I've been thinking about external and internal conflict. Sometimes you can be writing along and the story isn't quite working - and then you realize that the reason it's giving you trouble is that it doesn't have both external and internal conflicts, only external.
Why is it so important to have both external and internal conflicts in a story?
One reason is complexity. A story with only external conflicts feels somewhat shallow to me, no matter how thorny the external conflict becomes. I always like to have the sense that the protagonist is somehow at odds with the external realities of his or her situation.
Another is unpredictability. I always like a story that is hard to predict, and as Janice Hardy notes, when you have external conflict driving the story in one direction, and internal conflict driving it in yet another, "crashing them together," the story's direction becomes more difficult to guess.
Both of these are reasons I've thought through before, but here's another thing to consider.
It feels more real.
Now, why would that be? Maybe because it's plausible to think that most people have internal issues they're working through. On the other hand, why would it be so appropriate to have the protagonist dealing with internal conflicts that directly contrast with the external ones? Wouldn't that feel more coincidental? To me it doesn't. After much thought, what I've decided is this:
An internal conflict that contrasts with an external one lets the protagonist fight directly against the author.
As a reader, I know that the external conflict is controlled by the author - an outside force that throws things at our beloved protagonist. I don't feel the same way about conflict inside the character, for some reason, even though I know the author is just as much in control of the conflict inside the character as they are of the conflict outside. I think it's because a well-crafted character will feel like her motivations grow naturally from personality, experience and other factors. Thus, so long as the protagonist feels like a real person, then her struggle with internal conflict, while dealing with the events of the plot, will take on additional dimension. Not only will the protagonist's choices be unexpected, but she will take on that quality that I love to feel when writing a character - the feeling that she is acting on her own against me and against what I might (as the writer) want to make her do.
I urge you to think through internal conflict as well as external. It will really make a difference to your story.
Showing posts with label conflict. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conflict. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
The Scope of the Conflict
When you're writing a story, there needs to be conflict. Person versus person, person versus extreme environment, whatever it is... conflict is a necessary ingredient for making a story work. You may also have noticed that it's good to have both internal conflict and external conflict - conflict within the main character gives that person more dimension and also gives them a trickier time resolving the save-the-world conflict part. It's important also, I think, to consider the scope of the conflict that you are working with.
When considering scope, you can always start with two basic questions:
If the scope of the conflict is too small - only one person is involved, and nobody is affected - you may find readers going "so what?" You can make a story work with a conflict that involves and affects only one person, but in that case it will be very important to answer the question of why it matters that this person get through the conflict. Maybe in the case of personal moral dilemmas the significance comes from questions about the nature of human morality - the individual symbolizing us all, and thereby giving the small scope a larger meaning.
On the other side of things, you have the save-the-world/universe conflict, in which you have a large number of people involved, and absolutely everybody is affected. The number of people involved will be somewhat limited by what the narrative can bear without confusing readers. In The Lord of the Rings, we're dealing with all of Middle Earth falling into darkness, and so many people are involved that the narrative splits in order to deal with them all. Furthermore, almost anyone can be enlisted from the population of passersby to act on one side or another of the conflict, because it affects all of them.
In the case of The Lord of the Rings, everybody knows about the conflict and it's easy to get everyone involved. In the Harry Potter books, I found it interesting that the scope of the conflict kept increasing. At first it seemed like just Harry was involved, and maybe a few more people. Then the further we went the more it became clear that all of the wizarding world was involved, and by the end we were starting to see that even the Muggle world was involved. Good stuff.
But if we're to talk about potential problems with the scope of story conflict, I have to mention the Harry Potter books here too, because I had a quibble with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the level of scope. I entered that book with the impression that the conflict would center on Harry and his friends as both the primary people involved, and those affected - but it turned out that there were many more people involved, and that Harry and his friends were occupying a small corner of the affected area, in such a way that I wasn't convinced there was any way they could actually have resolved the conflict on their own. This isn't something that will bother everyone, but it bothered me at the time.
