Date: Sun, 20 Jul 1997 20:53:56 -0400 From: Words from the Monastery Subject: EXERCISE: Magnifying Conflict "Magnifying Conflict" from David Ray (pg 101-2) Low-energy writing has, in some circles, become fashionable, but it will probably not remain so for very long. Great fiction is tense with conflict--between characters, within characters, between characters and forces opposing them. We need only think of Ernest Pontifex's struggles with his father in the Victorian classic The Way of All Flesh or the custody battle of Kramer vs. Kramer or Roskolnikov's struggle between hi fixation on murder and his impulse to love and remain loyal to his family and its values in Crime and Punishment--or more accurately, his struggle between sanity and insanity. We might recall the heroine of Pamela, struggling against the whiles of her employer-seducer. Or we might think of Huck Finn, in his perplexity and struggle against the racism he's been taught and his more trustworthy intuition and loyalty to his friend Jim, a runaway slave. In Moby Dick there is conflict on many levels, but primarily between hunter and hunted, malefic force and the innocent violence of nature. Any solid work of fiction will provide ready examples. The Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa found a storm of raging conflict even in a dewdrop, the most peaceful thing he could find in nature when he sought retreat from his grief. The writer who loses touch with his responsibility to energize his fiction with conflict will probably have a very limited or temporary audience. The Exercise Take a story you have completed and go through it and intensify the conflict, magnifying the tension and shrillness at every turn, even to the point of absurdity or hyperbole. Add stress wherever possible, both between characters and within them as individuals. Exaggerate the obstacles they face. Be extreme. The Objective To create an awareness of the need for a high level of tension while encouraging a healthy regard for how easily it can become excessive. This exercise is not meant to "improve" the story, although it often provokes new and more dynamic descriptions and dialog. It raises the writer's consciousness about the need for conflict in fiction. "I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don't praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn't get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could red the story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Paris Review interview ***** What If? Writing Exercises fro Fiction Writers Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter HarperPerennial Publishers ISBN 0-06-272006-6 -- volente Deo, Anthony D http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/4640/ http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/5757/ "Don't you dare gloat, you miserable little biscuit whore." -- Frasier Crane