Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass gets serious with Chapter 3, titled 'Inner Conflict.' This is where he guides you into digging deep and adding layers. The chapter starts with a paragraph that strikes lightning:
"A step beyond the technique of adding character dimensions is investing your protagonist with two goals, needs, wants, longings, yearnings, or desires that are in direct opposition to each other. Wanting two things that are mutually exclusive means having inner conflict, being torn in two directions, and that is what makes a character truly memorable."
Did you feel the same WOW! I felt reading that? These are the gems that make the book great. As Maass expands on this and gives several examples, you can see these aren't easy choices. Here's one I just thought of: Choosing between doing what makes you happy (tuba playing for the local opera, perhaps) or marrying your soul mate and living a life that you fear will stifle you. That would be a killer choice for me. Then throw another complication into the mix. You're pregnant! (Not you, of course. The character. But let's pretend.) I can think of complication after complication to go with this conflict.
One of Maass's examples is Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake. Blake is a court-sanctioned vampire killer whose love interest is a French master vampire. She's also still has feelings for her ex-fiance, an alpha werewolf of a local pack. (This was true when Maass's book was written. I don't know if any of this has changed.)
That's two conflicts: Enforcing the law vs. caring about vampires. Vampire vs. werewolf. There's a third. She's a committed Christian, yet she has sex with vampires and werewolves.
Awesome conflicts.
At the end of the third chapter is an exercise where you write down two things your character wants that are opposite of one another. In the example I used, if the hero gave up his life to live with the heroine, that wouldn't work because he'd be miserable. Yet if she left her tuba-playing life to be with him, she'd be miserable. So what if she doesn't tell him about the child? What if she stays where she is and finds a perfectly acceptable life being a single, tuna-playing mom, though not deliriously happy? What if he goes home and marries someone who can't have children? What if he has prostrate cancer and ...
What if I stop now before I get a plot that I don't want to write? LOL
In my wip, my heroine risked her life to find freedom. Now she's settled into a new, safe life -- and it's in danger. She wants to stay, almost more than anything, but if she stays, lives are at stake and they might lose their freedom, not just because they might be in danger. That's only one of several inner conflicts.
What dueling conflicts do you have in one of your books? Is it simple, or do you expand on it?
I hope you'll read Karen White's terrific guest blog below. I goofed and was supposed to post my blog next week, so now there are two blogs today. So next week I'm still up and will blog about larger-than-life characters.
