Easily Forgotten Fundamental: Writing Conflict
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You're spending time with your family. Everyone is gathered at that house you all have unspoken rules about meeting at. Everything is going fine, food is flowing, everyone has had enough wine to act a little more natural, and then it happens: the slideshow.
Aunt Mable had another European outing, and you're gonna hear about it.
Cousin Steve went camping, took a video of the sunrise over The Lake, and you're gonna watch.
That uncle you call an uncle but isn't really an uncle starts talking about his time at the shooting range this summer.
You desperately try to find an excuse to get into other conversations or even watch football, although your team isn't playing, and your fantasy team hasn't had a chance since week 4. Also, it's Friday.
It's too late though, Aunt Mable has made direct eye contact and you find yourself nodding yes to whatever it is she's saying.
Why is it so cliché to dread the annual family stories/vacation photos?
It's all story and you like story right? You write, you observe everything you can to see what can spark a new idea, and you read more than you eat.
So why is this storytime so dull?
The vacation story, more often than not, is missing the key ingredient to good storytelling: conflict.
Story captures the interest of an audience, not because the weather was just absolutely gorgeous Dear as the sunset over the Alps, but rather because the sun is sinking, you are still 2 miles away from shelter, and the temperature is already pushing 0 degrees.
Now you have my interest.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want my friends and family to have terrible, life-threatening vacations. Vacations are meant to be relaxing, fulfilling experiences for the people involved. Any decent person will want to hear that their loved ones had a good trip.
Two hours of pictures next to yet another tree in the French countryside? Uh...pass...thanks.
This revelation really dawned on me when my wife and I got back from our own vacation/belated honeymoon. The first stories we told when we got home were the ones about how everything went wrong.
The Instagram posts may have looked like this but we didn’t mention the 1000 miserable stairs to get to our room.
Our friends and family are great and, of course, they want to hear how beautiful Italy was and how much we ate and all that good crap.
But, when it was time to tell our harrowing tale of missed flights, lost luggage, and nearly losing each other in the darkness of Florence, our friends leaned forward and demanded more.
It's the conflict that makes it.
If we had everything go to plan, the “story” would be something like this:
-A nice trip to the airport with the best Lyft driver ever.
-On-time to Lisbon for our connecting flight.
-Quiet relaxing flights all around, every step of the way.
-Easy going car rental to get us around Italy.
-Beautiful drive in sunshine through the Tuscan countryside.
-An enjoyable first day in Italy filled with friends, food, and wine.
BOOOORRRRING
Do I wish that was the story? Hell yeah, I do. I'm not some insane D&D Bard that needs to cause trouble in the group for the sake of a good story.
The real story outline looks more like this:
-A super cool Lyft driver to get us to the airport...and after that, nothing went right.
-A long-ass delayed flight to Lisbon after sitting on the tarmac for an hour because who the hell knows.
-Every person on the plane was sick and here I am reading Stephen King's The Stand for the first time. Worst idea ever. (Great book, though)
-As we land, there's a kid puking to our right (a lovely aroma inside the tin can of Air Portugal by the way) and a woman breastfeeding to our left (totally fine, but I ain't gonna stare either).
-We sprint to the connecting flight, having to go through customs and security again while the clock ticks away.
-They run out of bins at security (except for the stack behind the security guard who refuses to give them anyone, because reasons).
-We finally make it to the gate 20 minutes before departure, and they already have the gate closed. We miss our connecting flight, and so do 15 other people, because they can't wait 5 minutes, saving them a ton of customer issues.
-The customer service line to find a new flight was a nightmare because so many other people also needed a plane. We could wait 24 hours for a direct flight or 12 for a flight to Paris than Florence, our final destination.
-Our bags needed to be transferred, and no one knows where they are.
-We are assured the bags are on the next flight by both lost and found and our connecting flight.
-They're not.
-We arrive in Florence just before the car rental place closes and now have to drive at 1 in the morning instead of noon in a country where every driver hates you.
Then, Guardians from Breath of the Wild showed up and we knew things couldn’t possibly get worse.
There's more, but you get the picture, right?
By the time we got to the place we were staying, we're eating leftover welcome dinner (for the wedding we were attending) from a pot like a couple of crazed Hobbits that barely got their short asses to Rivendell.
The story we tell most isn't even the vacation (which was amazing, by the way, and we feel very lucky to have made it and experience what we did).
The story is the conflict. This is one of those things my wife and I are going to share over and over at Thanksgiving tables, family visits, and trips to Southern Grist brewery here in East Nashville.
If you don't have conflict in your story...then you don't have a story.
You're thinking, well duh Chris, my God, I'm not an idiot.
Conflict can slip through your fingers easier than you might think, though.
I'm going to put myself out there just for you. Well, and for me, I'm a little selfish, I'll be honest. I want to grow and learn and figure out what works in a story and what doesn't. That's kinda the whole point of this blog, after all. (And you get to learn along the way too).
So, here I linked a flash fiction I wrote, and it made the rounds of all kinds of different literary sources. It got rejected over and over and over.
Now, I originally liked how this story turned out, so I really examined what the hell was going on. It seemed like just the thing for the magazines and sites I submitted to.
The reason for these rejections was shockingly obvious and so simple. There's no conflict. There's an allusion to conflict, but that's about it. The characters don't get anything put in their way, and they don't change.
It's a poem more than a story.
So here it is, it's nice and short for a quick reference, but you can see what I'm talking about. No conflict, just literary fluff:
Your characters need to have obstacles in the way of their plans so that you can flesh out who they are. My wife and I got to see each other under extreme pressure, lack of sleep, anxiety, the whole nine yards.
Conflict is about creating change. Change of plans, change of character, change of hope, the list could go on and on.
The audience will put themselves in the middle of that conflict. They want to think about what they would do in that situation. Ultimately, it's an examination of self. A good story lets the viewer, reader, whatever, see a little bit of themselves.
And we love ourselves in conflict because we like to believe that we can be the ones to create good change through that conflict.
Even you love it. Yeah, that's right. How did I open this article? I told a story about you in conflict. Anxiety growing, boredom imminent, escape nearly impossible, and in an everyday situation we all have been through.
See, conflict is what will grab the attention of your audience. So make sure there are things in the road of your plot. You don't want to tell a nice story about how your characters had a great vacation. You may love your characters and really want that for them, but ultimately the audience wants to see them thrown to the wolves.
What opposes your characters' plans? What will they do when everything starts to fall apart? If you can begin to answer those questions, then you got the foundation of a story people want to experience.
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The kingdom they are from, where no magic lights appear.