Every Story is a War

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

My office bookshelves are stuffed with the writing books I’ve studied and highlighted over the years. They’re like old friends. They helped me learn to write salable fiction. I also have eight big binders of issues of Writer’s Digest, all sticky noted, because I’d gobble up the fiction column each month. When I started, Lawrence Block was the columnist. Later it was Nancy Kress. And later than that I shared the column with Nancy.

I sometimes go through these just to see what I was highlighting in those days and get some helpful craft reminders. Recently I came across one of Nancy’s columns titled “How You Can Make Your Story Into a Battlefield” (June, 1995).

In it she boldly states, “Every story is a war. This means every story.” Realizing this, you begin to think “not like a carpenter patiently building a house, but like a general ordering forces.” Further:

Every war includes these factors: combatants who know which side they’re on; something significant at stake; murderous action in which both sides are struggling as hard as they can to prevail; an end to the war through victory, surrender, exhaustion or default; some means of deciding who won.

This doesn’t mean you have to write bang-bang thrillers. The war can be inside a character. I’ve often said that a plot is how a character confronts death—physical, professional, or psychological (or a mix).

Do you write sweet romances? Well, unless the lovers fight through obstacles because they must be together or lose the deepest part of their lives (psychological death), the story isn’t full capacity.

This is even true of comic fiction. Why? Because the characters in the comedy must think they’re in a tragedy of epic proportions. Jerry MUST have the soup that the Soup Nazi makes! So much so that he will give up his girlfriend (who has offended the severe chef) so he can place his order.

Thinking in these terms will ensure that your scenes have significance. You won’t just be filling pages; you’ll be like Patton or Alexander the Great, field generals who were geniuses at moving troops in battle.

Again, this applies to romance as well as crime, character-driven and plot-driven.

Now, Voyager, which I wrote about here, is about a young woman psychologically damaged and suppressed by her overbearing mother. Her attempt to break free and become her true self is what the war is all about. The battles are fierce. So the mother drops her neutron bomb (**spoiler alert**) and has a heart attack. It’s implied she brought it on herself, so as to shackle Charlotte (Bette Davis) with permanent guilt.

That’s war to the death in a so-called “woman’s picture” of the 1940s.

Kress advises that as you begin writing you ask:

  • What are the two sides in this war?
  • What is at stake? [JSB: What form of death?]
  • How soon into the story do the two sides understand, intellectually or emotionally, that they’re at war? Or, if the characters don’t know yet that there’s a war on, can I at least make sure the readers know it?

Think about each move a character makes as a battle tactic, and each physical action and dialogue exchange as a weapon. These can be subtle and involve subterfuge or distraction, as well as direct assault. But they’re all employed to gain the victory.

Readers are always subconsciously asking: Why should I care? Draw battle lines in your story, and they will.

Comments and questions welcome.

 

NOTE: Today’s post is brought to you by Kellogg’s Corn …. no, wait. Brought to you by The Art of War for Writers.

25 thoughts on “Every Story is a War”

  1. I never consciously thought about it but I agree every story is a form of war. To me plotting a story (or several stories if writing a series) is like warfare because you have to play chess as you define the threads of the story, scope of the characters, and calculate moves across a book or books. And if you miscalculate it could be costly if you don’t consider all the moves of your troops—err—characters across the stories.

  2. Can I just say how amazed I am about the depth of your writing knowledge! I’ve been reading this blog for a decade and yet you come up with new material once a week that gives me food for thought about my WIP. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us.

  3. I love this post. It hits the nail on the head. I’ve been going thru my WIP and beefing up the conflict, both internal and external, in scenes that were lacking, so this is a good reminder. Thank you for sharing.

  5. This is a brilliant way of a looking at story, Jim. Nancy and you are both wise, as usual. I’ve been fortunate to learn so much from both you, having the privilege of taking a writing class and several workshops from her, studying the insightful books on fiction craft each of you has written, and reading your equally insightful TKZ posts over the years.

    It occurs to me that sometimes the war, just like a real war, can have more than two sides as well. For instance, in a mystery, there’s a war between the sleuth and the murderer, indirect at first, but there can also be a war between the sleuth and, say the police (or within the police if this is a procedural) and the investigator, since the police want to be able to do their job but also can develop tunnel vision about the murder.

  6. Love this, Jim! Never leave TKZ without another craft nugget…

    Still being a novice author myself, I’m going to draw a correlation with Mr. Gilstrap’s Jonathan Grave series.

    The two main characters, Scorpion and Boxers (AKA Big Guy), are partners and long-time covert operative buds. They rescue hostages. They work together, have each other’s sixes, and enjoy a very entertaining camaraderie (for me, the reader). But…

    One thing that keeps me coming back for more is that the two of them often butt heads tactically. The resolution of each tactical disagreement is kind of like two lovers working stuff out. 🙂

    IMHO, this is another take on your discussion above, and it works for me.

    Happy Sunday!

  7. I love your analogy of story as war, Jim.

    I especially like “Think about each move a character makes as a battle tactic, and each physical action and dialogue exchange as a weapon.”

    When I think about it, the very act of writing is a kind of war in itself. Coming up with a battle plan, working out the strategy, overcoming obstacles, enduring through all the trials. (If I had an army helmet, I’d wear it when I write. 🙂 )

  8. I started learning the craft by joining a RWA chapter. Deb Dixon’s GMC – Goal, Motivation, Conflict – seems to fit the ‘war’ model. I’ve been more or less following that “model” in all my books, be they romantic suspense or mystery.

  9. Jim, true wisdom stands the test of time. You and Nancy are proof. Thanks for holding up high standards in the face of transitory phases and fads that flutter through the writing world.

  10. This is why Ben Bova’s THE CRAFT OF WRITING SCIENCE FICTION THAT SELLS has always resonated with me. He believes that plot is a characterization device. You must examine your character and find his/her one glaring weakness and attack it through plot.

    The protagonist should have a complex set of emotional problems where two opposing feelings are struggling with each other. Emotion A vs. Emotion B. (guilt vs. duty, pride vs. obedience, fear vs. responsibility, etc.) He calls the conflict incompatible aims and desires.

    This conflict should exist on many levels beginning deep within the protagonist’s psyche and should well up into the conflict between the protagonist and the other characters. Resolution of that conflict is the story. He calls it an interior struggle made exterior by focusing on an antagonist (not necessarily a human enemy) who attacks the protagonist’s emotional problem.

    And, yes, it works with a romance as well as action novels, etc.

    • Good stuff. Swain had a colleague, William Foster-Harris, who wrote “The Basic Formulas of Fiction.” That’s not the buzz kill some pantsing writers think it is. It was his way of describing the battle between two moral values, A and B.

  12. War has been declared. This is almost the full prologue to my mainstream trilogy, a snippet from a New Yorker (faux) article, 10/26/06:

    “THE WORLD WAS SHOCKED, nay, stunned, by the recent revelation that, even as his pregnant fiancée, America’s Sweetheart Bianca Doyle, lay supine in a hospital bed at the California Regional Women’s Hospital in Burbank, on complete bed-rest to forestall the premature birth of his twin daughters, Irish Megastar Andrew O’Connell, seen last March dedicating his winning statuette at the Academy Awards to Ms. Doyle, was secretly married to best-selling author K. Beth Winter, many years his senior.”

    — PRIDE’S CHILDREN: PURGATORY (Book 1 of the Trilogy) by Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

    It’s also NOT completely true – you have to read to find out which parts are.

    Definitely a battle between moral values.

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