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?

The Perils of Procrastination

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By Mark Alpert

I have a son in ninth grade and a daughter in seventh, and the bane of their existence is homework. Their teachers assign way too much of it, four or five hours every night. And because the kids don’t come home from track practice till five or six in the evening, very often they’re still working at midnight, solving algebra problems or reading about the Roman Empire. They get far more homework than I ever got during my school days. Back in the halcyon Seventies I used to tear through my assignments in an hour or so and spend the rest of the evening reading my X-Men comics, listening to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, and watching Mary Hartman, Mary Hartmanon TV.

I blame globalization. The world economy has grown more competitive since the days of disco, and the striving meritocrats of America are desperate to save a slice of the shrinking money-pie for their children. In response, the schools in the wealthier districts have accelerated their curricula, trying to prepare their students to compete with the fiercely disciplined kids in East Asia. If the top achievers in Beijing and Seoul are working their butts off, then our kids should be doing the same, right?

Wrong. I’d rather see America forfeit this global rat race than continue to make our children miserable. Seriously, it’s not worth it.

The worst part is seeing the pernicious psychological effects that excessive homework has on my kids. The nightly burden is so great, it makes them depressed. They sense the unfairness of it, the futility. And they add to their misery by putting it off as long as they can. There’s too much homework to finish it quickly, so instead they delay starting it. It’s like a huge black mountain darkening all the hours ahead, and the last thing they want to do is begin the long, hard climb. So they go on Facebook or YouTube, or text their friends, or watch another Simpsons episode on TV. But all the while, the homework is still waiting for them, a looming threat.

I can imagine their feelings because I’ve felt them myself. Writing novels is more fun than doing homework — otherwise, why write them? — but sometimes I get confused about the direction of a work-in-progress and I start to wonder if the whole thing is a lost cause. At those moments I see the black mountain looming in front of me, and the last thing I want to do is climb it. So instead of writing the next sentence of the manuscript, I check my e-mail or the New York Times website. Or I go into the living room where the kids are watching the Simpsons episode and watch it with them. (It’s such a consistently entertaining show.) We procrastinate together, as a family.

I’m in that predicament right now, unfortunately. But I know that sooner or later I’ll sling my backpack over my shoulder and rediscover the path that goes up the mountain. With any luck, it’ll happen sometime this week. In the meantime, I’ll keep busy by nagging the kids about their homework.

Book Soup

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By Elaine Viets
soup1
    Writing a novel is like making soup: We add chunks of our own experience, bits of research, boil it down, season it with imagination. We transform those ingredients into something that we hope is tasty, even nourishing, for our readers.
    In “Fixing to Die,” my new Josie Marcus mystery shopper mystery, I used an old encounter with a bully. Josie has a tween daughter, Amelia. Three mean girls at Barrington School create a Facebook page called the Bitches of Barrington, and put photos of Amelia and three of her friends in doghouse frames. Twelve-year-old Amelia is hurt and humiliated when her classmates see the BOB page. Worse, the other students bark and howl as Amelia and her friends run for their parents’ cars.
FixingToDie
    It’s hard to escape stories about bullying these days. The facts are dreadful. Dosomething.org says some “43 percent of kids have been bullied online and girls are about twice as likely as boys to be victims and perpetrators of cyber bullying. Worse, bullying victims are two to nine times more likely to consider committing suicide.”
    I grew up before kids used computers – and before mean girls had their own movies. Back then, we knew about boy bullies, but nobody thought girls could be, too.
    When I was twelve, I was bullied by a mean girl named Bonnie. She went to public school and I went to St. Sabina Catholic school. Bonnie beat me up on my way home from school. I started taking the long way home to avoid her.
    Now that I’m grown up, Bonnie’s bullying seems ridiculous. But my terror at twelve was real.
    Here’s how I used it in “Fixing to Die.” In this scene, Josie, her new husband, Ted, and Amelia, discuss bullying:
Amelia & Mean Girls
    “Technology has changed the bully business,” Josie said.
    “What’s technology got to do with bullies?” Ted asked.
    “When I was Amelia’s age,” she said, “I was bullied by Bonnie. Skinny girl with straggly hair. Bonnie was a year older and a whole lot bigger than me. She didn’t like that I used what she called ‘big words.’ Bonnie would wait for me about two blocks from school, and punch me in the gut. I started taking the long way home to avoid her.”
    “Did you tell Grandma?” Amelia asked.
    “No. Bonnie said her father was in the Mafia and he’d kill her.”
    Amelia giggled. “You believed that?”
    “Yeah, I was stupid,” Josie said. “Bonnie had a German last name. I don’t even know if she knew any Italians, but she had me shaking in my shoes.
    “Here’s the difference between me and Amelia. Once I was home, I was safe. Bonnie wouldn’t come to my house and nobody else knew about it. Online bullying is there twenty four/seven.”
    Bonnie quit tormenting me when I went to high school. I’ve lost track of her. But the memory of her jabs to the gut stayed with me.
everlast-laceless-boxing-training-gloves
Here’s the good thing about being a writer: No experience is ever wasted, no matter how painful.

