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What if the inciting incident in your story is the "other man." He comes into the family system, meets the mother, and they start an affair.
This affair is naturally going to create a lot of conflict between the father and the mother.
Now the son is concerned. The father wants a divorce and the son thinks Dad's overreacting, that if they all pull together they can somehow get past this problem. The son feels that if only the father waits until the affair blows over, everything will return to the way it was. "Don't be rash, Dad, don't act hastily," he urges. So now the son is in conflict with the father.
The daughter, on the other hand, is mad at the mother for having the affair. "How could you do this to us?" she screams at her. Meanwhile, the son and the daughter disagree about what is going on and what should be done about it, and they're at odds, as well.
In frustration, the daughter starts acting out. She drinks, stays out all night, smokes pot, hangs out with a rough crowd. She dates a Hell's Angels biker who lives in a trailer park in the rough part of town. The daughter's behavior is distressing to the mother, and soon she and the daughter are fighting all the time. In short, everybody's mad at everyone else. There's a lot of excitement, a lot of passion, a lot of confusion—everything in the family system is out of whack. But, in the course of the story, they work through their problems and their crises and their conflict. At some point, ideally the climax or conclusion of your story, this element intruding into the family system is removed like a splinter or piece of grit. The "other man" tells the mother, "I can't deal with all this pressure and madness. I love you, but I can't be with you anymore," and he gets in his car, and he leaves.
CONFLICT
So, what happens? In time, all the family members get back their equilibrium, they calm down and the status quo is reestablished. The system is restored to balance.
The Hell's Angel tires of the daughter and takes off, the daughter and the mother make up, the son and the father come to an understanding and, now that the parents have kissed and made up, the daughter and the son become friends again. The family system comes back into balance. But . . .
All of the characters have been affected by what happened. They are no longer exactly the same. They have been changed by what happened in the story. So the old saying is true: As much as you would like to, you can't go home again. It is a law of nature that things are in a constant state of change, evolution, and decay. This is true of all systems, and your stories should reflect this, because your stories are systems like any other.
What happened in the example? Something came in and knocked the family system around. Like the group of dominoes standing in a line, one falls, they all fall.
An interesting exercise in seeing how this all works is to compare the movies Return of the Secaucus Seven, by John Sayles, and Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill. The parallels between the two movies are remarkable, although Sayles's movie was made first on a much lower budget. In Sayles's movie, the characters get together for a long weekend to relive old times and renew old friendships. Sayles's movie has a sly, almost satirical edge to it as the friends find themselves forced to confront the authorities (as they did while involved in 1960s campus activism) as the result of a ludicrous situation over a dead deer.
What is fascinating about the structure of these films when they are compared, however, is that in Kasdan's film, also about a group of old friends who get together for a long weekend, one of the characters has been removed from the system. In this movie, the characters are drawn together to mourn the death of one of their friends. The tone is much darker, and the influence of the past is much more about the experiences of the individual members than about their collective experience as a group.
Ordinary People
Similarly structured, but more effective in my opinion, is Judith Guest's novel Ordinary People. Here, once again, an element has been removed from the family system.
Before the story begins, there were two sons, a mother, and a father. However, at the onset of the story, the family system has changed. One of the sons has drowned. In effect, he has been pulled out of the system. And his absence is as noticeable and as powerful an inciting force as the addition of the "other man" was in the earlier example.
The important thing is not simply that the drowning affects each person in the system, but that it also causes them to affect one another; it reverberates throughout the system in a great example of cause and effect.
As you begin to think about your story, you want to include elements that are not just thrown in there willy-nilly, but that play into the system, that influence everything.
THE BACKSTORY
Let's work through an example.
Suppose a man who is unemployed and broke meets an attractive woman who is rich. He decides he is going to take advantage of this woman, pull some sort of a confidence scam, and cheat her out of her money.
The problem is he falls in love with her. That's the conflict.
Your first question should be, What's the backstory? How did this guy end up broke and unemployed in the first place? And what is it about him that allows him to go from being a crook and a cheat to a lovable character?
Your backstory should not be just a set of circumstances to explain a situation. It is really a story that took place before your main story's action begins. More likely, your backstory is made up of the high points of this story recalled briefly in flashback, and at the least, it's a single traumatic event in a character's life that influences the main story. In the case of your con man, what might be his backstory?
Well, what if this guy, Frank, had a vicious divorce. His wife, Eileen, took all his money and the house. Not content with that, she started calling his boss and saying terrible things about him to get him fired. Frank is really angry with women. He's decided he's going to get even with all women by picking on one, and then by cheating and lying to her. The problem, of course, is that he falls in love with his victim.
The Oyster and the Pearl
By playing the appropriate elements of the backstory against the main story, you can see how one "irritates" the status quo into a dynamic system, in other words, a story filled with incident and conflict. This is a little like introducing a piece of grit inside an oyster shell, which in turn forces the oyster to produce a pearl. The introduction of the backstory (grit) into the system (oyster shell) produces an irritation or conflict that creates the main story (pearl).
