Must Fiction Have Conflict?

I recently read FANTASY: HOW IT WORKS, by Brian Attebery, a distinguished scholar of fantasy and science fiction. In addition to the solid content, he has a highly readable style. While I can't unreservedly recommend this book to every fan, given the price (but still very reasonable for a product of a university press), anybody who enjoys in-depth analysis of fantasy in all its dimensions would probably find it more than worth the cost. Some topics include realism and fantasy, myths and fantasy, gender and fantasy (mostly focusing on male characters), and the politics of fantasy. Of particular interest to me is the chapter titled, "If Not Conflict, Then What?"

Advice to writers almost always maintains that a story can't exist without conflict. Attebery is the first critic I've encountered who casts doubt on that alleged truism. In fact, he flatly states, "This may be good advice for getting published, but it isn't true." Conflict, he points out, is simply a single metaphor, implying combat. Among other metaphors he suggests are dissonance, friction, and dance. He maintains there's only one "essential requirement for narrative," which is "motivated change over time."

This discussion intrigued and reassured me, since the necessity for goal-motivation-conflict in a properly structured story is usually taken for granted. Reflecting on examples of my own work, I realize some of my fiction contains what could be called "conflict" only by stretching the term almost out of recognition. Suppose we subsitute "goal-motivation-obstacles"? Marion Zimmer Bradley, after all, summarized the universal plot as, roughly, "Johnny gets his behind caught in a bear trap and how he gets out." Elsewhere, I've seen the essence of story encapsulated as: The protagonist wants something. What's keeping them from getting it?

For example, my contemporary fantasy, "Bunny Hunt" (to be published as an e-book on April 10), features a protagonist whose long-range goal is to have a baby, a wish gaining new urgency because she and her husband are over thirty. Her problem is that they've been trying for a while with no result. The impediment, her possible infertility, might fall under one of the classic types of "conflict," person versus nature—if we count her own body as part of "nature." But that interpretation seems to strain the definition of "conflict." The short-term goal, to help a rabbit woman through a potentially fatal childbirth (no more details, sorry—spoilers!), involves problems that might possibly be labeled "person versus nature," but again that reading feels like a stretch.

For me, I believe thinking in terms of the more general formula "goal-motivation-obstacles" will make plotting future fiction projects easier.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Viable Villains

I've just finished reading Dean Koontz's latest fantasy thriller, QUICKSILVER, which I like better than a lot of his recent novels. For many years, almost every book he's written has featured the same kind of villain (or a secret cabal of them)—a sociopath with delusions of grandeur, an evil genius, at least a genius in his own eyes, dismissing the rest of the human species as inferiors who, if not deserving of extermination, exist only to serve the few elite supermen. QUICKSILVER does include one of those annoyingly unrelatable, often flat-out unbelievable characters, but he appears only briefly. The other human antagonists work for a covert federal agency; their motives make sense in context, to carry out their orders and suppress the danger they believe the hero represents. The principal villains, invaders from another universe, have no humanly relatable personalities or goals, but that inhumanity is appropriate to them. They're almost Lovecraftian in their alienness.

Aside from such utterly alien creatures, however, the typical sapient antagonist (as opposed to an animal or a force of nature) should have some relatable traits in the form of motives we can comprehend even if we condemn the methods of pursuing those aims. Even many readers' favorite "pure sociopath," predatory genius Dr. Hannibal Lecter, has desires other than his cannibalistic cravings, goals we can sympathize with. He wants freedom, along with the comforts and luxuries denied him in his windowless, high-security cell, as anybody in that plight would.

Frankenstein's creature wants kindness and companionship; only rejection turns him bitter, vengeful, and violent. Count Dracula wants to leave his worn-out homeland for a new country of boundless opportunity. Dr. Jekyll begins with the noble goal of splitting the evil dimension of humanity from the good and thereby controlling the former. The Phantom of the Opera wants the admiration and devotion of a young woman. In more recent fiction, Michael in THE GODFATHER doesn't start out as a bad guy; indeed, he has deliberately tried to dissociate himself from that part of his background. He devolves into a villain when his determination to protect his family gradually entangles him in his father's criminal empire. According to an often cited principle, every villain is the hero of his or her own story.

To me, more often than not, one-dimensional evil geniuses such as Koontz's recent antagonists feel no more believable than the supervillains in an old cartoon series whose purpose was "to destroy the universe for their own gain." They're sometimes fun to read about, but I can't in the least relate to their motivations.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Going Deeper

A few weeks ago, the associate rector of our church delivered a sermon sparked by the question, "What do you want?" Beyond and beneath the superficial needs and wishes, what do you REALLY want out of life? As a recurring motif in the talk, she repeated several times, "Go deeper." The admonition to "go deeper" applies to writing, too.

