Hell is story friendly. But ... Paradise is not a story. Paradise is about what happens when the stories are over. ~Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House
Story Challenge | Week 8 | Conflict & Stakes: Conflict is fundamental to story & trouble is endlessly interesting ... but wallowing is not, so let's write conflict that seethes and sings!
Trouble is what makes a picnic into a story, says Janet Burroway (Writing Fiction). And if you want to understand trouble and harness it in your writing (fiction or CNF!)—then this is the post for you.
Here, I offer you three precise, powerful, and actionable strategies to infuse your writing with the kind of conflict that matters. These three exercises will help bring your story’s conflict to the surface, raise the stakes, and clarify the emotional center of the work. The idea is to explore how conflict and stakes drive and shape story, catalyze and pressurize transformation, and illuminate meaning.
I crafted and curated these exercises based on my own writing and teaching experience, plus wisdom gleaned from some of the best minds on narrative conflict (Janet Burroway, Donald Maass, Charles Baxter, and more).
I’ll also share the one thing your protagonist must do in order for your conflict to be dynamic rather than grating—in order for your conflict to be active rather than passive and wallowing. Dynamic conflict is compelling and keeps readers reading.
Many of us are afraid of conflict in real life. Too often, that fear shows in our writing—even when we think otherwise. Ultimately, though, conflict is story, story is life, and whether you’re writing a story or just living one, this post will shine a light.
Fair warning: this post is long. That’s because conflict is so crucial.
I’m glad to have had the very good fortune to attend a two-day workshop with Donald Maass at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis back in 2015. Maass is a brilliant, engaging speaker, and he taught me more about conflict and stakes in those two days than anyone else has before or since. What he said is that the vast majority of the manuscripts he sees are drastically undernourished. That is, they lack sufficient conflict. Not enough happens. Avoiding that mistake is worth a longer post.
Before we jump into the exercises, though, bear with me—we’re going to cover four basic topics in this post:
Magic: How & Why the Story Challenge Works (Some Housekeeping)
Tiny Things: How Attention = Possibility = Story
Sadness: A Taproot of Conflict
Trouble: A Quick Deep Dive Into The Abyss
That’s a lot. So much that this post is too long for email! So if it gets cut off by your email server, just click those three dots (…) so you can see more.
Now, let’s get going!
Magic
Every week I’m wowed by your snippets and your courage, and by your insight for each other’s work. This has been an amazing ride!
Especially for … a newsletter. Because that’s what Writing in the Dark is—a newsletter, not a traditional “class,” even though I’m seeing it referred to that way in comments and on Notes. When I first saw people calling this a class, I thought to myself, that’s so cool! I love that this can feel that way. It says so much about what an alive experience we’re creating together.
But, also (and this is the housekeeping part!), Writing in the Dark’s seasonal intensives and the challenges are not technically “classes.” They’re as robust as many classes, yes, and probably richer with resources and interaction than many classes. But, still, not technically classes. That’s in part a matter of scale, because this is a subscription newsletter with thousands of subscribers, and I can’t offer the exact same level of individualized attention available in my classes at a scale like this (to note, a 6-week synchronous live session of my Writing in the Dark workshop, when it runs, costs $499, whereas a subscription to this newsletter costs as little as $4.17 month). And this newsletter experience does come with the incredible unique benefit of an absolutely thriving comments section that contains beautiful (and bountiful!) interactive community of real human beings doing language together. It’s an astonishingly supportive and inspiring place to ask questions and share your work with each other and with me—and that’s a very big deal.
It’s huge.
So, even though the seasonal intensives and challenges aren’t technically classes, they do amplify the learning of craft exponentially compared to what most of us can do on our own. That’s because in addition to the craft essays, resources, and guided exercises:
This format provides accountability. Many of you say you make a concerted effort to post snippets each week as a means of holding yourselves accountable, which is fantastic—that’s how human psychology and creative theory work best. Most of us produce best (especially creatively) with some structure, some company, and a schedule. Yay!
I hang out in the comments and offer encouragement and a significant number of very specific and even individualized suggestions and clarifications, along with additional craft observations. Importantly, I look for the best in your work and aim to help you to see it, too, while also pointing out opportunities in the work that might be hard for you to spot.
Through reading the collective total of one another’s work and my comments and each other’s comments, and by paying close attention to how others interpret and execute the exercises, we deepen our artistic insight immeasurably. Plus, of course, it’s fun!
However, an important note: I can’t and don’t promise individual feedback every week to every participant who posts work. I mean, I have actually, so far, been able to give individualized feedback on almost every snippet. If you’re in the Challenge, you see that. I try to read and respond directly to as many snippets as I can, because I like to do it. But I can’t guarantee that.
And that’s an important disclaimer!
What I can do, and what I promised at the outset, is this (excerpted from a Story Challenge description post, one of which you can find here):
You’ll be encouraged to record your experiences as part of the process—and you can, if you share your thoughts in the chat or comments, expect to find me there, participating in the conversation.