To see a comic version of this particular type of story, rent the movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin. (It's actually a remake of an earlier film, Bedtime Story, with Marlon Brando and David Niven, which is also worth watching.)
The Goodbye Girl
Let's talk about your backstory for a moment and how it plays into the story system.
Do you recall Neil Simon's movie/play The Goodbye GirP.
First, let's set up the system. Paula (Marsha Mason) has an apartment in New York City with a spare room, and she is rolling along nicely, having finally adjusted to her boyfriend leaving her. What is going to upset this system? The arrival of a new element, or change, in that system.
In this case, the new element is Richard Dreyfuss's character, Elliot, an ambitious young actor in town to play Richard
III in an outrageous off-off-off Broadway production of the Shakespeare play. Paula's old boyfriend, as a parting gesture, has given Elliot a front door key, taken money from him, and told him the apartment—Paula's apartment—is all his.
Well, in the backstory, Mason's character has fallen in love three or four times with actors, and they always treated her poorly, then abandoned her.
What's going to happen to her in the present-time story? Is she going to fall in love with a pig farmer? Of course not. She's going to fall in love with another actor. Why? Because the best drama and conflict arise from forcing a character to experience and deal with the very thing she doesn't want to cope with, in this case, falling in love with yet an
other actor. By forcing your central character to confront her inner and outer demons, you are ratcheting up the emotional power of the narrative and consequently the reader's involvement with the unfolding story.
HOW AND WHY
Writers are often told to "start a story with a bang," and some authors think that instruction should be obeyed literally. However, the purpose of beginning a story with a dramatic moment is to engage the readers' emotions from the opening paragraph and then hold their interest by posing a problem or a dilemma of an extreme moral or ethical nature. How did this character reach this traumatic point in her life? And how will she solve this problem? It is the readers' emotional commitment to what the main character is going through and their intellectual fascination with how that character will solve her problems that will compel the readers to keep turning the page.
The depth or severity of the conflict a character has to cope with will provide a parallel emotional depth for your story system.
The change of the status quo system into a dynamic, evolving system will give you the story's problem and, ultimately, its solution, in other words, the plot. This change, or plot development, comes from asking of your story and its characters the question why?
Examine another story. This one may sound familiar.
A successful businessman is visited by three ghosts. The three ghosts say to him, ' 'In order for you to be happy, you had better be a nice guy, you'd better be generous, and you'd better be thoughtful.''
The status quo system then is an unhappy man, with no friends and a lot of enemies.
So in the backstory is this a guy a nice person? Or, more to the point, what happened to him in the backstory to turn him into this sour miser?
Of course, we're talking about Scrooge in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Scrooge, you may recall, was stingy and pretty nasty.
In the main story, he's being asked to run against his nature. But that nature was formed by an unhappy love affair when he was a young man that forever changed his nature—at least until the time the story starts. Scrooge's backstory is affecting the system of the main story by asking him to rebel against the kind of man he's made himself into and overcome that traumatic event of his youth to recapture the fun-loving guy he used to be.
EXERCISES
For each of the following situations, come up with a backstory, that is, something about the character's past that is going to affect the way he behaves in the present and will intrude upon and change his system.
1. A father desperately wants to help his teenage son who has been accused of a serious crime, but the father is unable to bring himself to do anything.
What is it in his past that is affecting that family/story system?
2. A young woman is planning to commit a murder in order to win a writing fellowship. What is it that happened in the past that makes this scholarship so important?
Chapter Nine
Conflict
I want to introduce you to Ted and Patty. They first appeared in an article in Writer's Digest magazine that Gary wrote called "Just Say No":
Hard-working Ted had a crush on Patty. One night at the Moose Lodge, though limping slightly from a hockey injury, Ted asked Patty to dance, and she said, "Yes." Then, he asked her if she'd like to go bowling sometime, and she said, "Yes, that would be splendid, Ted." Well, Ted got more and more infatuated with Patty and so he asked her to go steady. Patty said,' 'Yes.'' Before long Ted and Patty were in love, and on a drizzly Tuesday afternoon at the coin laundry, Ted got down on his knees and asked Patty to marry him. Patty said, "Yes." Ted said he wanted to live in Elgin, Illinois, and Patty said, "Yes, I would love that, Ted, more than anything, more than chocolate covered cherries, and I want us to have three babies, okay?" Ted said, "Yes." So they moved to Elgin, where Ted applied for a job at the rope factory, and they had three healthy kids and lived happily ever after.
Not exactly the stuff of cliff-hanging suspense—or any kind of suspense, come to that. In fact, it's a pretty lousy story.
Now, in real life when people say yes to us or people we like, we always feel great, but in good storytelling, saying yes the way it happens in Gary's Ted and Patty story is not so
great. In fact, it's terrible. Done this way, it's the worst of all crimes a writer can commit; it's boring. Readers rarely get more than a page or so into a story like this before their eyes glaze over and they put it aside to watch the more interesting nationally televised darts championship or turtles racing.