Writing with Two Heads

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By Joe Moore
@JoeMoore_writer

Recently, Mark Alpert posted a blog about The Writing Buddy and how writing can be a lonely occupation. There are few methods of getting around that situation. If you want to write fiction, it’s usually a one-man show. Fortunately for me, I have a solution—a cowriter.

One of the most frequently asked questions  Lynn Sholes and I get is “How is it possible for two people to write fiction together?” The answer is, it ain’t easy. At least it 2heads8wasn’t at first. Collaboration on non-fiction is somewhat easier to understand. In general, with non-fiction, the “facts” usually already exist and the collaborators’ job is to organize them into a readable document that has a beginning, middle and end. A good outline and knowledge of the subject matter along with professional writing skills may be all the authors need.

But with fiction, nothing exists. It’s all smoke and mirrors. Fiction is a product of an individual’s imagination. It might be inspired by actual facts or events, but only the individual has a specific vision of those events in their head. So how can two people have a similar enough vision to be able to write a novel together?

I can’t speak for the handful of other writing teams out there (including TKZ’s own PJ Parrish), but Lynn and I have managed to complete 6 thrillers together because of a number of reasons.

First, we love the same kind of books—the ones we read are like the ones we write.

Second, we have an unquestioning respect for each other’s writing skills and a deep belief that whatever one of us writes, the other can improve.

Third, we believe that there’s always a better way to write something.

Fourth, we never let our egos get in the way of a good story. This comes from spending over 10 years in a weekly writers critique group.

Fifth, we know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and are willing to admit them.

Sixth, we agree on the same message/theme in each book.

Seventh, we believe that we are on the same level of expertise.

And last, we believe that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Those points cover the mental portion. Now, how do we handle the mechanics of the job? We talk, and talk, and talk. Once a day we conference call, brainstorm, tell and retell each other the story. Our two favorite words are: What if? Whether it’s global plot points or an individual scene or character motivation, we keep telling each other the story until that little imaginary movie in our minds becomes as in-sync as possible. Then one of us will declare they have a “handle” on the scene or character or chapter, enough of which to create the first draft.

We write very slowly because each chapter must go back and forth many times for revision. Years ago, when we first started, everyone could tell who wrote what as we tried to write our first book. It took three years of hard work before we melted our voices together. Now, because the process goes through so many revisions, even I can’t always remember what I wrote and what she wrote. I rely on my co-writer so much that I’ve come to wonder how individuals can possibly write a book on their own.

There are a number of advantages and disadvantages to collaborating. A disadvantage is that you split any money you make. So you’ll always make half of what you could as a single author. And like any relationship, there is always a chance of a falling out. And something could happen where an ego can become inflated and affect the process.

One of the pluses is that we never experience writer’s block. One of us will always have an idea on how to get out of a jam or move the story forward. And unlike our spouses, family, friends, trusted beta readers, and everyone else, a co-writer has an intimate, vested interest in the success of the story that no one else could have.

Lynn and I are approaching the mid-point of our seventh thriller together (THE SHIELD, the follow-up to THE BLADE). I’ve found that creating the first draft of a chapter is just as exciting as getting a new chapter from her and seeing where the story has gone. I guess the whole thing boils down to trust. Trust in each other and in the goals we both want to achieve with the story and with our careers.