In the January 2020 RWR (the magazine of the Romance Writers of America), Shirley Jump's regular column "Your Writing Coach" dealt with the topic, "Creating deeper motivation: The rule of six." What does your protagonist want and why? We have more than one motivation for almost everything we do, and in creating a believable protagonist, the writer should delve deeper. Jump recommends digging down for six layers of motivation, hence the title of the article. By the time the writer gets to number six, she says, the process should become hard. She also notes that the character's true, deepest motivation is not the one he or she recognizes on the surface. The first motivations that come to mind are likely to be external factors, while the last layers uncovered tend to be "the deeper internal motivations." One of her examples imagines a character who wants to save her grandmother's farm because that's the wellspring of her happy childhood memories. The deeper motivation not recognized by the character herself, however, is that the farm serves as her "security blanket" because she doesn't want to leave her familiar community.

Jump demonstrates the technique by analyzing the character of Shrek from the first movie in his series. First, he wants to get the intruders out of his swamp. To accomplish that purpose, he has to confront Lord Farquaad. Shrek is angry and "helpless to fix this himself." He's angry because he wants his sanctuary (the swamp) back. The root cause of this desire, according to Jump, is that he withdraws from other people and creatures to avoid pain (as demonstrated by his preemptive rejection of Donkey). She refers to "layering in" the characters' deeper feelings and motivations and also recommends making sure each scene conveys some aspect of those motivations.

Her "saving the farm" example brings to mind GONE WITH THE WIND. In the beginning, teenage Scarlett thinks she'll attain complete happiness if she marries Ashley. She barely hears her Irish father's passionate speech about the importance of land, the only thing that lasts. Her obsession with Ashley lingers until the very end, when she wakes up to the realization that her alleged love for him has been only a girlish fantasy all along. Meanwhile, though, a newly discovered motivation dominates her actual behavior and decisions—saving Tara. All her major choices (except marrying Rhett, and she admits she does even that partly for the money), such as tricking Frank into marriage and becoming a hardheaded businesswoman, are motivated by the need to support Tara and her family. The deeper motivation for that need is the role of Tara as a symbol of stability and material security. The deepest motivation breaks out in the iconic mid-point scene when she fiercely vows, "I'll never be hungry again."

The "layering" image strongly resonates with me, because that's how I tend to revise my fiction. Many writing experts advise that proper revision consists of cutting, that later drafts should be shorter than the first draft because rewriting should trim extraneous material. Well, not my revisions; my second drafts are almost always longer than the first. That's because I start with dialogue, action, and necessary description and exposition. The emotional, sensory, and to some extent descriptive elements of scenes are always on the "thin" side the first time around. I need to expand and enhance those elements to make scenes and characters come to life. Sure, I often cut on the micro level, since my sentences are often unnecessarily convoluted or wordy (maybe a side effect of having produced so much academic nonfiction over the years). On the macro level, though, the total word count nevertheless increases more often than it decreases. In my current WIP, the heroine faces the certainty of losing her job in six months because the business (an independent bookstore) is going to close. Therefore, it becomes vital, not just a pleasant prospect, to sell the graphic novel series she and the hero have created to a major publisher, so she'll have a financial cushion. Digging to the next layer down, getting that cushion is important to her not only for practical reasons but for emotional ones. Because her father's gambling addiction almost destroyed her parents' marriage in her teens and young adult years, she's obsessed with financial security. Her unhappy memories of those years also make it hard for her to trust the hero and lead her to leap to negative assumptions whenever it seems he might let her down. Those don't quite add up to six motivations, but the general idea is the same.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Greed Is Good?

Gordon Gekko, fictional Wall Street Power User, dwells on the mantra

"Greed Is Good."

Here's a quote from:

http://www.timeslive.co.za/entertainment/article525768.ece/Gekkos-ex-learns-greed-lesson

---------QUOTE------
 "Greed is good" was the maxim of Michael Douglas's 1987 film Wall Street. Now, his former wife appears to have taken the lesson to heart.

Diandra Douglas is suing the actor for half of his income from the new sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps - though the couple divorced in 2000. The Oliver Stone film is due out in September, with Douglas reprising his role of Gordon Gekko - the self-styled "master of the universe".
--------END QUOTE---------

CNBC ran a poll on Friday July 1 asking if viewers thought greed is good.  It was nearly a split decision, from the way they asked the question.  They didn't specify good for what.

I'm telling you, greed is the writer's best friend! 

It is a perfect, High Concept character motivation.  Nobody, reader or viewer, needs an explanation of what greed feels like, or what it's like to go up against someone fired up with greed.

Now, beyond that, the thematic discussion makes perfect fuel for either a soft-sweet romance or a hot-spice romance, and you can even found a raging action-romance on it.

Greed is a good motive for a protagonist who "comes to his senses" because of love (or a good knock on the you-know-what) and it's a great motive for a villain who gets his comeuppance good and proper.

