Category Archives: conflict and suspense

Forensic Genetic Genealogy: A Crime Writer’s Field Guide

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Marcia King’s mother kept the same telephone number for thirty-seven years.

She kept the same house in Arkansas. She didn’t move. She didn’t disconnect. Marcia had hitchhiked out of town in 1980 and stopped calling, and her mother — like every mother in this position has done since the invention of the telephone — left the line open in case her daughter ever picked up on the other end.

In April of 2018, the call finally came.

It wasn’t Marcia.

It was the Miami County Sheriff’s Office in Troy, Ohio, telling a woman who had waited almost four decades that the unidentified body found beside Greenlee Road on April 28, 1981 — the young woman the press had nicknamed Buckskin Girl for the fringed leather poncho she had been wearing — was her daughter. Twenty-one years old. Strangled and beaten. Buried under a headstone that simply said Jane Doe.

The case had not been solved. Her killer was, and remains, unknown. But her name had come back.

Marcia King’s identification was the first cold case ever solved by forensic genetic genealogy. A blood sample preserved in an unrefrigerated tube since 1981 was processed, uploaded to the public genealogy database GEDmatch, and matched within four hours of computer searching to a first cousin once removed. A team of volunteer genealogists at the newly founded DNA Doe Project built the tree out from there. Two weeks later, a mother in Arkansas got the call.

Three weeks after that, on April 24, 2018, a 72-year-old former police officer named Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested in his front yard in Citrus Heights, California. The Golden State Killer. Caught the same way: GEDmatch, family tree, candidate identified, confirmation DNA pulled from his trash. I remember standing with my cohorts from the Los Angeles Forensic Science Academy and talking about this case and the validity of using discarded DNA and familial DNA databases to find criminals. It was walking a fine legal line at the time.

This case began a change in the way cold case investigations worked in the U.S.

Eventually, it seeped its way into crime fiction. I tackled the topic a few years ago when writing What Darkness Does.

If you write the genre, you can no longer write around forensic genetic genealogy. And if you’re going to write it, you have to write it right.

Why This Matters for Crime Writers

Cold case fiction used to live in a forgiving place. The case had gone cold because the science of the era couldn’t read the evidence. Your investigator’s job was to be present-day-clever about a past-tense problem.

Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy (FIGG) moves the goalposts. Evidence that was useless for forty years is suddenly usable and trackable. Crimes from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s are now solvable in ways the original detectives couldn’t have imagined. Hundreds of cases have been resolved this way since 2018. The U.S. Department of Justice issued formal policy on its use in 2019. CRC Press is releasing the first comprehensive practitioner’s guide to FIGG this month.

That’s not a problem for fiction. It’s a gift. Forensic genetic genealogy gives you a mechanism that finally works the way readers want a cold case to work — the past speaking, after years of silence — without the cheap rescue of a deathbed confession or a buried diary in the attic.

It only works on the page if you understand what FIGG actually does, what it doesn’t do, and where the writer’s instinct toward speed and tidiness is going to trip you up.

What Forensic Genetic Genealogy Actually Is

Plain English: FIGG combines DNA recovered from a crime scene with consumer genetic genealogy databases — places like GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA — to find relatives of an unknown suspect or an unknown victim. A forensic genealogist uses those matches to build a family tree backward and outward until the tree narrows to one viable candidate.

That candidate is a lead. Not a defendant. Not a confirmed suspect. Just a lead.

For a suspect-identification match, investigators then need to collect what is called a surreptitious sample. This is typcially an abandoned or discarded source of DNA sample — for instance a coffee cup, a water bottle, a tissue from a public trash can. This is legal if the sample is taken from public domain. That sample is then tested and compared against the original DNA profile from the case at hand.

For a victim-identification case like Marcia King’s, a relative agrees to give a confirmation DNA sample, and the unknown person becomes a known person again.

Two distinctions matter for fiction.

FIGG is not CODIS. The Combined DNA Index System is the federal database of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, arrestees, and unsolved crime scenes. CODIS hits when your suspect is already in the system. Forensic genetic genealogy works when they aren’t. That distinction is the whole point of the technique. A writer who collapses the two will lose any reader who has paid attention to the last six years of true crime.

FIGG isn’t fast. The lab work to generate a sequenceable profile from old, often degraded evidence takes weeks to months. The genealogy work that follows takes even more time. Difficult cases take months. The famously hard ones take a year or longer. The science moves quickly. The genealogy is patient, careful, and slow.

Where Crime Writers Are Getting It Wrong

After watching the field for the last several years, here are the misnomers that show up most often regarding FIGG.

The instant match. A writer’s investigator submits DNA on Tuesday and gets a name on Wednesday. In the real world, even Marcia King’s case — which made a hit in only four hours of searching — had been preceded by weeks of lab work to extract usable DNA from a 1981 blood sample most labs had already given up on. We have to compress the timeline some, but compress the timeline that much and you lose the texture that makes cold case fiction interesting in the first place.

