Month: February 2012

Conflict – or How Many Sides to the Dark Side?

Did The Phantom Menace have it right?

—Yeah, a cheap shot, nodding some less-than-stellar Star Wars. But if the question is what makes a character evil—or rather, what makes him move against other characters, whether it’s “villainy” or driving someone to turn on his friends or even pressure the hero—I always thought the movie’s (one) famous line had a lot to say.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Still, this is the Unified Writing Field Theory, where we try to sort out a lot of different ideas to see what our story options are, and where we can take them. So let’s start with the basic definition of conflict:

  • someone hurts someone.

Call it his hand swinging into our hero’s face, or into his pocket, or him speaking out against the hero’s plans, or anything that interferes with the hero or other sympathetic folk. And the obvious motive is just

  • he wants his __

but that’s only one type, and worse, “he really really wants it” doesn’t give us a lot of options to build on it in a story. So let’s mix in some other dimensions of evil: the Seven Deadly Sins, the famous Jedi warning, and the Unified Theory’s recent breakdown of plot elements.

The Deadlies include Greed, Lust and Gluttony, all more examples of simply Wanting things. But they also add Sloth (not much of a plot event, but slacker or stressed characters could be goofing off about something important), and Pride and Envy. (I’ll get to the seventh in a moment.) Could we see these as amplifying how much a character wants things?

  • Envy twists any sense of what he doesn’t have by fixating on what someone else does have, so he tries to drag his “rival” down more than trying to take things for himself. Envy’s nasty stuff if it goes deep, maybe the hardest evil of all to spot because it’s less direct. Think Iago scheming behind Othello’s back.
  • Pride, though, is about what he does have or thinks he does. And it can create two conflicts: refusing to consider other people’s needs and warnings (like that hero saying he needs to guard the gates), and being protective of things he hates to lose—like anyone from a first son to the angel Lucifer might resent someone new getting attention. They’re protective… as in afraid.

And here we get to Fear (which isn’t in the Deadly Sins) but also to the last of those Seven, Wrath, because of Yoda’s line:

“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

I think the coolest thing about this line is that it lists its evils *in sequence*, showing that we need some thing to be worried for before we can get fighting mad to keep it. (Like Mom used to say, if you get angry at an insult, it also shows you think it’s a little bit true. Come to think of it, even the future Darth Vader had to start by losing his mother…) Then on the less specific end, hate is simply anger moving to a long-term burn, maybe hating the people who “wronged” him but maybe also being more ready to resent the whole world more the more he loses.

So, a budding antagonist could have desires on one hand, and on the other have things he fears and rages to hang on to, maybe stiffened by past losses’ grudges, or pride, or envies… You could have a whole spiral of how the hero’s noble goal is threatening what he values, and his response makes the hero push harder, until…

–Not a bad plotline, especially once we add how someone could be protecting an intangible thing like “a world where no peasant belongs in college,” or how “fear” might mean he attacks an innocent hero because of what the hero might do. (How many wars start because the nation next door seems too strong and angry not to hit first? Or consider the jealous boyfriend—real “jealousy” is very different from envy, less sneaky but more immediate.)

Or his “fear” could be of doing what he himself used to do. Guilt is a marvelous way to define a character as coming from a whole different viewpoint from what he has now; it really lets a story point out two sides of a tangled problem.

Yes, what he wants and what he won’t lose or do, good. Now let’s check that against this blog’s recent breakdown of plot elements: changing alternative choices that have Reward, Cost, and Difficulty.

Of course Reward and avoiding Cost are what we’ve been talking about, but there’s another side to this: what if what makes the difference is the cost to his victims, that instead of something driving him past restraints he just doesn’t realize he’s hurting people, or doesn’t care? Here we have everyone from sociopaths, to mad scientists who think their creations will help people, to the daily tragedy of seducers that don’t notice whose hearts they break.

And then there’s Difficulty. Plenty of storylines have hinged on people who have all the same goals and fears as the hero, and that becomes the whole problem: they still block him because they doubt he’s got the right plan or just the skills to pull it off.

So… desire (or envy), and fear (even paranoia, or maybe guilt) or anger multiplied by pride or old hate, and maybe ignorance or apathy or just a doubt about strategy.

That’s a lot of problems. And the more a tale explores these conflicts, the clearer it is how much they challenge our heroes—both with how many committed enemies can come out of the woodwork, and how hard it is for a struggling hero to keep his own soul clean.

