Finding the Pivot in All the Problems

Unsuccessful story structure was a problem I got good at noticing and fixing as an editor for two decades. Manuscripts that didn’t hold together often had too little going on or too much. Too little conflict was a problem so many writers face, otherwise known as keeping characters too safe. But a select group struggled with the opposite issue.

Too much conflict usually meant no pivot to the story. No theme could emerge. All because the multitude of things happening began to feel like white noise.

Solution? Find that pivot. Choose one conflict and make it the key.

So my post this week is for those of you who, like me, think more is better.

Actually, less is more sometimes

One of my earliest writing teachers told me: “It’s better to not have so many events of great impact in your story.”

“Why not?” I was very new at fiction.

“They lose their meaning. They blur in the reader’s mind. The noise is too loud.”

I didn’t really get it. So she suggested I start studying story structure in other books.

I took it on as an assignment. On her advice I listed the big conflicts in books I loved. They ranged from moves to job losses to death to relationship breakup to illness to financial loss. There were smaller conflicts like a fight with a friend or getting caught in a white lie or a crazy family that always changed plans. But what I decided was major or minor was only my view, not necessarily what the character experienced.

In some stories, a job loss was insignificant compared to a friendship fight. It was all determined by the character’s history, their inner world.

That inner world colored everything about their view of the outer world, of the conflict that came to meet them, as it does for all of us. So I learned: a key conflict is completely individual to the person. Less about the event than its impact.

What makes a key conflict?

If one of your story conflicts articulates, or brings to the surface, a loss in your character’s backstory, the conflict will hit the character harder because it highlights whatever is missing inside.

Say the crazy family background creates a longing for order and routine. The loss of that order and routine in the character’s adult life is a hidden burden they carry around. Any conflict that touches that—say, a relationship that is also way out of control—would have the potential to be a key conflict in the story.

They are being thwarted for what they’ve longed for.  This creates the story’s theme—the echoing of inner and outer conflict.

I often cite Andre Dubus III's novel, House of Sand and Fog, as a classic example of inner and outer mirroring each other.

After reading and studying the novel over the years, I’ve decided some things about its key conflicts. (These are my thoughts, as a reader, maybe not the intention of the writer.) Although the two main characters face many problems, the one with the highest stakes, to me, is betrayal. 

For me, the key conflict of this amazing novel pivots around the question of Who can I trust? Let’s look at why.

Placing key conflict in pivotal scene

Dubus places the discontented police officer and the woman trying to get her house back from squatters together in a revolving restaurant. We’re on the top floor of a San Francisco skyrise. We watch the two circle a romantic relationship, as well as the illicit partnership to get back the woman's house.  Betrayal emerges during this scene as outer story conflict: the cop shares a confession.

He has done something illegal out of compassion and he's never told anyone about it. This act of sharing puts him in legal danger.  The woman could expose him, he could get suspended, he could go to jail. 

So immediately, the potential for betrayal is on the table.

As the woman listens, the restaurant revolves. The setting element Dubus chose emphasizes the woman's extreme disorientation. She doesn't expect this straight-arrow cop to have such a secret and she's teetering on the edge of what will happen between them. Will he betray her first, or will she, him?

Because both internal and external conflict elements are presented together, and because even the setting echoes the conflict, it all works.

How key conflict creates theme

If you think about successful stories you’ve read, you probably also think about their theme. The meaning, the aspect that lingers with you after the last page. Theme is the unstated message of the book, the story’s main question. It’s hard—maybe impossible—to get at directly. Which is why it’s confusing for so many writers.

I was pretty overjoyed when I discovered that just by selecting my story’s key conflict, I could get clearer on its theme. Why? Because the key conflict has special meaning to the protagonist (as we said above, it’s something that triggers them strongly). It affects them both internally and externally.

Once you figure that out, there’s a lot that can become triaged in your event list. Like my long-ago instructor said, you can’t expect a dozen or a hundred events to feel the same to the reader or character. They have to be organized by impact or they just become white noise.

Theme is subtle. It moves through the story like a river. I find in a well-structured story, all conflicts flow through and around it. Like in Dubus’s novel, theme comes most strongly to the fore when the characters are on the brink of their biggest, most impactful challenge. Not the thing that would necessarily flatten another person but the conflict that means the most to them.

Why does a job change flatten one person and another is nonchalant about it? Why does the loss of a friendship haunt one character for years while some people can move on without a blink? The internal life of a character in a well structured story is paralleled by what happens to them. The writer who knows and works with this basic rule of story structure chooses only the outer conflicts that resonate, good or bad, with what the characters believe.

Finding key conflicts

It’s not always easy to sift through all the problems you’ve created in your story to find the one that everything else pivots around. So many levels of internal conflicts might exist: letting go of the past, believing in yourself, believing in someone else.  External conflicts are even more varied: a move, a war, a death or birth, divorce and marriage, friendships dying, imprisonment, you name it.

Human beings are adept at creating conflicts every day of their lives.  

I learned a great tip from screenwriting guru John Truby who advised writers to ask this question:  Who is fighting whom for what?   

If you ask this about each conflict you’ve chosen for your story, and you find the ones you can answer definitively, you are on the right track to locating your key conflict.

A final note: The outer dilemma that forces change needs to illustrate or demonstrate the inner challenge if it’s to be a key conflict. 

The exercise I’m giving you this week is a simple way to sift through the story problems you’ve chosen and find which one actually does this.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

1.  Take a sheet of paper and make three columns.

2.  In the first column, list the main players in your story. 

3.  In the second column, next to each person's name, write the thing they are most afraid of or want the most. 

4.  In the third column, next to each person's name, write an outer situation that threatens to make this inner conflict worse--either by facing the thing they are most afraid of or by taking away something they really want.

See if these answers surprise you.  Then check your actual chapters to make sure both levels of conflict are present on the page.  Does this help you find your key conflict?