Skipping the confirmation step. A FIGG match is a candidate. It’s not legal proof. The story doesn’t move from genealogy hit to courtroom. It moves from genealogy hit to a separate, traditional confirmation DNA sample, almost always from something the suspect discarded in public domain. A writer who skips this step is writing a case that wouldn’t survive the first defense motion.

Using the wrong databases. Since the 2019 DOJ policy, U.S. law enforcement is restricted to genealogy databases where users have explicitly opted in to law enforcement matching. That means GEDmatch (with the right setting) and FamilyTreeDNA. It does not mean Ancestry. It does not mean 23andMe. Those companies have refused law enforcement access. A writer who has investigators pulling matches from Ancestry is writing a scene that gets the case thrown out.

Treating the genealogist as scenery. Forensic genetic genealogy is not done by detectives. It’s done by trained genealogists. Not sworn officers of the law. Many of them are civilians. Some of them are former hobbyists who turned professional after the Golden State Killer breakthrough. They are the people who actually build the tree. If your manuscript is about a cold case solved by FIGG and there is no genealogist in the story, you need to go back and add them.

Ignoring the ethical layer. Real investigators, real prosecutors, and real defense attorneys are arguing about FIGG every day. About consent. About whose DNA gets used. About what happens when one family member’s spit kit puts their cousin in prison. That tension belongs in your fiction. It’s exactly the kind of moral territory crime writers were made for.

How I Used FIGG In What Darkness Does

In What Darkness Does, a fourteen-year-old named Flora finds a bone in the woods.

Flora is sharp, stubborn, and exactly the kind of kid who doesn’t let go of a question once it’s in her teeth. The bone goes to a forensic anthropologist, Dr. Samantha Eckhardt, at the University of Michigan. Dr. Eckhardt invites Flora to a two-day workshop where she’ll learn how to use forensic genetic genealogy to try to give the bone a name.

I wrote the workshop scenes carefully. I gave Dr. Eckhardt a line I want every crime writer to internalize before they write a single FIGG scene of their own:

I want you to have realistic expectations. You may not leave here today with a candidate lead.

That’s the whole field guide in one sentence. Realistic expectations. Maybe not today.

One scene I love in that storyline isn’t the moment Flora gets a DNA hit. It’s the scene where her aunt, Emily Hartford, comes back to the lab after a break and finds Flora hunched over the keyboard, fingers moving fast, eyes locked on the screen, refusing to come up for air. Emily asks if she wants a snack. Flora doesn’t hear her. Emily asks again.

Without looking up, Flora answers: What if this were your child or sibling or best friend who had gone missing, never to be heard from again? Wouldn’t you want to know as soon as possible?

That’s the heartbeat of FIGG.

The drama isn’t the technology. The drama is the moral urgency the technology gives a fourteen-year-old at a keyboard, condensed into a single sentence by a kid who has only just learned what the work costs.

Flora’s storyline didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a real program at Ramapo College in New Jersey, the same one I credit in the back of the book — Ramapo runs an investigative genetic genealogy boot camp, and the youngest person ever to help resolve a case using IGG was a high school student who took part in it. The classrooms are real. The cases are real. The kids are real.

What I needed Flora to model — and what I want every crime writer to take with them — is that FIGG is not glamorous. It’s tedious, careful, full of stretches where the only thing happening on the page is a person staring at a screen.

The drama lives in the patience. But the reward is worth the wait. And to illustrate this I stretched Flora’s FIGG storyline into book 6, Walking On White, releasing October 20, 2026. Flora will get her answers!

The Field Guide: FIGG Best Writing Practices

Practical things to do when forensic genetic genealogy enters your story.

  • Write the timeline honestly. Give the lab time. Give the family tree time. Let your investigator be frustrated by the wait. The slowness is the realism.
  • Write the genealogist as a character. Let them have a personality, a method, a doubt. Let your reader watch them work.
  • Show the confirmation DNA moment. The discarded coffee cup, the swab from a hospital, the cigarette in a parking lot. That’s the beat where the candidate becomes the suspect. Don’t skip it.
  • Use the right databases by name. FamilyTreeDNA. Mention the opt-in setting. Get this right and the readers who care will trust you on everything else.
  • Build the family tree onto the page. A scene where your detective sees a name three generations away from a killer and starts to feel the case shift — that’s a scene that didn’t exist in the genre until 2018. It’s yours to invent.
  • Let the candidate be a real person before they’re proven guilty. FIGG often surfaces ordinary people — fathers, neighbors, retired church deacons — whose DNA matched because their nephew did a Christmas-gift spit kit. Sit with that for a paragraph. The moral weight of the technique lives in that pause.
  • Don’t forget victim identification. Most crime fiction uses FIGG to catch killers. Marcia King’s case is a reminder that it also gives names back to the dead. A novel that works the missing person’s side of the technique has a clear field in front of it.

The Ethics Seam Writers Should Rip Into

When a great-aunt sends her DNA to a consumer genealogy site to find out where her ancestors came from, she is not consenting to a future case being made against her grandnephew. The chain of relationship is invisible, intimate, and one-way. She doesn’t know who she is implicating. She can’t know.