If the scope of your conflict is too large, readers may be confused. Make sure that you're showing all the people involved, and taking the necessary steps to imply the number of people affected. If the scope is too small, relevant only to the main characters and not to anyone else, make sure that you're showing readers why such personal stakes matter.
The reader's understanding of the full scope of your conflict isn't something that should necessarily remain the same, either. Expanding the scope of the conflict - at least in terms of the number of people affected - is part of what raises the stakes as the story progresses. You can plan ahead for moments that reveal expansions in scope: that moment when suddenly you realize that more people were involved than you ever suspected. Or the moment when you realize that a single decision that rests on one character's conscience will affect everyone you have read about so far.
Of course, the issue is more complex than I can really explain through generalities, so here are a few of my thoughts about scope from my writing of my new novel, For Love, For Power.
I'm finding that I have to keep reminding myself about issues of scope. The main characters are all members of a single nuclear family which has lots of internal struggles, and at the same time, they are involved in a larger-scale conflict over the leadership of the nation of Varin that will affect everyone. Where the question of scope becomes more complex is in the fact that their nuclear family is part of the larger group called the First Family, and that there are twelve Great Families in the nobility, all of whom have a stake in the leadership struggle. Because of this, I have to decide how many of them are involved in events (say, attacks and attempted assassinations, meetings and negotiations) that directly affect the First Family and my characters. Logically, since everyone is involved in the process, the events that affect my characters are not the only ones that are going on at any given time. I'm finding that I have to build in ways for my characters to get information about aspects of the ongoing conflict that don't directly affect them. Otherwise it would appear that the First Family is the only important group here, and then why would the struggle for leadership have any meaning? Thus, if the First Family is attacked, then very likely several other families will suffer attacks on the same day (and some may be initiated by the First Family!). If people who attended a particular event are getting sick, then maybe my small group of First Family members should get a message letting them know how many people are ill and how far it affects the nobility as a whole. At the same time, I also have to realize, and try to hint to readers, that the First Family is not the only group experiencing internal struggles. Otherwise their efforts to affect the First Family would be too effective. In fact, I am planning deliberately to have some of the other Families' efforts to affect the power struggle fail because of internal problems in their group. I guess I would call it a question of making sure that I imply the scope of the type of conflicts and setbacks that the First Family suffers, and not just the scope of the overall power struggle.
It's something to think about.
When considering scope, you can always start with two basic questions:
- how many people are involved?
- how many people are affected?
If the scope of the conflict is too small - only one person is involved, and nobody is affected - you may find readers going "so what?" You can make a story work with a conflict that involves and affects only one person, but in that case it will be very important to answer the question of why it matters that this person get through the conflict. Maybe in the case of personal moral dilemmas the significance comes from questions about the nature of human morality - the individual symbolizing us all, and thereby giving the small scope a larger meaning.
On the other side of things, you have the save-the-world/universe conflict, in which you have a large number of people involved, and absolutely everybody is affected. The number of people involved will be somewhat limited by what the narrative can bear without confusing readers. In The Lord of the Rings, we're dealing with all of Middle Earth falling into darkness, and so many people are involved that the narrative splits in order to deal with them all. Furthermore, almost anyone can be enlisted from the population of passersby to act on one side or another of the conflict, because it affects all of them.
In the case of The Lord of the Rings, everybody knows about the conflict and it's easy to get everyone involved. In the Harry Potter books, I found it interesting that the scope of the conflict kept increasing. At first it seemed like just Harry was involved, and maybe a few more people. Then the further we went the more it became clear that all of the wizarding world was involved, and by the end we were starting to see that even the Muggle world was involved. Good stuff.
But if we're to talk about potential problems with the scope of story conflict, I have to mention the Harry Potter books here too, because I had a quibble with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the level of scope. I entered that book with the impression that the conflict would center on Harry and his friends as both the primary people involved, and those affected - but it turned out that there were many more people involved, and that Harry and his friends were occupying a small corner of the affected area, in such a way that I wasn't convinced there was any way they could actually have resolved the conflict on their own. This isn't something that will bother everyone, but it bothered me at the time.
