Chapter NINE: The Heart of a Story: Character and Conflict
What you read in this chapter applies equally to Imaginative, Literary NonFiction, and Fiction:
Character and Conflict describe two essentials for all good writing.
So read closely.
You can play with character a bit in the short work you do for this week; and, of course, you will find this chapter and the next (feel most free to read ahead for ideas) two of special interest.
Clearly, telling stories describes something of what characterizes humans: whether pictographs painted or carved on rocks in Australia and the United States, or the traditions of orature in Eastern Europe and in African, we tell stories. And all over the world now, people write stories.
As you text notes, "People everywhere write stories, tell stories, or sing songs" (188).
Indeed, "narrative is the only art that exists in all human cultures. It is by narrative that we experience our lives" (189). We live, in part, to find out what happens next or to figure out how what happened before relates to us in the present, what often happens in a flashback.
Again, what you read here will serve you well for your short story assignment due in a couple weeks and your final project, whether you compose a short story or another brief memoir.
As with Creative Non-Fiction, you as author remain pivotal for the story, and your experience actually determines and guides the narrative. Thus, you hone your experience, as in all good writing, to provide the emphatic details that engage your reader.
"Writing a story involves taking experience, real or imagined, and shaping it in such a way that the story you tell reveals that experience to you--and to the reader--through a series of events affecting and involving a character or characters" (189). For either Fiction or Literary Nonfiction you do not, of course, simply retell what happens--aim for a greater truth and not simply what happened.
And remember that for your short story or stories, you can include more than one character but only one protagonist into whose "hidden head" you can introduce readers.
And as you formulate your ideas, bear in mind what other writers have to say, from Brent Spencer to Ernest Hemingway, for you want "two write truly, and, having found what is true, to project it in such as way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it" (189).
You want, as the text indicates, to deal with slices of life, aware that all slices take place in a very complex web of personal experience--all life is sublime in this significant regard, no matter how simple the experience at hand, for the event's personal significance involves your specific past.
The job requires that you relate this experience in such a way that "it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads" what you have to say.
And to accomplish this transition requires, above all, a compelling character and a believable conflict.
In fiction, you tell a story about a specific person and through this person--in your case, an "I" who is not you or a "Third Person" other than yourself. These characters are "a deliberate blend of many elements arranged to produce a specific result in the story" (190); in other words, you character must be specific to the experience. And you character must strike the reader as at least somewhat rounded.
Inasmuch as you have not a great deal of time in which to create your story and not much space to develop the conflict, you want to narrow your focus to this one character--and to share your developing story with your fellow readers. You can use the other characters, called flat characters, to reveal or otherwise reinforce specific elements of your protagonist.
As your text indicates, you want to prepare a list for yourself of character traits your protagonist embodies; and you should also connect these traits in some fashion with your character's physical traits, from hair color to shoe make--but only if the details help further develop your character.
Read in particular what the text has to say about Charley Brown and Danny DeVito. As you will discover, you must exercise a certain economy with all that you tell or reveal about the character: less is better. You have to think about the story's outcome and the conflict to determine what aspects of the character you want to introduce and to emphasize: they must move the story along or illustrate central ideas.
To create the appropriate balance, to achieve Flannery O'Connor's four methods (192), requires both economy and revision:
"You may not find or decide all of the characteristics and actions with which to create each of the characters in your first draft" (193).
And as you revise, you can concentrate on maintaining a balance between telling the reader something more about a character and showing through dialogue--the dramatic effect creates the greater emphasis, which underscores why you want to use dialogue with effect--and with necessary economy.
Quotations call attention to themselves, so make them work for you.
Dialogue looks different and therefore calls attention to the words and their significance for a specific character and scene: thus use economy to ensure appropriate impact.
Read through the various exercises in this chapter and the others to get ideas for your story or stories. And most certainly review (195) the five ways story writers present a character.
I list them here for emphasis:
*Describing the character's physical characteristics;
*Putting the character in a particular setting--that is, time and place, mood, circumstances;
*Revealing information about the character's background, such as family, past, historical information, emotional experiences, habits;
*having the character say things, either to him/herself or to other characters; and
*having the character do things, either on his/her own or in response to other characters and/or events.
Now, remember that all these elements share connections--the setting will have something perhaps to do with the protagonist's physical characteristics and motivate his or her dialogue, which will reveal, for instance, conflicts that elicit a specific action or which give significance to the action.
This link provides some common sense ideas about character development and conflict.
As you text insists, "Conflict, along with character, is the central ingredient in any story" (196). As your authors emphasize, while "without conflict, you have no story" (197), conflict does not mean simply physical violence or violent scenes, or excessive sentimentality or emotional displays and events, such as giving birth or suffering a great loss or hardship.
Instead, "Conflict is a problem to be worked out, or tension to resolve, facing the main character" (197). And you need not resolve the conflict.
If you want to deal with a person beaten up, relate the scene after the event, for dealing directly with abuse and other violence puts tremendous strain on the writer, especially in a short story. You will have better luck dealing indirectly with this violence, for you want to emphasize not simply the physical but the psychological.
A short narrative in particular is character driven and concerns psychological conflict(s). And as the exercises between 197-199 indicate, "Almost inevitably, where there are people, there will be conflicts" (198). These conflicts, moreover, need not register above "8" on the earth-shattering scale.
You can have a character wash a car and come to a realization about, say, a relationship.
You create an imaginary character whose actions and thoughts elicit interest because these actions and thoughts bespeak the truth.
And the manner in which these truths become evident concerns the story's plot, the manner in which the conflicts find explication and perhaps resolution. Remember, if you write "the king died and then the queen died," you have no plot, for the narrative will lack conflict. If you write, however, "the king died and then the queen died of grief," you have a plot, for you have conflict.
Read over Writing on Your Own (202) for some suggestions about writing a story. In fact, go to the sections on page 222 and on page 238 for other potential story topics.
If you will write another short memoir, you will find these prompts equally valuable.
Good luck with your story for this week.
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