And I love hanging out in the comments! There is little I love more than talking with writers about writing. But if you do end up posting “late,” when the conversation has died down, or working through a seasonal intensive long after the date the posts went out, do not worry. That’s how this thing is built to work! All those comments, even as they age, remain available for you to study. And a lot of the things that I say end up applying to many and even most snippets (e.g., have you. noticed how often people’s snippets are better if they start with the second sentence, or third, instead of the first? It’s amazing!).
Anyway, a huge value of a paid subscription is the continual access to our incredible archive, which you can go back into again and again. Writing in the Dark challenges are designed to be evergreen and self-guided, so you can work them at your own pace whenever and as often as you wish. And as I’ve been shouting from the hilltops: we recently made it all the easier for you to find what you’re looking for by building our own Curriculum Index, now pinned to the homepage!
The Index is a living document that we’ll expand and improve as we go. We’ve organized it by intensive, by type of post (including our Voice Memos and Video Notes!), and by genre, mood, etc., so take a look and see what you think. If you have ideas/suggestions, let us know in the comments under the Index.
And if you ever have any questions at all about any of the above, please ask. ❤️
Tiny Things
Reader Alice Kuipers said to me yesterday, this:
I love how you make the tiny things seem like possible stories… Thanks.
What a beautiful compliment! What’s better than making things possible? I revere the art of possibility, which stems from the devotion of attention. If we are not paying attention, we will not notice the tiny opportunities for art and story that present themselves quietly, and even silently, to us each day.
A recent example: Recently,
(my youngest adult child) texted me a poemish thing they’d been working on, plus a few photos of their evening with their foster son, Z:
I said, “You could make a photo essay!”
By the next day, Billie had posted this powerful photo essay on their own newsletter,
. I shared a link in our first Thursday Thread (which was amazing!).Just one example of paying attention, seeing stories in tiny things, and making stories possible. This is something we all can do—it’s a way of living like a writer in the world, a way of shimmering and sharding toward a larger whole.
Sadness
It’s also an example of “erring heartbroken.” I am afraid I have passed this gene of mine along to my children, and modeled it for them simply by being who I am. Sometimes, I wish I erred more, you know, happy-go-lucky. But as writers, erring heartbroken is not unusual. You see, the more we feel, the more broken our hearts are likely to be. As Andrea Gibson of
so gorgeously said:Just to be clear I don't want to get out without a broken heart. I intend to leave this life so shattered there’s gonna have to be a thousand separate heavens for all of my flying parts.
We also talked about this last week in Lit Salon, in that post about how the best writing can be so devastating (Dear Curious: Is That Fucked Up?).
Because, you see, all literary conflict is not … a fight or a tornado or a Big Bad Wolf. Sadness itself is also a form of literary conflict. Sadness (and the things that made us sad) opens a doorway into the arc of conflict, crisis, and resolution.
As poet, short story writer, and novelist Robert Morgan has said about sadness in stories:
Almost all good stories are sad because it is the human struggle that engages us readers and listeners the most. To watch characters confront their hardships and uncertainties makes us feel better about our own conflicts and confusions and fears. We have a sense of community, of sympathy, a cleansing sympathy, as Aristotle said, and relief that we are safe in our room only reading the story.
Trouble
Of course, sadness is not the only kind of conflict. Conflict is any form of trouble, any element of things going wrong, creating obstacles for your protagonist (even if that’s you!), and getting between them and the object of their desire (because as we know, desire drives plot! More on that here and here).
As for trouble, here’s a great passage from Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, (eds Janet Burroway, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Ned Stuckey-French):
Suppose, for example, you go on a picnic. You find a beautiful deserted meadow with a lake nearby. The weather is splendid and so is the company. The food’s delicious, the water’s fine, and the insects have taken the day off. Afterward, someone asks you how your picnic was. “Terrific,” you reply, “really perfect.” No story.
But suppose the next week you go back for a rerun. You set your picnic blanket on an anthill. You all race for the lake to get cold water on the bites, and one of your friends goes too far out on the plastic raft, which deflates. He can’t swim and you have to save him. On the way in you gash your foot on a broken bottle. When you get back ot the picnic, the ants have taken over the cake and a possum has demolished the chicken. Just then the sky opens up. When you gather your things to race for the car, you notice an irritated bull has broken through the fence. The others run for it, but because of your bleeding heel the best you can do is hobble. You have two choices: try to outrun him or stand perfectly still and hope he’s interested only in a moving target. At this point, you don’t know if your friends can be counted on for help, even the nerd whose life you saved. You don’t know if it’s true that a bull is attracted by the smell of blood.
A year later, assuming you’re around to tell about it, you are still saying, “Let me tell you what happened last year.” And your listeners are saying, “What a story!”
Another way to understand this—one I LOVE, is through Kurt Vonnegut’s utterly fantastic four-minute video on the shapes of stories, which you can find here, and which I recommend watching before completing this week’s exercises!
Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories: WATCH HERE.
And, finally, here we have:
Three concrete exercises for playing with, elasticizing, clarifying, and amplifying conflict in your stories
One essential strategy that will keep your conflict dynamic rather than a slog
I am really looking forward to what you’ll come up with this week, so please share liberally, including your questions and any obstacles you run into in the writing.