If the scope of your conflict is too large, readers may be confused. Make sure that you're showing all the people involved, and taking the necessary steps to imply the number of people affected. If the scope is too small, relevant only to the main characters and not to anyone else, make sure that you're showing readers why such personal stakes matter.
The reader's understanding of the full scope of your conflict isn't something that should necessarily remain the same, either. Expanding the scope of the conflict - at least in terms of the number of people affected - is part of what raises the stakes as the story progresses. You can plan ahead for moments that reveal expansions in scope: that moment when suddenly you realize that more people were involved than you ever suspected. Or the moment when you realize that a single decision that rests on one character's conscience will affect everyone you have read about so far.
Of course, the issue is more complex than I can really explain through generalities, so here are a few of my thoughts about scope from my writing of my new novel, For Love, For Power.
I'm finding that I have to keep reminding myself about issues of scope. The main characters are all members of a single nuclear family which has lots of internal struggles, and at the same time, they are involved in a larger-scale conflict over the leadership of the nation of Varin that will affect everyone. Where the question of scope becomes more complex is in the fact that their nuclear family is part of the larger group called the First Family, and that there are twelve Great Families in the nobility, all of whom have a stake in the leadership struggle. Because of this, I have to decide how many of them are involved in events (say, attacks and attempted assassinations, meetings and negotiations) that directly affect the First Family and my characters. Logically, since everyone is involved in the process, the events that affect my characters are not the only ones that are going on at any given time. I'm finding that I have to build in ways for my characters to get information about aspects of the ongoing conflict that don't directly affect them. Otherwise it would appear that the First Family is the only important group here, and then why would the struggle for leadership have any meaning? Thus, if the First Family is attacked, then very likely several other families will suffer attacks on the same day (and some may be initiated by the First Family!). If people who attended a particular event are getting sick, then maybe my small group of First Family members should get a message letting them know how many people are ill and how far it affects the nobility as a whole. At the same time, I also have to realize, and try to hint to readers, that the First Family is not the only group experiencing internal struggles. Otherwise their efforts to affect the First Family would be too effective. In fact, I am planning deliberately to have some of the other Families' efforts to affect the power struggle fail because of internal problems in their group. I guess I would call it a question of making sure that I imply the scope of the type of conflicts and setbacks that the First Family suffers, and not just the scope of the overall power struggle.
It's something to think about.
Monday, April 18, 2011
How and where to begin a story
How and where to begin a story is always - always - a hard question. I have gone back and changed the beginning for nearly every story I've written. In some cases, I have changed the beginning multiple times over the course of revision. It's enough to make one go batty!
The fact is, while there is no absolute rule, a story generally should begin with:
I put the main conflict first because the main conflict is what drives the story forward, and sometimes the main conflict does not start in the same place that the main character does. Often in works where a murder mystery occurs and where the antagonist is mysterious, the book will start with a segment from the antagonist's point of view. This establishes the stakes, i.e. why exactly it is that a reader should care about what the main character is going to try to accomplish. Thus, when we get to the point where we're seeing the main character - likely doing something far more innocuous - we already get a sense of danger, anticipation, and most importantly, curiosity about what happens next. When, as in Janice Hardy's The Shifter, the character has a secret and her safety depends on nobody finding out about it, it makes perfect sense for the story to begin with a scene that results in this secret being discovered. That's what I would call a tributary scene, where the scene has its own natural stakes and drive, but delivers us into a place where the main conflict has clearly begun. For my current work in progress, the opening scene is one that shows the main character in a situation where it is important for him to pay attention to how he and his reputation are perceived by others, and then shows him being driven step by step off his comfortable ordinary concerns into a place of extreme danger, not because of the antagonist, but because of a contagious disease and the fear that the disease causes in people around him. The disease then becomes a driver that leads to a second major change, the death of a person in power, that propels the story toward its conclusion.
I'll return in a second to the issue of "being driven step by step off his comfortable ordinary concerns," but before I do that I want to address the question of backstory.
