By Karen Newcomb

Conflict

Here in the Sierra Nevada foothills we had a near heat wave the first half of March.  Everyone got excited with the hint of spring and broke out the shorts, grabbed the garden equipment and headed outdoors.  The old timers said hold off planting because we may still get a hard freeze.  By the second half of March it rained, turned cooler and those tiny seeds in bedding trays went back inside. It’s hard to contain spring fever!

There were no questions submitted, so I’ll jump right into the subject of the month.  Conflict.

I touched briefly on the subject in January.  Conflict is drama.  Drama is two characters wanting the same thing and going about getting it in different ways.  Drama is the main character forced into action.

There are four kinds of conflict:  1.  Man against man, 2. Man against nature, 3. Man against society, and 4. Man against himself. 

Don’t confuse conflict with the theme of the story.  Use conflict to weave the theme into the body of work.

Man against man has the main character fighting for his goal against a human enemy.   This is where your protagonist and antagonist fight for the same ending.  Since the characters may not wear white and black hats you have to give your characters their own special traits that allow the reader to immediately know the difference between the two. 

When you want to use man against nature as your conflict, think of Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man of The Sea.  There are times in this book when you think nature, the fish, is going to win, but the will of the old man prevails as he battles nature.  You will, of course, be able to think of other books using this conflict.  Re-read some of these classics and analyze how the author used this conflict.

Man against society and Oliver Twist would be a good classic to recall.  Today, there are certainly modern factors that can be used for this conflict.  Aids, gay versus straight, war versus peace, and of course the current right to life, right to die conflict. 

The final conflict is man against himself.  Think Scrooge.  Again, in today’s world this conflict could be used in many ways.  This is one conflict where the hero had better win.

Every time you read a book ask yourself which element of conflict has the author used to propel the story along?  To stimulate conflict use human needs, such as desire and emotions.  And of course…you can use all the conflicts in one story.

Conflict is not one long angry fight throughout the book, but smaller battles and each battle has to be solved before another can start, but in the end it seems like the main character has fought one long war.  What kind of conflict/s will your character face?

Keep writing!