That’s the moral seam every crime writer working in this space should put pressure on. Not to take a side, necessarily — only to acknowledge that the technique that brings closure to one family creates exposure for another. A character who has thoughts about that is more interesting than one who doesn’t. A scene where a relative is told your DNA is the reason we found him is one of the rawest moments fiction can offer right now, and almost no one has written it well yet.

That could be you.

Why This Tool Earns Its Place in the Genre

The cases forensic genetic genealogy has solved are the cases that broke families for decades. Children waited their whole adult lives to learn who killed their mothers. Parents died not knowing what had happened to their daughters. The technique can’t undo any of that. It doesn’t give back the years.

What it does is end the unknowing. And the unknowing, as I have written before, is the part of grief no one survives well.

In April of 2018, a mother in Arkansas finally got an answer about a daughter she had never stopped waiting for. The headstone in Riverside Cemetery in Troy, Ohio, that had said Jane Doe for thirty-seven years got a name carved into it: Marcia Lenore Sossoman King. The murder is still open. The killer hasn’t been caught. But Marcia is no longer Buckskin Girl. She is herself again, in death, the way she was in life.

Every crime writer who writes in cold case territory is, in some sense, writing toward that exact moment — the unknowing that finally breaks. FIGG deserves a place in crime fiction. It deserves to be written without shortcuts. It deserves to be written by people who understand that the truth at the end of the family tree belongs first to the family of the victim.

Get the science and technique right. Get the genealogy right. Get the long process right.

The story takes care of itself from there.

Want more on writing forensics that actually holds up? My Crime Writer’s Toolkit and the Master Crime Writing Course at forensicspeak.com walk through the procedures, evidence types, and craft principles that separate the novels readers trust from the ones they put down on page forty.

Jennifer Dornbush is an author, screenwriter, and forensic specialist who brings crime stories to life with authenticity and heart. With a background rooted in real-world forensics and a passion for crafting unforgettable mysteries, Jennifer offers readers and viewers a front-row seat to the intersection of science, justice, and human nature. Jennifer’s crime expertise has made her a sought-after speaker, consultant, and educator. Through her webinars and master courses, Jennifer guides writers in melding suspenseful storytelling with forensic realism to the screen and page. Meet her at www.jenniferdornbush.com

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The Two Things Every Novel Needs

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Raymond Chandler

“Trouble is my business.”—Raymond Chandler

There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can’t. And there are two things every novel needs if you want to please readers—Conflict and Suspense. Let us examine.

Conflict

What is the goal of your novel? Is it to entertain? Teach? Preach? Stir up anger? Change the world? Make you a lot of money?

It might be any of these things, but in the end, none of these objectives will work to their full potential unless they forge, in some way, a satisfying emotional experience for the reader.

And what gets the reader hooked emotionally? Trouble. Readers are gripped by the trials a character goes through. It’s a human response called empathy. We “see” ourselves in a character’s problems, and follow the story from there. And story has to include a problem that arises from plot.

Someday I’ll do a deep dive into when plot, once proudly championed by writers, became a “four-letter word” to many in the writing game. At some time or other it became fashionable to assert that character is primary over plot. It’s actually the exact opposite: True character is only revealed in crisis. Plunge your character into big trouble (plot) and then we’ll see what he or she is made of (character).

If you don’t believe me, imagine a 400 page novel about Scarlett O’Hara where she just sits on the porch all day, sipping mint juleps and flirting with a variety of of beaus. Gone With the Wind only takes off (on page 6) when she finds out Ashley is going to marry Melanie (trouble). And then the Civil War breaks out (big trouble!).

Another way to think about it is this: We all wear masks in our lives. A major crisis forces us to take off the mask and reveal who we really are. That’s the role of conflict in fiction, to rip the mask off the character.

Now, this conflict must be of sufficient magnitude to matter to readers. That’s why I teach that “death stakes” must be involved. Your Lead character must be facing death—which can be physical, professional or psychological.

Genre doesn’t matter. In a literary novel like The Catcher in the Rye, it’s psychological death. Holden Caulfield must find meaning in the world or he will “die inside.” Psychological death is also the key to a category romance. If the two lovers do not get together, they will lose their soul mate. They will die inside and forever have diminished lives. (That’s the feeling you need to create. Think about it. Why was Titanic such a hit with teen girls? It wasn’t because of the special effects!)

In The Silence of the Lambs, it’s professional death on the line. Clarice Starling must help bring down Buffalo Bill in part by playing mind games with Hannibal Lecter. If she doesn’t prevail, another innocent will die (physical death in the subplot) and Clarice’s career will be over.

And in most thrillers, of course, you have the threat of physical death hanging over the whole thing.

That’s why, novelist friend, trouble is indeed your business. Without sufficient conflict readers aren’t going to care enough to finish the book.

Suspense

The second element is suspense, and I don’t just mean in the suspense novel per se. Suspense means to “delay resolution so as to excite anticipation.” Another way to say this is that it’s the opposite of having a predictable story. If the reader keeps guessing what’s going to happen, and is right, there is no great pleasure in reading the novel. It will, in other words, be boring.