I often feel like choosing an opening scene for a story is like trying to create a see-saw. You have a big piece of story (it might even be your protagonist's whole life!) and you have to balance it on that opening scene. The part that chronologically precedes the opening scene is the backstory; the part that follows is the story. My rule of thumb is this:
Any piece of backstory that contributes directly to the identity of the protagonist, his/her culture, his/her self-awareness, and his/her basis for decision making can be portrayed indirectly through the protagonist's actions, and thus need not be included in the main story.
You may have noticed that I've arrived at "the main character" here.
Point of view is my ultimate ally in this. I think about it in the following terms: we judge our experiences and choose our actions on the basis of our personality and experience; thus, aspects of personality and experience can be included at points where our protagonist judges events, and chooses to act.
Here's an example from For Love, For Power of me doing the backstory thing with character judgment. Tagret (my main character) is going to a concert in the ballroom and one of his friends tells him that a new Cabinet member will be announced at the event, and that it might be Tagret's father. Here's how Tagret responds:
"It wouldn't matter," Tagret said. "My father wouldn't risk coming all the way back across the continent just for a Cabinet seat. He's too happy ruling Selimna where nobody can reach him." No Father meant none of Father's nasty surprises, and it would be preferable to keep him there, except that his last and worst surprise had been taking Mother with him.
The fact that Tagret's parents have been gone in a place so far that they can't come back to visit, that he hates his father and loves his mother, and that his father is important enough to consider a Cabinet seat not worth his while - all of these are important pieces of information for understanding the story as it continues. They are relevant here not because Tagret stops out of his ordinary concerns to muse on them, but because he's using them as a basis for his evaluation of the ongoing talk, and his response.
The fact is that an opening scene is strongest when it's a point of convergence. It shows conflict, it shows character, and it shows world (you didn't think I'd forget world, did you?) all at once in an active and engaged way. At the beginning of the story, a reader needs to be grounded in all three.
Grounding is absolutely critical in an opening scene. This is the word I give to basic reader orientation. The reader needs to be oriented - in some way - to the who, what, and where of the story. These elements can be presented in different sorts of balance, as when our protagonist is feeling disoriented and not knowing where he/she is, but they are very important. Imagine the main character as a runner, and you're about to be tied to that runner with a rope so you can follow along at (possibly breakneck) speed for the entire story. If you are going to be able to do this, you have to have your feet on the ground. Otherwise the runner will end up dragging you, spinning and yelling, until you manage to untie yourself and get away.
This is why starting in the middle of extreme action is not a good idea. Everett Maroon had a good post on this issue, here. In your opening scene, your main character should be doing something that requires him/her to indicate to readers who he/she is and what his/her normal concerns are. Until "normal" is established, the abnormal will have no meaning. Even if your character is disoriented, he/she can still try to make sense of what is going on around him/her in terms of what would be normal under ordinary circumstances.
Similarly, starting with simple introspection or gazing out at views is not a good idea either. It's not just that you've omitted the conflict. It's also that you've shackled yourself in terms of backstory and world. It's not only that people don't sit down and contemplate the basic normal conditions of their lives for no reason. It's that backstory and world belong in the background, and if there is nothing going on, they will necessarily take the front seat. By starting with your main character in a situation of conflict that leads directly to the main conflict of the story, you do several things:
Dive in and go for it. These are just a few things for you to think about as you prepare to do so.
The fact is, while there is no absolute rule, a story generally should begin with:
- the main conflict, or some event that is a direct tributary of the main conflict
- the main character
I put the main conflict first because the main conflict is what drives the story forward, and sometimes the main conflict does not start in the same place that the main character does. Often in works where a murder mystery occurs and where the antagonist is mysterious, the book will start with a segment from the antagonist's point of view. This establishes the stakes, i.e. why exactly it is that a reader should care about what the main character is going to try to accomplish. Thus, when we get to the point where we're seeing the main character - likely doing something far more innocuous - we already get a sense of danger, anticipation, and most importantly, curiosity about what happens next. When, as in Janice Hardy's The Shifter, the character has a secret and her safety depends on nobody finding out about it, it makes perfect sense for the story to begin with a scene that results in this secret being discovered. That's what I would call a tributary scene, where the scene has its own natural stakes and drive, but delivers us into a place where the main conflict has clearly begun. For my current work in progress, the opening scene is one that shows the main character in a situation where it is important for him to pay attention to how he and his reputation are perceived by others, and then shows him being driven step by step off his comfortable ordinary concerns into a place of extreme danger, not because of the antagonist, but because of a contagious disease and the fear that the disease causes in people around him. The disease then becomes a driver that leads to a second major change, the death of a person in power, that propels the story toward its conclusion.