One last note: I haven’t seen Lynn in person in over 5 years since we live hundreds of miles apart. That seems to be something that mystifies everyone.

So, now that you know how we write together, do you think you could ever collaborate on a novel? Or is writing fiction too private an experience. Do you believe two heads are better than one or would you rather not have anyone sticking their nose in your work?

————–
“THE BLADE is full-throttle thriller writing.” David Morrell

What we can learn from pulp fiction

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By P.J. Parrish

Now pay attention, kittens and bo’s, there’s a quiz at the end of this one.

I was an art major in college. This was before I figured out I couldn’t make a living at this. Unless I planned to teach, but I was scared of kids. (Not a good character trait in teachers). I was doing okay in art until I hit a class called Three Dimensional Design. I could draw and paint but I was terrible at this. Evidence of my ineptitude was my “final exam” sculpture, which I called Nude With A Paper Cup Head. So titled because I couldn’t get my figure’s face right so I just filled a Dixie cup with wet plaster and stuck it on top. I got a D.
I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t think outside the two-dimensional box. Finally, my instructor told me I had to stop seeing the world in POSITIVES and start seeing it in NEGATIVES. In other words, I was so hung up on adding things, I was missing the beauty of subtracting. “Learn how to leave things out,” he told me.
I ended up abandoning art for writing. But I think that little piece of advice must have lodged deep in my brain cells because it is something subconsciously I have always tried to apply to my fiction writing. Subconsciously I say because until recently, I hadn’t even thought about my art instructor and his advice. Maybe I am thinking about it now because of the book I am reading — “The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.” I got it for Christmas but I keep it handy by the bedside, digesting it in small doses.
It’s a handsome book…a compiliation of the best crime stories from the “golden age” of pulp crime fiction — the 20s through the 40s. It’s about the size of the Manhattan phone book. And to be really honest, parts of it read about as well.
Many of these guys were dismissed as the hacks of their day, churning out their stories for cheaply printed magazines like “Black Mask” and “Dime Detective.” Yeah, they were lurid, the syntax cringe-worthy, the plots thin or nonsensical. But they tapped into a popular need for a new kind of human hero. The most memorable of the heroes became the prototypes for much of what we are seeing in our crime fiction today — lone wolves fighting for justice against all odds but always on their own different-drummer terms. Would we have Harry Bosch without the Continental Op? Jack Reacher without Simon Templar? Doubtful…
Some of my favorite “classic” crime writers wrote pulp. Like John D. MacDonald who churned out stories for “Black Mask” and “Dime Detective,” and Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark. Even my seminal hero Georges Simenon (creator of inspector Maigret who was a partial inspiration for my own protag Louis Kincaid) couldn’t resist the lure of the lurid and wrote two nasty little noirs call “Dirty Snow” and “Tropic Moon.” 
To be sure, not all the stories in “Lizard” have aged well. The slang sounds vaguely silly now, the sexism and racism we can explain away as anachronistic attitudes. But the armature these writers created is still sturdy.

Especially in pure writing style. That is the biggest thing I am getting out of these stories, an appreciation for that streamlined locomotive style that propels these stories along their tracks. I read these stories now — discovering most of these writers for the first time — with a smile on my face and a Highlighter in hand. There are lessons to be learned for us all, and you can almost hear James M. Cain whispering: “I’m not going to dazzle you with my writing. I’m going to tell you a helluva story.”

These guys sure knew what to leave out. Let me give you one little passage from Paul Cain’s “One Two Three”:

I said: “Sure — we’ll both go.”
Gard didn’t go for that very big, but I told him that my having been such a pal of Healy’s made it all right.
We went.