We’ve all had the wonderful experience of being so caught up in a story that we have to keep turning the pages. This is where writing technique can be studied and learned and applied. For example, there are various ways you can end a chapter so readers are compelled to read on. I call these “Read on Prompts,” and it was one of the first things I set out to study when I got serious about writing as a career. I went to a used bookstore and bought a bunch of King, Koontz and Grisham. When I’d get to the end of a chapter I’d write in pencil on the page what they did to prompt me to read on.

Again, genre doesn’t matter. You have to be able to excite anticipation and avoid predictability no matter what kind of book you write. Suspense technique helps you to do that. (See also Brother Gilstrap’s post about tension.) I even wrote a book for Writer’s Digest Books with the clever title Conflict & Suspense.

The prodigious pulp writer William Wallace Cook put it this way back in 1923: “Plot…is life responding to environment; and not only is this response always in terms of conflict, but the really great struggle, the epic struggle of creation, is the inner fight of the individual whereby the soul builds up character.”

Believe it.

Comments welcome.

Trouble is Your Business

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Imagine the first storyteller. I’ll call him Og. He was out hunting for meat. He was about to bag him some wolf when he got surprised by a mastodon lumbering by.

Bummer.

He dropped his club and ran. He hid in some rocks. An hour or so later he came back to his prey and found it being devoured by a saber toothed tiger.

Double bummer.

Then Og had to trek back to the waiting fire. His tribe was sitting there awaiting some steaks (they were tired of berries and roots.) They looked at Og and grunted something which can be roughly translated, “Where’s the meat, man?”

Og was on the spot. His position as chief hunter-gatherer was up for grabs, depending on what he said next.

The last time something like this happened, and the tribe asked what went wrong, Og merely shrugged and threw dirt at them. This didn’t help matters at all. They seemed unwilling to give Og more chances.

So now Og gets on his haunches and says, “I was out hunting like always, and had a wolf in my sights. I threw a rock and got him right on the head. He went down. I was about to go get him when I heard this ROAARRRR!”

He pauses to take stock of the reactions around the fire. Every face is turned toward him. He can see consuming interest in their eyes.

He has them hooked.

Good, Og thinks. Let’s see if I can keep them that way while I figure out how to get out of this.

“I spin around,” Og says, “and there is a tiger with those long, spiked teeth. There is spit dripping off those teeth. His eyes were huge, as big as lakes! I could smell his fur. It smelled like death.”

The audience is leaning forward now. Og thinks, That went well. If I take time to describe things this way, it stretches out the story and the tension. And that bit about the smell, that was pure genius.

Og is beginning to develop a style.

He’s also searching for an ending, and so he lays out, beat by beat, a story of this encounter with the tiger and the ensuing fight to save his own life. He finally gets to the end and speaks of a mighty battle with the beast, until his ultimate triumph.

Someone in the audience asks, “So where’s the tiger?”

Og must think up a twist ending. So he comes up with the speculative fiction genre, and says the god of the mountains came down and took the tiger as tribute. He was about to call down fire from the sky on Og’s tribe. Og told him not to, that it would be bad, and he would fight the god if he had to. The god relented.

So Og has saved all their lives. Or so the story goes.

Well, the reaction of the listeners is so good that Og gets a double portion of berries. An attractive woman gives him a blanket of squirrel fur in honor of his exploits. One of the old men gives Og his best club. A couple of the younger tribe members hand over their favorite trinkets, and promise more if Og will tell more stories.

And Og thinks, Maybe I can make a living at this.

Og’s brother, who collects the booty, keeps 15% of it.

Og had more thrillers on his tongue.

Later, Og began to tell stories that were about his emotions. How he was having to deal with past demons, like his father flicking pebbles at him when he was a boy, and when he fell in love with a cave girl who later got stepped on by a wooly mammoth. Og starts calling these “character driven” stories, but knows they are based on the same idea: a high stakes threat to the character’s life and happiness.

And you know what? The essence of story has not changed—from Og to the early myths to the Greek drama to Shakespeare; from Jane Austen to Herman Melville to Mark Twain; from Dashiell Hammett to Raymond Chandler to Sue Grafton.

It’s all about trouble.

Trouble comes on a continuum, from the annoying to the life-threatening. When you can’t find your reading glasses that’s one kind of trouble. A kidnapped child is quite another.

Every scene in your book should have some form of trouble that produces emotions that are also on a continuum, from low-level worry to outright terror.

That’s your palette, writer. Dip into it each day as your write your story. Always be thinking How can I make more trouble? How can I make it worse?

Then stick the landing. Nail the ending. And readers will line up to give you a double portion of berries.

Are you making enough trouble? Do your openings disturb? Do you write “friend talking to friend” scenes that need more tension (watch out for eating scenes)? What are some of your favorite ways to make trouble (a la “bring in a guy with a gun”)?

Note: The link in the post takes you to an Og-inspired thriller that is on Kindle-sale for 99¢ this week. The book is Your Son is Alive.