Sounds like a story to me…

(For more on shades of villainy: Case Study: LaCroix and Everything I know about evil I learned from Thunderbolt Ross.)

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Plot – Just Three Tools?

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Greetings and welcome to the first post of my evolving Theory. I could take a moment to introduce myself and plug my novel… or I could dive right in to what’s been the most useful principle for me to look at a story.

I mean the broad process of fitting everything together, building a forest so you know where each of those trees belong, and if that makes you ready to line up their branches too.

The plot.

Plot’s the kind of thing where we find either simple advice (“rising and falling action”) or so many people’s different toolboxes I used to make myself crazy wishing I could compare more than a few tricks at a time. People even give us different ideas for what’s most important about plot:

  • it’s conflict…
  • it’s keeping events logical…
  • it’s the character following a goal…
  • it’s him making choices…

Or people say plot matters but never as much as presenting a vividly-detailed world, or a memorable character, or revealing a theme or inspiring an emotion in the reader.

–Never mind forests and trees, describing writing can turn us all into blind people examining the proverbial elephant! Most of it must be the good times we’ve all had digging trenches with the tusks or clearing roads with the trunk, but still, is there a whole picture of the animal that we can see or not?

I think there is.

To take that wish list –conflict, logical, goal, choices, world, character, theme, reader emotion– I’d say you could line them all up to say:

  • plot is “how a Character and his Goals come in Conflict with the World, especially creating Themes and Reader Emotions through how Logical his Choices are.”

In other words:

  • someone’s Choices.

Doesn’t everything else fit around that? Choice is how the character (and her most active part, her goals) deals with the world; conflict and its lack are how the two mesh. And most ways to bring the reader to the right emotion that are just following what the character learns will and won’t blow up in her face, and why.

I think choice is the root of it all. We hate villains for their bad choices, struggle alongside a detective to choose which tool to crack the case, and savor a book that puts us so deep in the world we start to intuit what’s behind how someone handles his day.

So, if it comes down to choice, how do we writers use that?

Well, so many stories focus on problem-solving: how do you get the girl, or track the terrorist, and so all the classic forms of “what helps/hurts it next”? In other words, the chance that a goal will simply fail, its Difficulty.

But if you think of that a moment, you’ll probably add “or the times he finds the goal’s price is too high.” True enough, especially since Cost is an easy other way to complicate a goal in progress. (If I can’t see what a character’s giving up for his goal or how it hurts someone else, I know I’m just not trying.)

And then there’s the third side, the Reward of the goal itself, that he hopes makes the Cost and Difficulty worth it. In many ways this might be the deepest level of internal conflict–or at least the hardest one to mess with without reconsidering everything else. It’s also the easiest to cover in adventures (the reward is you don’t get killed), and all too easy to leave it fuzzy in lower-stakes tales.

Again: Difficulty, Cost, and Reward. If a plot just establishes those three, then everything else relates to the balance of those, in two ways:

  • Alternatives, and
  • Changes

A choice isn’t much of a choice without an Alternative, some different way to change the Difficulty or adjust the Cost or try a different goal with a different Reward and its other factors–known as “taking a longshot” or “taking the bullet for your friend” or “settling” or whatever it may be. And of course, a story is always “what comes next” so you’re presenting these by having them Change, the whole process of building suspense or maybe revealing a new option to tempt the hero or slowly raising the cost he’ll have to pay.

Really, is there anything that doesn’t come from some combination of these?

  • Tales of courage? just show how high the Cost is and that there is no alternative to its Difficulty.
  • A mystery? work through all the Alternatives about what might solve its Difficulty.
  • Learning one lesson? it might be the same plan as a mystery: only one option works.
  • Theme? isn’t that showing how one factor or one pattern within them keeps coming back? (Betrayal, betrayal by one guy, coping with betrayal with forgiveness…)
  • Making one shocking point? keep the reader busy with one set of choices and then spring the real one, so they’ll never forget how you’re saying that in this situation, This Just Happens.
  • Or you can lay out a progression through all of these sides of choosing, to really capture how wide this slice of the world is and how your hero grows in dealing with it all.

Try it. Look a story’s plot: how much of it is pushing the Difficulty up and down with changes and alternatives there? When does it tear at the hero by bringing in a Cost, or make the heroine grow by seeking a more mature Reward?

See how much of your story it pulls together.

Next time:

Conflict — or, How many sides to the Dark Side?

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