep relaxation, but mostly it engendered conflict in me. Luckily, my teacher is my age and she complains sometimes, as she teaches, about stiffness or immobility, so I don’t feel so bad. But after the pure relaxation postures, the harder ones show me immediately how well (or poorly) my body is doing after a year of book launch.
The teacher stressed the rhythm, the flow, rather than perfection of poses, and I was grateful for that too.
Books take it out of you. There’s the actual writing, which is not a picnic. Then the revision, which I usually like better because it’s about finding the story in all those words. Then it’s the editor/agent relationship, where you get to swallow your pride and realize your mistakes. Then there’s the publishing and marketing.
The conflict grows, for me, as the book moves through these stages. The hardest one, like the more challenging yoga postures, is the last one.
I’ve learned I can’t live with the nonstop tension of any of it, not anymore. Can you? I have to take breaks from the writing, the editing, the publishing and marketing. There has to be a balance, like a sine wave, between tension and relaxation in my life. Between the fire of the creative urgency and the cooling water of the pause where you figure out what you’ve created, learned, realized.
It’s a lot like story rhythm, both the yoga I’m practicing and the book launch efforts I’m recovering from.
Yoga story is just an example of conflict in one person’s life. The external conflict of those poses. The internal conflict of feeling the aches and inflexible joints. There’s an effect, from these two. External leads to internal leads to change. What changes in me, from these weeks of yoga?
What is external and internal conflict?
When I was teaching, I’d ask writers to print a few pages of a chapter they were struggling with. I asked them to find two highlighters, in two colors—yellow and pink, for instance. They were to read through the chapter, first looking for external conflict. These got highlighted in yellow.
What are the signs of external conflict?
it happens out here, not in someone’s head or memory or feelings
it happens now, not in the past
there’s a real place, a tangible setting
someone is involved
Usually, there’d be some incorrect yellow highlighting—hopeful conflict, I called it. But it was just someone remembering an argument, perhaps. Or thinking sad thoughts. Or wishing for something. That’s not externally realized, you could say. It’s still in the unformed areas of a person’s interior life.
Then I asked writers to find the internal conflict in those same pages and highlight this in pink.
What are the signs of internal conflict?
it happens in the inner world of the character
it’s shown via thoughts or feeling
there’s an emotion created by it
this emotion is strong enough to make the character uneasy in some way and provoke change
A good equation in story is
external conflict + internal conflict = change
I started yoga on this winter getaway because after the intense work on my book launches this past year I felt growing stiffness and inflexibility. The body getting sore more often was external conflict. It created a feeling of worry, even fear, that I couldn’t afford that at my age. Because of this internal conflict, I made a change—I started practicing yoga again.
The external and internal conflict toggle. Sometimes the feeling comes up first, then something happens externally to prove it as real. Then the person changes.
When my students completed their highlighting assignment, we discussed what they’d found. Many (too many) had little or no yellow highlighting. Some had neither yellow or pink.
This led to the very reasonable question: is conflict necessary all the time in story? Does every page have to offer some? When this question came up, I asked them to research. Find a book they loved. Scan through a chapter. Better yet, make copies of a few pages and try the highlighting technique on this published work.
What will you find? The amount of each kind of conflict depends on the genre and how recent the work is. We all know that some conflict makes story work, and the two kinds must be present to evoke change, but how much and how often varies. I tend to downplay conflict in my early drafts (an echo from my desire for a low-conflict life), then I catch it with this highlighting exercise at revision.
I’ve come to believe you can’t have good engagement with character without them having a problem to solve, a fight to fight, a challenge to meet.
I’ve also noticed how much my outer life, and my personal preferences around conflict, affect my use of it in story.
Does where you live make a difference?
I’m going to make some terrible generalizations here, so please forgive. It’s just from living all over the U.S. during my teaching career and noticing trends among writers in different locations.
For eighteen years, I lived in Minnesota. I loved it, even the winters. At that time in my life, I was transitioning not just from a long-distance move, but also difficult business failure and a disappointing love relationship. Life was upside down. I was supremely grateful to come to a place where strangers gave each other smiles at the grocery store, I received regular greetings from neighbors when I walked my dog, and most of the driving conditions were (fairly) polite.
Minnesotans joke about Minnesota Nice. When I moved there, I was more than ready for Nice.
Of course, everyone struggled. We’re all human, after all. But I marveled at how kind this culture was, despite the hardships. Maybe the struggle happened privately. I didn’t know. I did know that at that time, before so many public tragedies, people didn’t tend confront each other in public. Where I’d just come from in my life, I knew all about confrontation, so it was such a relief not to live in the midst of it 24/7.
But here’s another thing I noticed: As much as I loved my new life of Nice, I became stalled out in my writing. I was unable to write external conflict. Only the internal world came alive. I taught writing classes each week and began to notice this in my students’ writing as well. I hesitated to mention it, being a newcomer to the area, but I wondered if there was any link between Nice and nada conflict on the page.
I wanted to spark up my scenes with more external friction, but I SO wanted to keep my own serenity of life. It was complex enough without rocking the proverbial boat just for better words on the page.
Years later, I taught writing again in New York. I’d moved from Minnesota to go back to grad school again. Suddenly my writing was replete with external conflict. Breathless, in fact. I noticed it in many of my students as well.
Where was the balance?
Must writing and life parallel each other?
My biggest fear about bringing more conflict into my novel—at that time, I was revising the manuscript which eventually became my debut, Qualities of Light—was that I would have to live it myself. After all, wasn’t that the tried-and-true writer’s experience, that brought authentic emotion and sensations to the page? The writer herself would go through the experience, distill it down to its essence and meaning, fictionalize or not, then craft it into scenes. I didn’t know any other way to write—I wrote what I lived.
Even if I didn’t actually live through the circumstances of conflict in my novel (a brother’s accident and near death, being ostracized from the family, falling in love during all of it), wouldn’t I need to access and experience the emotions, at minimum, in order to write them well?
It was a dilemma. I didn’t want to feel all that. But I couldn’t think of how to get my characters out of their stuckness. They mostly sat around and drank good coffee. Feedback was lukewarm. It was as if we’d all gotten tired of conflict—me and my characters—and we wanted a long rest. Which did not make an engaging story.
I had published quite a bit by that time, and I taught writing too. Other than my two writer’s group friends, many of the writers in my classes also had the problem of how to bring conflict to the page. They were quite good at creating internal conflict, the inner angst of characters, but their people sat around and drank good coffee too.
I’m not making fun of anyone here, except perhaps myself. Eventually I matured my view of conflict, and I discovered that it appears in many guises. I got to know people around me at a deeper level and I learned that everyone has it, in their own way.
It really doesn’t matter where you live or how nice or confrontive you are in real life. We are in a world of conflict and for writers, there are many ways to bring conflict to the page.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Try the highlighting technique described above, either on published writing or your own work-in-progress, to both learn about the rhythm of conflict and where yours might need more.
Share your thoughts about conflict. Do you find it easy to write? Difficult?