Using Conflict to Build Tension

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My friend Becca Puglisi is here today with a fab post about how to use conflict and tension effectively. Enjoy!

One of my favorite Aha moments as a writer came in the form of feedback from a critiquer. (Shout out to all the critique partners!) She kept writing notes in my manuscript, like Where’s the tension? and This would be a good spot to add some tension.

No tension? What’s she talking about? The main character was just abandoned by her father. Her best friend was attacked by racist pigs. The family business is about to go under. I mean, there is conflict ALL OVER the place, so how can she say there’s no tension??

After chewing on this for a while, I realized that I was confusing tension with conflict. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they aren’t necessarily the same.

Blake Snyder (Save The Cat) defines conflict like this: a character enters a scene with a goal, and standing in the way is an obstacle. That’s conflict. Maybe it’s a confrontation with an adversary, a downed tree that blocks the character’s path, the alarm not going off on the morning of an important meeting, or a temptation that triggers an internal struggle.

Conflict is whatever makes it harder for the character to achieve their goal. It’s a vital part of creating empathy in the reader as they wonder if the hero is up to the challenge.

Tension in literature is an emotional response from the reader, and conflict is one of the things that elicits it. Think of it in terms of real-life tension—that tight, stretched feeling in your belly that puts you on edge. Where conflict occurs, the character should be feeling some of that tension. If the reader feels it too, an emotional bond is forged that puts the reader more firmly in the character’s corner, rooting for them and turning pages to see if they succeed.

When conflict is done right, it should result in tension. But it doesn’t—not all the time, as my critique partner kindly pointed out. So how do we write stories that are chock full of tension? Here are four tips for making that happen.

Include Conflict in Every Scene. In each scene, your character should have a goal. If they get what they want without any opposition, where’s the fun (or tension) in that? Too many pages without conflict will result in a story that drags and readers who start wondering what’s in the fridge.

So for each scene, know what your character’s after, then add whatever will make it more difficult for them to achieve their goal. The conflict can be big and noisy (a fistfight) or quiet (the character wanting something that’s bad for them), but make sure it’s there. For ideas on possible conflict scenarios, take a look at this database at One Stop for Writers.

Employ a Variety of Conflict Scenarios. Think over the past day and take a quick inventory of all the difficulties you encountered. The list is going to be impressive (and maybe a little overwhelming). It’s going to include not only conflict of varying intensity, but scenarios that touch on different areas of life. The same should be true for our characters. Your spy protagonist is going to have lots of work-related conflict, but they’re also going to encounter relationship friction, moral temptations, power struggles, ticking clock situations, etc. Well-rounded characters should experience conflict in all areas of life. Maintain authenticity (and make things super difficult for them) by varying the conflict scenarios in your story.

Add Some Internal Conflict. While there always will be external forces working against your character, any protagonist traversing a change or failed character arc is going to struggle internally. As the story goes along, they’ll face difficulties that highlight a weakness, challenge a dysfunctional coping mechanism or flawed ideology, and push them to make the changes that will allow them to succeed. The only way they can reach that critical tipping point of meaningful change is if they struggle with their inner demons.

It’s Sarah Connor doubting her ability to become “the mother of the future.”

It’s Jason Bourne slowly realizing who he is, not knowing if he can live with the knowledge, and being unsure how to move forward.

It’s John Anderton—cop and neuroin addict—wrestling with the knowledge that the Pre-Crime program he’s devoted his career to may be flawed and even immoral.

Internal conflict is compelling to readers because they’ve been there—wrestling with questions about morality, right and wrong, identity, and a host of other things. They also know what’s at stake for the character should they fail to emerge from those internal struggles with a healthier approach to life.

Make Sure the Stakes are High Enough. We know that conflict doesn’t always result in tension, which means it won’t automatically engage readers. For readers to be unsettled and a little nervous about your character’s future, something significant needs to be at stake: a cost incurred if the protagonist fails to navigate the situation successfully.

So when you’re thinking of the consequences of failure, think in terms of stakes. Each conflict scenario needs a serious or else attached to it. To identify stakes that will greatly impact the character, consider the following:

  • Far-Reaching Stakes: those that may result in loss for many people if the protagonist fails.
  • Moral Stakes: those that threaten the character’s most foundational ideals and beliefs.
  • Primal (Death) Stakes: those involving the loss of something major, such as innocence, a relationship, a career, dream, idea, belief, reputation, or a physical life.

Stakes—even the far-reaching ones—should touch your character on some level. This gives them skin in the game by making things personal and endangering something or someone important. When the reader sees just how high the stakes are, their empathy for the character will grow, and they’ll be more engaged in the story.

We try to avoid tension in real life, but in our books? It’s absolutely vital for holding the reader’s interest. Create and maintain tension by carefully considering the conflicts in your story. Include opposition in every scene, vary the kinds of conflict your character experiences, add some internal struggles, and ensure that the stakes are impactful and you’re sure to raise your character’s blood pressure while keeping readers engaged.

For more information on the role conflict plays in storytelling and how you can use it effectively, check out The Conflict Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles (Volume 1).