Not: And then we left the apartment and got in my roadster and set out. We took Mulholland Drive out of the canyon and arrived just before dusk.
Just: We went.
How can you read that and not smile?
I heartily recommend the “Big Book of Pulps.” And speaking of art, check out some of the best pulp cover artists of the day at Rex Parker’s terrific vintage paperback blog Pop Sensation. 
And now, in honor of our pulp forefathers, I am offering up this little quiz of pulp slang for your amusement. Answers at the end. And don’t chance the chisel for a cheap bulge, bo. We Jake?
DEFINITIONS.
1. Ameche
2. Kicking the gong around
3. Wooden kimono
4. cheaters
5. Gasper
6. Hammer and saws
7. Orphan papers
8. Wikiup
9. Bangtails
10. Can-opener
TRANSLATIONS
11. I had been ranking the Loogan for an hour and could see he was a right gee. It was all silk so far.
12. I stared down at the stiff. The bim hadn’t been chilled off. Definitely a pro skirt who had pulled the Dutch act.
13. I got a croaker ribbed up to get the wire.
14. By the time we got to the drum the droppers had lammed off. Another trip for biscuits…

 Answers:
1. telephone
2. taking opium
3. coffin
4. sunglasses
5. cigarette
6. Police
7. Bad checks
8. Home
9. Horses
10. Safecracker
11. I had been watching the man with the gun for an hour and could tell he was an okay guy. Everything was cool so far.
12. I stared at the body. The woman hadn’t been murdered. She was definitely a prostitute who had committed suicide.
13. I have arranged for a doctor to get the information.

14. By the time we got to the speakeasy, the hired killers had left. Just another trip for nothing…

Remodeling

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by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

As you could tell from my last (MIA) post I am currently in the throes of a house remodel and thus ‘enjoying’ life without a kitchen or living area (having decamped into the basement), trying to keep everything on schedule, taking the opportunity to buy a new memory foam mattress and deciding whether tile or carpet would be better. I know that a lot of people struggle when it comes to deciding what they want doing to their house when they are thinking about having it remodeled. Some people might just struggle with figuring out where they want a knock out wall to add, whilst others only worry about the color scheme. When we bought our house we knew we would have to undertake some sizable renovations to bring the 1957 ranch house back to its former glory. Although, we are quickly blasting through our budget so I might have to find some cheap, discount furniture in the sales!

Oddly enough, our house remodel coincides with a significant ‘remodel’ I’m undertaking of a story a wrote a couple of years ago. This particular story had a great premise but, for some reason, turned into a way-too-convoluted novel (it took me about a year to realize the novel was actually three stories in one – a YA novel, an adult novel and one novel that was only good for the garbage!).

Once I realized this, I faced a dilemma, should I try to go beyond mere edits and totally ‘remodel’ it, or was the book really only fit to be burned. As it was, I knew my agent loved the main idea (so the foundations were solid) but felt I needed to streamline some of the multiple plot and mythological elements. When I started to pull apart the three different stories, I felt I could see my way clear to writing the YA novel trapped inside. The question was, would I be able to pull off this kind of major renovation?

Gutting most of a novel and starting again creates a number of challenges – not the least of which is ensuring that the new story structure holds together and doesn’t teeter on the edges of the old one. For me, the decisive moment came when I realized that changing the time period provided the ideal opportunity to refashion the story whilst keeping the critical elements in place. After doing further historical research I came to realize that the new time-frame provided a much better grounding for the story and (thankfully) it looked as if the remodelled story would be much stronger and clearer than the original.

Now I feel like, despite the chaos of the physical renovations occurring at my house (estimated to take about 10 weeks…), I’m ready to face this new challenge – especially as the story has been gnawing away at me (which is a good indication it wants to get written) and I have time now that my previous WIP is out on submission. Still – it’s a daunting task.

So, my fellowTKZers, have you ever managed to successfully remodel an old story. If you have, how did you approach the process? How did you gauge whether the story was salvageable? What about if the remodel was a failure – any lessons learned?(Be kind now – for I’m facing not just the cutting block but an HGTV worthy scrape and rebuild…)



How to Procrastinate

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There are three steps to successful procrastination:

1.

***

Let me put it another way. I am currently in the throes of NaNoWriMo, so it seems a bit odd to pause for a meditation on procrastination. But I spend a good deal of online time chatting with fellow writers, and in one loop a discussion broke out on, of all things, the proper use of the singular possessive apostrophe (talk about having too much time on your hands!)

This is what I mean. Should you write Dickens’ books or Dickens’s books? The former sounds better, but the latter is the accepted form. I pulled out my Strunk & White and found the rule to be that for ancient proper names, like Jesus and Moses, the form is: Jesus’and Moses’. Which seems to me a little unfair to Dickens, as it’s merely his accident of birth date that gets him the extra s at the end.

