Internal Conflict
In debating whether to start a new idea or not, I got caught up in trying to create an internal struggle strong enough to sustain a full-length novel. I stumbled across this blog by Kate Kyle about internal conflict. Her line about the characters' goals (external motivation) being AWAY from love makes a lot of sense. What the character wants at the beginning of the book should not be love. It should be something else: revenge, a successful business, custody of a child. . . .whatever.
The character gets dragged into love kicking and screaming, but ultimately better off.
The internal conflict demonstrates growth or change, and that is what will eventually make the character able to give and receive love. The chase for that elusive external goal will force an internal change, and that in turn will allow the character to become the person who can love and be loved. That's a lot to happen in one book! And for a romance, it's going to have to happen for both of them.
So to start thinking about this new book, I have to decide what the primary character (my heroine, Anna) most wants out of life.
What are other ways you start off on the path to a new book or idea?
Thanks to a Facebook conversation with my friend and critque partner DeeAnna Galbraith, I'm going to ask today's question: Can you have too much of a good thing?
We've tossed ideas about conflict around here--external, internal, and various permutations of All Of The Above. But DeeAnna is reading a book where pretty much everything that can happen does--yet from her description, not a lot of it relates to a conflict between the hero and heroine. Which, I would argue, should be the crux of any good romance novel. Oh, sure, people have physical disabilities. And they lose their job. Then someone in the family gets sick or dies. And their car dies. . . You get the idea. It's a whole huge bunch of bad luck, but to me, that doesn't necessarily equate to conflict. It's something that could be fixed with an oil change and a good counseling session.
To me, conflict that's big enough to sustain an entire book doesn't have to be anything with guns blazing or cars dying or even people dying. It does, however, have to be a conflict that speaks to a fundamental difference between two characters who maybe WANT to like/love each other, but because of that fundamental difference, can't. At least, not at the beginning of the book. He thinks people should make their own end-of-life decisions; she thinks that's morally reprehensible. There's your conflict, and not a bit of shouting or exploding cars is involved.
OR, there has to be something each of them wants that's mutually exclusive. In VALENTINA, it was the hero desperately needing to make a business deal with the Bad Guy, whom Valentina wanted to kill. In the end, neither of them got their original goal, but they got something bigger and better.
So have you read books like this, where the author threw everything but the kitchen sink at the characters? Did it work? Pick it apart for us.
Spent this past weekend with the Olympia RWA Chapter at Manresa Castle in Port Townsend with some of the most fabulous people on the planet. Had a wonderful time, and took up the current MFH (manuscript from hell) to work on. Writing it has just turned into such a struggle. And I discovered with their help that the reason is. . . . there's no conflict. The hero and heroine both wanted, basically, the same thing.
This makes for a very short book.
In my head, they had opposite goals, but once people with a clearer vision looked at my plot (or lack thereof), they said, "Hey! There's no conflict here, and no place for your characters to grow."
On the flip side, I think I helped a couple of people with the same problem with their manuscripts.
So why is it so easy to see these ginormous plot holes in other peoples' books and not in our own? Is it because we're too close to the characters? Is it because we don't spend enough time before sitting down to write to get this figured out? Or do we not go deep enough? I mean, this is something like book #7. I should have this figured out by now. And I **thought** they were at odds. But they're really not.
I have a whole notebook full of 'deep insights' into this book that clearly meant squat. I'm going to start fresh because I still like the characters, but I was heading them in the completely wrong direction.
So today's question is, How do you ensure you have enough conflict? How do you recognize when there's not enough? And where do you draw the line between revising what you've got, and throwing it out and starting all over?
Adrianne Lee told me that you need Goal, and Opposition to that goal. And that both of those should either be heroic, or someone doing something unheroic, but for a very good reason, a heroic reason. Part of my problem was that my heroine wanted freedom and/or self-determination, which is heroic, but the OPPOSITE of that, which would have to be the hero's goal, would be to deny her her freedom. Bad juju there, at least for a hero. One of the many reasons the book wasn't working.
In my bullfighter book, the heroine wants to kill the story's villain. Now, murder is generally not considered heroic, BUT she's going to avenge the murder of her family by the villain years earlier. And of course, the villain does die in the end, but not at her hand, so she's still left being heroine-like. Heroic. Whatever.
Thoughts? How do we test our conflicts to ensure they'll be sustainable for an entire book?