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and other resources for writers.

Her books have sold over 700,000 copies and are available in multiple languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online resource for authors that’s home to the Character Builder and Storyteller’s Roadmap tools.

What Can Go Wrong?

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by Joe Moore

A huge Happy New Year to all my TKZ friends and blogmates. May 2014 be the best year ever for all of you.

Back in June of 2012, I posted a TKZ blog called Magic Words and how using them can be one of the best methods for kick starting your story ideas. The words are: “What If”. I’m sure that almost every story written probably started with those two words. What better way to get the juices flowing than to start with what if? I consider this a “story level” technique.

Today I want to suggest a “chapter level” exercise. Four words that can help create tension, suspense, conflict, and character-building. They are: “What Can Go Wrong?”

As you’re about to start a new chapter, even if you know what needs to happen, pause for a moment and ask yourself what can go wrong in this scene. Chances are, whatever answer you come up with will give you the opportunity to ratchet up the suspense and thereby keep the reader’s interest. Here’s a recent example of how I used this technique.

In my latest thriller THE SHIELD (co-written with Lynn Sholes) I was to draft a chapter in which my protagonist, her ex-husband, and a Russian colonel who had taken them prisoner, were flying in a 2-engine prop plane from Port Sudan inland across the Nubian Desert to a secret military facility. The outline which Lynn and I constructed about a year ago called for this journey from point A to point B. The only purpose of the chapter was to get to point B, the secret military facility. If I had drafted the chapter sticking strictly to the outline with the flight comprising of light banter between the three and the mention of a few landmarks passing below, it would have been short and dull, almost surely unneeded. The reader would have skipped through it to get to the “good stuff”.

So before I began, I asked myself what can go wrong in this scene that would lift the suspense and conflict, and even give me an opportunity to build character. My answer: what is the worst thing that can happen to an airplane? It crashes. Why would it crash? Well, that area of North Africa is known to be a dangerous place with anti-government rebel and al-Qaeda training camps. So what causes the crash? It’s shot down by shoulder-fired rockets from a rebel encampment.

Keep in mind that the outline calls for the three to get from point A to point B. This is the beauty of outlining: you can still reach your goal but taking an interesting detour can improve the story.

To increase the tension—although the three manage to survive the crash—the rebels are now coming after them. And how about the character-building aspect. My protagonist manages to save the life of her Russian captor when she could have easily left him behind to burn up in the wreckage.

In asking what can go wrong, I managed to turn one chapter into three, prolong the conflict, build character, and still fulfill the plot outline by getting all three to their destination.

As writers, whether we write by the seat of our pants or create a solid outline first, we must never pass up an opportunity to improve our stories. Asking what can go wrong often helps.

How about my friends at TKZ—ever use this or similar techniques in story building? After all, what can go wrong?

Juice Up Your Characters With Inner Conflict

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In Chapter 9 of Conflict & Suspense I write about Inner Conflict. I define it this way: Think of this interior clash as being an argument between two sides, raging inside the character. Like the little angel and the little devil that sit on opposite shoulders in a cartoon, these sides vie for supremacy. For inner conflict to work, however, each side must have some serious juice to it.

I had a chuckle re-reading that, which chuckle I must now explain.

Last week I was in Minneapolis for the annual Story Masters Conference. Donald Maass, Christopher Vogler and your humble correspondent spent four solid days with a roomful of writers, digging deeply into this craft we all love.

I enjoy Story Masters each year, not just because I get to hang out with Don and Chris and a whole bunch of motivated storytellers, but also because I pick up something valuable each time myself.

This year, during Chris’s talk on The Hero’s Journey, I was struck by something he said about how we feel stories. This came to him, he explained, during his years as a reader for the studios. He noticed that strong emotions hit him physically, at points in his body. There were different points for different emotions.

He connected this to the concept of Chakra. What happens is that certain emotions immediately fuel a secretion of chemicals in areas of the body. Chris realized the that best scripts, the rare ones that really knocked him out, were hitting him in more than one place.

With a playful gleam in his eye, Chris announced to the class what he calls “Vogler’s Rule”—

If two or more organs of your body are not secreting fluids, your story is no good.

This got a laugh from the crowd. Thus, my reference above to the serious juiceof inner conflict is apt.

As Chris’s session went on, I started thinking more about this idea. What Chris suggests is that when our “fluid centers” are activated, we are not being rational. Thus, a great form, perhaps the best form of inner conflict is when the character’s rational mind is being assaulted by a strong emotional, er, fluid.

How human that is, isn’t it? Think of the traveling salesman. He has a wife and children he loves. But at the bar in Wichita he sees a cocktail waitress whose sultry walk and Lauren Bacall voice unleash inside him an immediate animal lust. The fight is between his mind, which reminds him of all he has at home, and his body, which doesn’t care what he thinks at all.

