š¦ Tales of conflict
I received a question on Ask the Fox (a form where anyone can ask me questions or suggest writing topics) and I would like to share it with you.
First, I would like to say, as Iāve mentioned in some emails, that I love receiving them. It feels like getting a letter. I loved it when that existed... you write wonderfully and knowing a bit about your life in Japan is very cool. Iām always looking forward to the next email. Now, hereās the question š I am writing a book and needed to create a conflict, but I am stuck, and it frustrates me. I have written a book before, but it was about immigration. Itās the story of my grandparents coming from Lebanon to Brazil. So, it wasnāt exactly a fiction book. If I told you about my book, would you help me create an interesting conflict for my story? Hugs, take care.
The message came from Lua and my response will be todayās newsletter.
First of all, thank you for the compliment! I like letters, even though Iāve never been very good at replying to them (I wrote about that here, in Portuguese). I believe they materially translate what we have to say and express much better than an email or electronic message ever could. If not for the curves of ink on paper created specifically and uniquely by that particular hand, then for all the time involved in producing and sending a letter, which suggests a significant investment of time and attentionātwo of the most precious things we have access to while alive.
When we write to someone, we are offering time and attention in the production of something. When we write for the worldābe it a digital letter with a specific list of readers or a story to be read by an unknown number of people over timeāit involves an act of effort, care, time, and attention. This something we produce is completed in the encounter with this other, with the reader of our words.
If the letter I write never reaches anyone and is never read, it loses part of its reason to exist. If what I write is produced with the intention of being read, the writing ceases to be a pure exercise of expression and becomes what I call the design of a reading experience. Am I writing to inform, entertain, or inspire? Are the words I choose part of a lexicon accessible to those who will read me?
All stories are fiction, including what āreally happened.ā To report something that happened, itās necessary to translate into words the complex reality of what we were able to perceive and think. In the end, everything always stems from specific points of view.
The biggest difference between writing what really happened and what I imagined is that what we call fiction is not about truth, itās about the feeling that it could be trueāwhat we call verisimilitude in literature. It doesnāt matter that humans canāt talk to cats and cats canāt respond in human language: in the book Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, there is a character who talks to cats, and to read the book, I make a contract with the author that I will suspend my disbelief about what he has to tell me as long as he offers me something in return. This something can be many things, but I like to think it generally boils down to a mix of informing, entertaining, and inspiring.
Stories teach us to deal with certain situations without having to go through them directly. As empathetic beings, we can put ourselves in the place of the characters whose stories we follow, feel their pains and joys, and if all goes well, learn and be inspired by their experiences.
This brings me to the idea of conflict. Literarily, it is one of the many tools we have at our disposal to build stories. Conflict is central to the idea of narrative we learn in the Western world and has to do with the obstacles that characters will try to overcome as they move towards some goal.
A story without conflicts tends to be boring because without risk for the characters, we have fewer reasons to be curious about what will happen next. We can be interested in what happens next without obvious conflictsāfor example, I can read about a Buddhist temple and be enchanted by the descriptions of what happens around the character, the paintings on the walls, the people meditating and wearing orange robes, etc. However, few things grab our attention as much as wanting to know how a complicated situation will unfold. If I can imagine that something will go wrong, I already start to imagine how it will be resolved, and then, before I know it, I am hooked on the story.
What is a good conflict for a story depends on many factors, including the genre we adopt. Romance stories have to do with the difficulties of finding or sustaining love. Horror stories have to do with the immeasurable darkness we may face in life. Action stories have to do with overcoming concrete obstacles. And so on.
If we think as designers of reading experiences, we can take the stance of testing possibilities. A good conflict is one that makes readers curious about how it will be resolved. We are our first readers, so how we feel about a specific conflict can be a good gauge of the quality of the conflict we are writing about. From there, we can show the written materialānever the idea, because idea and written text are different things, and the skill of writing has to do with being able to transform ideas into sequences of words that evoke images, reflections, and feelingsāto other humans and ask about their reading experience.
There are many considerations I would like to make about this process of showing our texts in production to others to "test the quality" of what we write, but thatās a topic for the future.
I have gone around and didnāt properly answer the question about a āgood conflict.ā The truth is, I donāt have a definitive answer for that. What I can suggest is to play with ideas and see which ones move you the most. What difficulties and problems would make you more excited to read or write this story? In the creation phase, when the cement hasnāt set yet, you can play with different paths. Try making a list, writing entire chapters to see how they turn out... Alternatively, you can copy a writer you like. Not word for word, of course, but the overall structure of their text.
Whatever you do, my suggestion is that you finish the story. Even if it turns out bad, even if you never show it to anyone. Neil Gaiman has an online course where he says we learn when we finish things, and since he is the closest to an idol I have in the writing universe, I will take his words as my own.
Moreover, there is nothing stopping you from going back to a story I have finished in the past and editing or rewriting it. Just make sure you finish what you start.
š
With affection,
Tales