One of the other writers cited the “Bible” – The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. She said CMOS “goes for  ‘s for singular nouns ending in s––even Jesus’s name.”

Unwilling to leave it at that, and feeling a bit anti-authoritarian that day, I took five minutes and wrote a drinking song, to be sung around a table with other writers, steins of beer in hand, and sung directly to CMOS:

Your singular possessive
Is singularly regressive
And your S’s just make messes!
Halaloo halalay!

[Pause for drinking, and pounding steins on table]

When it comes to guys like Dickens
Your injunction is for chickens.
Here is what I say:
I will do it Jesus’ way!
Halaloo halalay!

[Finish with more drinking]

And that’s how you procrastinate.

What about you? What are your favorite ways to keep from working on your books? What do you find yourself doing when you know you should be writing? 

Purging the Editor

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I believe it is a given that those of us who aspire to write are also vociferous readers. A reader is a wonderful thing to be; however, I have come to the conclusion that sometimes this state of mind and being can be an impediment to an author aborning.  Reading a novel by James Lee Burke or Karin Slaughter or John Connolly or Chelsea Cain can inspire a reader to think, “I want to do that.”  Yet it can also be discouraging; one reads BLACK CHERRY BLUES by Burke and thinks, “I can never be that good; why bother?”  The fleeting dream is set aside, sometimes permanently. Part of the reason for this state of affairs is that in the case of a book (or a film, or a painting, or a music project) we rarely see what came before, the early stages that led to the final result.

Such does not hold true with respect to a construction project, to name but one example. We recently had the opportunity to watch an all but vacant shopping center in our area be transformed over a period of several months into a wholly done, over, remodeled, commercially successful unit. It was fun to watch. Readers generally do not get to watch the process by which their favorite author transforms a few hundred blank pages into a cohesive, occasionally unforgettable, experience. So it is that the novel, upon publication, seems to have sprung from whole cloth, seemingly effortlessly. We know better, of course. But it is difficult sometimes to fully appreciate it without seeing the ultrasound ourselves.

I hit an emotional low point this past week for a number or reasons that aren’t really important to this discussion; what is important is what brought me out of it, at least so far as creativity is concerned. I happened across an article in Slate entitled “Cormac McCarthy Cuts to the Bone.”  You can find the article here. It is an extremely interesting piece which, among other things, reveals that McCarthy’s classic novel BLOOD MERIDIAN was a far different book at publication than it was at conception. What really attracted me to the article, however, was the reproduction of two pages from McCarthy’s original draft.  They are instructive, even if you have never read a word that Mr. McCarthy has written or alternatively would not reflexively grab your copy of BLOOD MERIDIAN or THE ORCHARD  KEEPER if confronted with a fire and the resultant dilemma of what to save.  BLOOD MERIDIAN did not flow out of McCarthy’s mind without deep and dark consideration. If you’re having trouble getting your words out of you and onto the page, don’t let it be because you in your own mind aren’t “good enough” or “as good” as your favorite author. When your favorite author started writing, they weren’t good enough either. It takes several drafts, several cement pourings, if you will, before things solidify and become right. Don’t put your handprints and your initials into your work and ruin it before it is dry. Purge yourself of what playwright John Guare so brilliantly called “tiny obnoxious editor living in your head,” the one who tells you that you will never be as good as Stephen King or Elmore Leonard or whoever. Then let the construction begin. 

Reader Friday: Bad Opening Line Contest

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As you probably  know, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is an annual event to see who can write the worst opening line for a novel. Let’s do our own here at TKZ. Write a bad opening line in 50 words or less. The winner (as judged by the TKZ bloggers) will receive a signed copy of The Art of War for Writers. Entries must be posted before 12:00 a.m. Eastern Time. 

Check back on this post on Monday at noon (Eastern) to find out who the winner is.

Good luck!

UPDATE: We have a winner. The voting was extremely close, but the victory belongs to Jeannie Leighton. Congrats!  Please email me at JSB [at] jamesscottbell [dot] com for details on the book. We were going to do second place and honorable mention, but frankly it was too difficult to choose after all the judges weighed in. You were all so good…I mean, bad. Thanks to everyone who played!