Or what about a sheriff with a high and honorable sense of duty? That’s his mind. He’s thought this through his whole career, lived by that code. But then killers come after him, and he cannot gather a posse to stop them, and his body starts feeding him fear—of death, of losing the woman he’s just married, of perhaps being a coward. This is the inner conflict that throbs throughout the entire movie High Noon. It’s head versus body.

I was reminded of something Iago, who has all the best lines in Othello, says to Roderigo:

If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. 

Shakespeare was describing this very thing, the battle between reason (the mind) and all our bodily “raging motions.”

It’s such a great way to think about inner conflict, because you can create this tension at any time in your novel. Just arrange for something to strike your character on a strong emotional level, and put that at odds with something he strongly believes.

Thus, I came up with “Bell’s Corollary to Vogler’s Rule” as it relates to inner conflict:

You must have at least one hot fluid fighting your character’s head!

This is where you have so much potential for ratcheting up the readability of your novel. We follow characters not because of what’s happening to them, but because of what’s happening inside them. Make it real and full of churning, roiling inner conflict.

What about you? Are your characters conflicted enough?

A Key to Creating Conflict in Fiction

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Today’s post is brought to you by Conflict & Suspense, two things every novel needs. Yes, every, no matter the genre.

I’m not just talking about plot here, but characterization, too. It’s this latter aspect that some writers fail to take full advantage of. To illustrate, let me talk about one of my favorite movies of all time.
12 Angry Menis the 1957 film directed by Sidney Lumet, written by Reginald Rose (based on his play). The plot is disarmingly simple. Twelve jurors deliberate in a capital murder case. The entire drama, save for a short prologue, takes place inside the jury room.

At first, the verdict seems like a done deal. All the early chatter is about how guilty the defendant is (he’s a slum kid, accused of stabbing his father). One of the jurors (Jack Warden) has tickets to the ballgame and would love to get out early. Others don’t see the point in spending a great deal of time actually deliberating.
They take an initial vote. And only one juror, Number 8 (Henry Fonda), votes Not Guilty. Everybody else grumbles.
And for the next hour and a half, we sit in on the deliberations.
The movie violates all the currently fashionable, postmodern, ADHD stylistic conventions. No quick cuts or explosions or overbearing music. It’s all talk. It’s even in black and white, for crying out loud!
Yet, no matter where I happen to come in on the film when it’s on TV, if I start to watch I have to finish.
Why? Because inter-character conflict works its magic. What Rose did was bring together twelve distinct characters, each with their own background, baggage and personality, and throw them into what is essentially a great, big argument.
Therein lies the real untapped secret of creating conflict: orchestration. That means you cast your characters so they have the potential of conflict with every other character.
In 12 Angry Men, for example, there’s a Madison Avenue ad man (Robert Webber) who spouts bromides and tosses out suggestions, just like he would at a brainstorming meeting at the office. “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.” He’s amiable, easy with a laugh. But he never makes a final decision. He vacillates. Finally another juror (Lee J. Cobb) gets fed up. “The boy in the gray flannel suit here is bouncing back and forth like a ping pong ball!”
There’s a mousy bank clerk (John Fiedler) who automatically draws satirical comment from the macho salesman (Warden). There’s a coldly rational stockbroker (E. G. Marshall) who arrogantly dismisses all reasonable doubt, until backed into a corner by Fonda. There’s a young man who grew up in the slums (Jack Klugman) who, at one point, turns to E. G. Marshall and asks, “Pardon me, don’t you sweat?”
“No, I don’t,” Marshall says. There is nothing more to that exchange, but the line is memorable because of Rose’s superb orchestration, knowing the personalities and quirks of all his characters.
Then there’s the bigot (Ed Begley) who in one unforgettable moment alienates everyoneelse on the jury.
But it is, finally, the main conflict between Cobb and Fonda that is the focus of the drama. Cobb wants to get this kid executed (for reasons that become heartbreakingly clear at the end). Fonda wants to give the kid his due under the Constitution––the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
And that’s another lesson about conflict: the stakes. They have to be high. In fact, I hold that death must be on the line. Not just physical death, mind you. There is also professional and psychological death. Unless you have one of these overhanging, your story is not going to be as gripping as it should be.
In 12 Angry Men, physical death is on the line for the kid, but more importantly it’s a matter of psychological death for each of the jurors. After all, they could be sending an innocent man to the chair. In addition, each of them has some inner baggage to deal with. Like the old man ignored by his family (Joseph Sweeney), and the newly naturalized citizen trying to make it in America (George Voskovec).
Orchestration for conflict is essential in any genre, including comedy. Especiallycomedy. Think of, say, City Slickers.You have three friends from the city going on a cattle drive out west. They are very different from each other – one is a joker, one is macho, one is just a loser. Then they come in contact with someone who is unlike any of them – Curly, the ramrod. The comedy flows naturally out of the conflict between the different personalities.
So as you’re getting ready to write, you would do well to create a chart of all your important characters, a grid like the one produced below (taken from my article “Vitamin C For Your Thriller” in the July/August 2013 issue of Writer’s Digest):

Then figure out points of conflict between the characters, as in this example:
You will be pleased and amazed at all the natural plot tension, subtext and foreshadowing that will emerge from this simple exercise.