THE BASIS OF ALL NARRATIVE
Narrative storytelling is all about conflict. Between us, Gary and I have written a lot of stuff that's been published. But we have a lot more pieces sitting in trunks that will never get published, at least in their current form. There are probably a lot of reasons for that, principally that they're not very good. But if there's a single reason why these books will remain unpublished, it's because they lack conflict.
Conflict is the basis of drama, whether it's fiction or recreated narrative nonfiction. If you don't have a series of scenes with some sort of conflict in them, you don't have a narrative.
As I mentioned earlier, Sigmund Freud, despite criticisms that have been leveled at him in recent years, offers a range of provocative ideas about dreams, childhood, love, authority and many other things, all of which comprise the matter of conflict in narrative storytelling. Perhaps one of the most useful concepts he came up with was the psyche. This can be broadly defined as that part of ourselves that is responsible for our individual thoughts and feelings—the seat of the faculty of reason.
What Freud maintained, and should be of some interest to the student of narrative storytelling, is that despite our outward appearances and despite our wishes to the contrary, we are not unified beings. Emphasized and highlighted by the "political correctness" movement, which at its best underscores sensitivity to the nuances of others and at its worst tries to homogenize society, there is a great movement these days to make art "nice." No controversy, no conflict. According to Freud, character is conflict. When we dream, the top slides off the cauldron of our emotions and we see another self, far less shackled by convention and the niceness of civilized behavior than when awake. At night, we discover that nothing is foreign to us: Murder, cruelty, sexual urges of all sorts arise directly or in distorted forms within the dreaming theatre of our minds. And they arise, Freud says, because they are reflections of our desires. At night, we discover what our dark persona is and what it wants. And from this yarn, we weave the warp and weft of the whole cloth that will eventually comprise narratives about ourselves and our world.
Drama is about the resolution of a character's problems and dilemmas. And problems and dilemmas arise when someone says, "You can't do that" or, "You mustn't do this." In short, conflict is about someone saying no.
A narrative can be thought of as a series of connected conflicts (with bridging passages in between) that are eventually resolved by one final, cathartic conflict.
When there's no conflict on the page, there's no reader interest in what happens. The reader also has no emotional involvement in the story. In other words, the audience doesn't much care what your characters do, why they're doing it, or what happens to them. Nothing is compelling the reader to stay with that story. Conversely, the more extreme the conflict, the more emotionally involved in your narrative your reader becomes. One way to do this is to make sure your characters have individual goals that will clash and conflict. Drama is about the fight for dominance among a group of characters.
THREE TYPES OF CONFLICT
We can divide conflict into three basic types.
Man Against Man
This is the most common conflict. In a scene, two people— men, women, or children, in any combination—may not necessarily be having a fight, but there's something antagonistic between them. Great examples of this are the movie The Fugitive and Elmore Leonard's novel Get Shorty, and I'm sure you can think of many more. In The Fugitive, the conflict comes from the clas
h of goals between U.S. Marshal Gerard, who is single-minded in his pursuit of escaped prisoner Richard Kimble, and Kimble's need to (1) find the one-armed man who really committed the murder and then (2) get Gerard to help him arrest the masterminds who ordered the murder in the first place. In Get Shorty, everyone has clashing goals and ulterior motives, but they circle around an "unreachable" stolen bag of money, stashed away in a locker at Los Angeles International Airport, and the desire of criminals and low lifes to achieve mainstream legitimacy through the wealth and fame that making a hit movie will bestow on them.
Man Against Nature
You may have a guy trying to climb a mountain and there's a hurricane coming into town, or a tornado, flood, whatever. A famous example of man against nature is Moby Dick. In Melville's classic, a whaling captain is obsessed with hunting down and killing the only beast that ever bested him at sea, a beast that not only escaped but took away the captain's leg in the process. Another example is Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, which is a reworking of the themes of Moby Dick, in this case, an old fisherman's obsession with catching a big fish before he dies.
Man Against Himself
This involves internal conflict and is the hardest to write well. The danger is that the writer's fascination with the character is not translated onto the page or conveyed well to the reader and the story becomes static, wordy, self-involved, and boring. The trick here, so to speak, is to find ways of dramatizing in an external fashion what is going on in the internal story. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" or Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment are about criminals who are left with the gnawing, mounting guilt that murder can inflict on a normal human being, and the major concern of both stories is how the characters wrestle with this guilty conscience. Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe, about a man who is shipwrecked on a desert island and forced to survive alone for years before he is rescued, is another example.
One source of this kind of internal conflict is regret. Another, as we've mentioned, is the guilt of people who don't have the strength to do what they have to do, such as quit drinking, stop taking drugs, etc. In general, this type of story works best in a short form rather than a long form.