We discussed the film Toy Story 3 last week, July 13, 2010 on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com

On http://www.blakesnyder.com/2010/06/25/toy-story-3-beat-sheet/  you can read the analysis of Toy Story 3 and see just how important THEME is to this light-entertainment film that isn't supposed to draw audiences seeking "serious thought."

You should also note this entry on blakesnyder.com
http://www.blakesnyder.com/2010/07/02/kieran-kramer-saves-the-cat-and-so-much-more/ where a NOVEL is analyzed for "beats" --  can you see the trend in Romance there?  Just as I pointed out in my July 13 post noted above.  Theme and Romance and Novels and SCREENPLAYS go together.

Now, plot some stories with greed as the main theme subject.  The word "greed" by itself isn't a theme.  It can be a motif, a character motivation, or almost any other element in a story.  Make it a theme by taking a position on the subject.  "Greed is good" is a great starting point, but move on from there.    

Challenge yourself to a writing exercise.  This is like a pianist doing scales rather than playing an entire piece. 

1) Create a POV character who hates greed (because he/she is riddled with it and rejects Self). 

2) Create a POV character who lauds greed and proves (as Gekko) that greed is the personality trait to foster if you want to get rich or stay rich. 

3) Create a SUPPORTING ROLE character who fights greed in human society.  Generate a POV character from the supporting role (B story character), a POV character that the supporting character can redirect.

4) Create a Villain or simple antagonist who either embraces Greed or eschews it, but does so with way too much force. Explain why he/she's so obsessed. 

5) Create a character whose hidden fear is that his inner greed will overtake him - perhaps he starts out living the severe austerity of a street-begging Monk with a bowl and a robe, no sandals, and suddenly has to command a galactic fortune that's shrinking alarmingly fast.

6) Create a greed-theme based character with your own formula for a character.  Then build a world to display that character's lessons in greed -- such as Wall Street was chosen to display Gekko's philosophy.

Remember all the TV Series you've seen using Confidence Men (White Collar rules the roost at the moment) as lead characters. In the grifter's world, the handle they look for in a Mark is Greed. 

If you don't have greed activated in your character, if your greed doesn't rule you, no grifter can possibly get you to do anything against your best interests - and the grifters good at their trade, the ones who might succeed, won't even try you.  There are plenty of "Marks" in the world who wear their greed on their sleeves.  You don't have to be one of them.  That's a theme.  Work it every which way. 

The reason these exercises are relevant to success in the story marketplace today is the same reason CNBC and film makers are shouting about this film "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps." 

We as a society will be, possibly for the next 20 years, debating how to "govern greed." 

I discussed the 20-year fiction-taste trend cycles here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html
and here
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html

It's Pluto transiting Capricorn.  Capricorn is the natural 10th House of Vocation and Government and is ruled by Saturn, Restriction and Discipline.

The financial meltdown of 2008-9 coincided with Pluto making stations on the USA Natal chart's 8th House (other people's money, inheritance) -- and for a Nation, 8th House is all about taxes.  Pluto is all about the hidden world beneath the world, and the nuclear magnitude power that seethes down there.  Pluto rules the Natural 8th House (Scorpio) just as Saturn rules the Natural 10th House (Capricorn). 

Greed is a natural desire magnified beyond all limits.

We have a natural awareness of the possessions of others (8th House), and the Values of Others (also 8th House).  The 8th House is naturally opposed to the 2nd House, our personal Money, Possessions, and Values.  So we're always comparing what we have to what others have.

The problem comes from coveting what others have.  When that natural tendency to compare gets magnified, it becomes a desire FOR what others have, not just curiosity.  Magnify that and you get Greed. 

Pluto's main effect is just exactly that, magnifying.  Pluto releases that subterranean nuclear level (super-volcano magnitude) power into the channel of a natural, normal, ordinarily good, human tendency of being aware of what's around us. 

So it's entirely possible we may see the whole USA society confronting a government (Saturn) exploding with unbridled (Pluto unbridles) greed for control (Saturn) especially of "other people's money" (8th House).


Or it might not go that way.  Don't let your imagination fail here.


http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html

People will be on all sides of this issue, subliminally worried about it and confused because the "Conservatives" who are deepest into Christianity pound the table about Greed as a Sin, while the rest of our world keeps trying to de-demonize sins in general, pounding the table about acceptance of what used to be taboo because it's based on primitive superstitious religion. 

That's a CONFLICT, in case you didn't notice. 

And so there's a building audience that will be grabbed by fiction that discusses all sides without taking a side. It's a puzzle everyone will be working on solving.  

Grab your piece of this action with all the greed you can muster.

But once you have done that, stuff that greed back into the lock-box that your emotional anti-virus software keeps for you. 

When doing business as a writer, keep your greed completely out of the transaction.  Agents and Editors will blacklist you if you don't.  They won't deal with someone who wants more than they're worth.

But if you don't know exactly what your product is worth, you will get taken to the cleaners.  (you know I love cliches for a reason).

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com