Raising the Stakes: How to Amp Up Your Story's External Conflict
Hot weather! We’re having such intense heat waves this summer, a week or more of high 90s F and humidity that reminds me more of Baltimore summers growing up than the Northeastern climate I’m used to. And when you live in an older house (ours built in 1765) with not quite enough air conditioning, you curate your days. Heat makes me generally more crabby. I work hard at not letting this external conflict get the best of my personality. So I wake early and spend an hour outside in the garden or walking our country road, maybe a little time on the screened porch eating breakfast. Then it’s time to close up the house for the day and send good vibes to our air conditioner to keep us civil until evening.
If this summer in our house were an action movie, heat would be the focus. And as a writer, I know that increasing the heat for anything makes for some kind of reaction. That’s what we’re looking for in our stories, isn’t it? Something a bit past comfort level, something that will provide external conflict.
Crabby because of the heat = perfect blend on external and internal conflict. The heat brings out my worst side. The two together formula a story.
One by itself isn’t enough, I’ve learned. What do each contribute, and how do they play off one another?
Two kinds of conflict
Although it’s simplistic and rift with overlap, I define internal conflict as whatever arises inside the character, forcing them to choose a direction, make a decision, do something rash.
It’s not what’s happening out here, onstage. It’s coming from within.
External conflict is outside the character, something happening in the outer environment that affects them. It can cause them to make a decision, take an action, run or fight, of course. And external conflict can also amplify what’s going on inside—if well planned in story, external conflict echoes the still-festering internal wound.
I find writers—myself included—lean in strength towards one over the other. Why? Because of our natural preferences, what we love to read or enjoy in life, where we feel our edge of interest lies.
The goal, when writing a completely balanced story, is to recognize and develop whatever area of conflict we’re missing.
If you tend to write more external conflict, you may need to rebalance with intentional internal strife. And if, like me, you are most at home with what goes on inside the character, you need to learn how to create an action-filled plot.
Learning from thrillers
This was hammered home when I was revising my second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue. I was working with an agent who loved my premise but told me I lacked outer action. Not enough happening out here.
She had a great suggestion: find a thriller writer to mentor me.
I was hesitant at first, although I love reading thrillers. (I am the proud owner of used copies of every one of British author Peter O’Donnell’s ten or so novels about the badass combat heroine Modesty Blaise, written in the 60s and reread by me whenever I want a real escape.) I also love badass female heroes, as you can see from this short piece I wrote for Shepherd.com about my five favorite badass women heroes in novels.
But I was reluctant to change my strength—the internal side of conflict—into something that wasn’t me.
I began to ask around and a writing buddy recommended instructor and crime author Robert Eversz. Robert teaches at the UCLA writing program and consults on manuscripts. His five thrillers feature the legendary Nina Zero, quite the badass heroine. I decided to give it a try.
Robert also liked my opening—but he made the excellent point that the succeeding chapters carried too much slack. I could definitely bring in more external action, and the question was what kind of action it might be.
He suggested a crime. I hadn’t considered this, but it made sense that one of the two pilot sisters in A Woman’s Guide is a fugitive from the law. At first, I played with her as criminal, but that didn’t fit who she was for me. So I settled on a crime she didn’t commit, and the real criminal trying to find her.
Triggering event
In stories with strong external conflict, we open with a crisis which I call a “triggering event.” Imagine a trigger being pulled and how that action sets up a certain effect. Like dominoes falling throughout the rest of the story, the opening leads to more crises until a major turning point is reached near the end.
Because the trigger is pulled, the rest of the story happens. My question when brainstorming a triggering event goes something like this: If this event doesn’t happen, the rest of the story can’t happen either. The cause and effect must be strong.
Just look look at any story—memoir or fiction—that grips you immediately, as a reader. I bet it has a triggering event in the opening pages. The goal, as a reader, is to convey a sense of tension immediately. Maybe a body or a missing object is lost or found. Maybe a murder or theft is committed. There’s a pending move, a sudden break up, someone gets notice at their job, a person goes missing. Even the start of a road trip can feel risky, if played right.
How much risk?
A good measure of external conflict is the level of risk of this opening moment. The higher the risk, the more tension it creates. That tension drives the rest of the story.
Both my main female characters were pilots. It seemed logical to play with the idea of plane crash. To ramp it up, have the fugitive sister steal the plane because she’s running from that crime she didn’t commit. And where might she run?
Again, if I looked at ramping up the external conflict, the destination would have to hold high risk too. What if she had only one place she could run to, where she’d never be found—her estranged sister’s home in the remote mountains of New York state?
Estrangement means very little chance of open-armed welcome, right?
Five questions to develop external conflict
Each time I decided an event, an outer action, I had to make sure it led to something bigger, riskier, harder for my character. This acceleration would keep the tension riding high. It would keep readers turning pages.
I developed five questions for each moment of crisis, to make sure more conflict came from it.
What’s the worst thing that could happen here?
How does this increase the risk?
What smaller actions or turning points would need to be planted to “earn” this moment?
What history might cause this worst thing to happen?
How does this moment change the character?
If I could answer all five questions satisfactorily, I knew the choice of an external conflict worked.
Sequencing
To make sense to a reader, external conflict must be sequenced in a believable way. This happens because of that.
For my books, I find it helpful to lay out the sequence of plot points I’m considering as moments of external conflict. I use a storyboard (this is my tutorial on You Tube). But you can just list the plot points on a page, describing each briefly, and see if risk noticeably accelerates one to the next.
Another trick I use to test this is to work backwards from the end. I look at the last plot point I’ve chosen for my external conflict moments and ask what would need to happen before it to make it make sense.
This is basically question #3, above, but having all the points on the list in sequence makes the answer more valuable and real. Seeing all of the points lined up, as I work them out, tells me exactly where I still have slack. It also shows where the plot point wasn’t earned out—which just means arrival at that moment will be unbelievable to the reader.
Fixing it just requires going back into the points before it and planting clues or set-ups.
Agent approval and more
After I worked with Robert for a year, I had a sequence of events, external conflict, that worked. My opening crisis was still dramatic enough to get agent thumbs up but now the effect from that opening crisis built to something bigger.
I finally got agent thumbs up—for the whole story.
It worked because of the new understanding I had about external conflict. How to not just have a killer opening chapter but how to keep that momentum through 300-350 pages.
If you’re curious about how it works in real time, check out my book, which was published in October, became an Amazon bestseller, and is a finalist for two national awards. It’s available as a paperback, e-book, or audiobook (with a killer narrator).
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Use the five questions above to test one of your crisis moments in your fiction or memoir. If you can’t answer all five to your satisfaction, spend some time on external conflict moments this week. What could be ramped up?