Some stories seem to move more slowly than drying paint. They elongate scene after scene of a bland character sitting, contemplating, staring at walls. Whole novels can go by without the character doing much more than taking a sip of their watered-down beer as they contemplate the vagaries of their universes. How often do I sit down to write a Goodreads review and see someone comment, “Nothing really happened in this book.”
When I hear someone describe a book in that way, I’ll confess, often I think, I bet I would love that book. I find that many of these so-called “boring” stories are full of emotion and depth and meaningful topics, although externally I suppose it’s true that not much happens. In fact, sometimes I think that it’s precisely because not much is happening externally that a text can approach some of the deepest concerns of life, because the mind is left undistracted by too many external goings on.
Or, perhaps, it’s because I’m contemplative myself more than an action-taker. Maybe I see myself a bit in these lumpy, over-thinking characters. They say nobody wants to read about these sad-sack ruminators. Readers want determined, spunky heroes who aren’t afraid to say what they think. Well, I’ll tell you what I think: if all we read about are the big actors of the world, then literature is failing at its purpose of holding up a mirror to life.
And yet, I get it. In the world today when fiction competes for attention with an entertainment-driven, image-saturated media ecosystem, perhaps this is the direction fiction must move in order to perpetuate itself among readers.
This question of the prominence of conflict connects, I think, to another common topic of debate among writers: the virtue or vice of planning out a story before writing. The continuum from the most detailed “plotters” who know the minute details of their characters’ lives and have a planning document seventy pages long before they begin drafting, down to the freest “pantsers” who ramble over the page, brings us a range of different approaches to storytelling.
In the short story class I took with One Story earlier this summer, we took a decidedly “plotter” approach, first building the skeleton of our stories around stages of a central conflict. Following these distinct stages helped us establish a clear structure that, as we fleshed out each section later, foregrounded conflict and gave the stories a great sense of movement from beginning to end.
My personal approach before taking the class had involved similarly planning out basic movements of the story before drafting, but I had never focused those basic movements so consciously around stages of conflict development. I was impressed how doing so enabled me to construct a meaningful story that did follow the culturally recognizable progression of conflict without sacrificing the elements that felt personally important to me as well.
Theorists like Joseph Campbell have attempted to identify cross-cultural, archetypal story structures that they suggest may be encoded into our subconscious minds and are therefore meaningful, no matter when or where we are born. Although I have read Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and used to teach his theory of the “hero’s journey” to students, at this point in my life I tend to be skeptical of such attempts to universalize literature. They seem to me more likely to be the results of confirmation bias than actual universals.
Yet I may be wrong about this too. It seems likely that there are some elements of storytelling that move across cultures. I keep asking myself what those are. Maybe conflict is part of the picture. Maybe I need to challenge my suspicions. I recognize that no author and no story exist in a vacuum. We should not accept blindly the advice of others about fiction writing, but I think perhaps I am sometimes too ready to dismiss such advice out of hand. The story I wrote with this conflict-focused structure I ultimately found personally moving. I’m working on another short story now using the same process, and it is helping me make forward movement while still finding ways to be creative in the telling.
Our travels are continuing. I am writing to you now from La Crosse, Wisconsin, where I am meeting my baby nephew for the first time. How good it is to be with family. Two weeks from now, though, I’ll be beginning my journey back to Norway.
What do you think about the role of conflict in literature? How do you choose to engage with conflict in your own writing?
Be well. Wishing you the best in the coming weeks,
Jimmy
Words like trees 