Trouble is your business, writer friend. Go make some.
What are some of your favorite ways to increase conflict, tension and suspense in your work?

The Two Things Every Novel Needs

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“Trouble is my business.” – Raymond Chandler
So you want to be a writer. You want to sell your novel to a publisher, via an agent, or maybe you’re thinking of going indie like 90% of sentient beings these days. Maybe you think if you do the latter, and do it fast, you’ll rake in a boatload of easy lettuce.
Well, you won’t. Unless your book has the two things every novel needs.
Without these two things, you will have no story. At least, no story most readers will care about. You might have an “experimental novel,” and that’s okay if you understand what experimental novel means. It means a novel that five people buy. (Please note: This may not matter to you, and that’s perfectly fine with me. Experimental artists have given us some good stuff over the years. A lot of bad stuff, too. But if that’s your corner of the artistic world, go for it. This is America, after all).
But if you want to sell your work and have a shot at generating income, you need to master these two elements.
They are Conflict and Suspense.
Conflict
What is the goal of the novel? Is it to entertain? Teach? Preach? Stir up anger? Change the world? Make the author a lot of money?
It can be any of these things, but in the end, none of these objectives will work to their full potential unless they forge, in some way, a satisfying emotional experience for the reader.
And what gets the reader hooked emotionally? Trouble. Readers are gripped by the terrible trials a character goes through. (There are psychological reasons for this that are beyond the scope of this post).
That’s where conflict comes in. While there are writers who say plot comes from character, let me say that’s too simplistic. Character actually comes from plot. Why? Because true character is only revealed in crisis. Put your character into big trouble (plot) and then we’ll see what he or she is made of (character). If you don’t believe me, imagine a 400 page novel about Scarlett O’Hara where she just sits on the porch all day, sipping mint juleps and flirting. Gone With the Wind only takes off when she finds out Ashley is going to marry Melanie (trouble) and then the Civil War breaks out (big trouble!)
Another way to think about it is this: we all wear masks in our lives. A major crisis forces us to take off the mask and reveal who we really are. That’s the role of conflict in fiction: to rip the mask off the character.
Now, this conflict must be of sufficient magnitude to matter to readers. That’s why I teach that “death stakes” must be involved. Your Lead character must be facing death—which can be physical, professional or psychological.
Genre doesn’t matter. In a literary novel like The Catcher in the Rye, it’s psychological death. Holden Caulfield must find meaning in the world or he will “die inside.” Psychological death is also the key to a category romance. If the two lovers do not get together, they will lose their soul mate. They will die inside and forever have diminished lives (that’s the feeling you need to create. Think about it. Why was Titanic such a hit with teen girls? It wasn’t because of the special effects!)
In The Silence of the Lambs,it’s professional death on the line. Clarice Starling must help bring down Buffalo Bill in part by playing mind games with Hannibal Lecter. If she doesn’t prevail, another innocent will die (physical death in the subplot) and Clarice’s career will be over.
And in most thrillers, of course, you have the threat of physical death hanging over the whole thing.
That’s why, novelist friend, trouble is indeed your business. Without sufficient conflict readers aren’t going to care enough to finish the book.
Suspense
The second element is suspense,and I don’t just mean in the suspense novel per se. Suspense means to “delay resolution so as to excite anticipation.” Another way to say this is that it’s the opposite of having a predictable story. If the reader keeps guessing what’s going to happen, and is right, there is no great pleasure in reading the novel.
We’ve all had the wonderful experience of being so caught up in a story that we have to keep turning the pages. This is where writing technique can be studied and learned and applied. For example, there are various ways you can end a chapter so readers are compelled to read on. I call these “Read on Prompts,” and it was one of the first things I personally studied when I started learning to write. I went to a used bookstore and bought a bunch of King, Koontz and Grisham. When I’d get to the end of a chapter I’d write in pencil on the page what they did to get me to read on.
Invaluable. Of all the reader mail I’ve received over the years, the ones that please me most are those that say, “I couldn’t put it down.” Music to a writer’s ears. Suspense will make music for you.
And again, genre doesn’t matter. You have to be able to excite anticipation and avoid predictability in any novel. 
I am so passionate about this that I wrote a whole book on the subject, and Writer’s Digest Books has just released it.

[Insert short commercial here!]
For the PRINT version:
Or E-BOOK:
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I could go on and on about this subject, but we don’t want to overstuff one blog post. Suffice to say that if you were to concentrate almost exclusively on these two key elements for the next few months, your books will take a huge step toward that exalted “next level” everyone always talks about. Try it and see.
May your own new year be filled with plenty of conflict and suspense (on the page, I mean!)
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NOTE: I will be teaching a workshop on conflict and suspense at the annual Writer’s Digest conference in New York, January 20-22. It’s the perfect time to travel to the Big Apple (just bring a coat). And it’s an awesome conference. Use this code: WDCSPEAKER12 when you sign up and you’ll get a $115 discount off the regular price (the home office says this is for new registrations only). Go to the WD Conference page to find out more.