I'll return in a second to the issue of "being driven step by step off his comfortable ordinary concerns," but before I do that I want to address the question of backstory.
I often feel like choosing an opening scene for a story is like trying to create a see-saw. You have a big piece of story (it might even be your protagonist's whole life!) and you have to balance it on that opening scene. The part that chronologically precedes the opening scene is the backstory; the part that follows is the story. My rule of thumb is this:
Any piece of backstory that contributes directly to the identity of the protagonist, his/her culture, his/her self-awareness, and his/her basis for decision making can be portrayed indirectly through the protagonist's actions, and thus need not be included in the main story.
You may have noticed that I've arrived at "the main character" here.
Point of view is my ultimate ally in this. I think about it in the following terms: we judge our experiences and choose our actions on the basis of our personality and experience; thus, aspects of personality and experience can be included at points where our protagonist judges events, and chooses to act.
Here's an example from For Love, For Power of me doing the backstory thing with character judgment. Tagret (my main character) is going to a concert in the ballroom and one of his friends tells him that a new Cabinet member will be announced at the event, and that it might be Tagret's father. Here's how Tagret responds:
"It wouldn't matter," Tagret said. "My father wouldn't risk coming all the way back across the continent just for a Cabinet seat. He's too happy ruling Selimna where nobody can reach him." No Father meant none of Father's nasty surprises, and it would be preferable to keep him there, except that his last and worst surprise had been taking Mother with him.
The fact that Tagret's parents have been gone in a place so far that they can't come back to visit, that he hates his father and loves his mother, and that his father is important enough to consider a Cabinet seat not worth his while - all of these are important pieces of information for understanding the story as it continues. They are relevant here not because Tagret stops out of his ordinary concerns to muse on them, but because he's using them as a basis for his evaluation of the ongoing talk, and his response.
The fact is that an opening scene is strongest when it's a point of convergence. It shows conflict, it shows character, and it shows world (you didn't think I'd forget world, did you?) all at once in an active and engaged way. At the beginning of the story, a reader needs to be grounded in all three.
Grounding is absolutely critical in an opening scene. This is the word I give to basic reader orientation. The reader needs to be oriented - in some way - to the who, what, and where of the story. These elements can be presented in different sorts of balance, as when our protagonist is feeling disoriented and not knowing where he/she is, but they are very important. Imagine the main character as a runner, and you're about to be tied to that runner with a rope so you can follow along at (possibly breakneck) speed for the entire story. If you are going to be able to do this, you have to have your feet on the ground. Otherwise the runner will end up dragging you, spinning and yelling, until you manage to untie yourself and get away.
This is why starting in the middle of extreme action is not a good idea. Everett Maroon had a good post on this issue, here. In your opening scene, your main character should be doing something that requires him/her to indicate to readers who he/she is and what his/her normal concerns are. Until "normal" is established, the abnormal will have no meaning. Even if your character is disoriented, he/she can still try to make sense of what is going on around him/her in terms of what would be normal under ordinary circumstances.
Similarly, starting with simple introspection or gazing out at views is not a good idea either. It's not just that you've omitted the conflict. It's also that you've shackled yourself in terms of backstory and world. It's not only that people don't sit down and contemplate the basic normal conditions of their lives for no reason. It's that backstory and world belong in the background, and if there is nothing going on, they will necessarily take the front seat. By starting with your main character in a situation of conflict that leads directly to the main conflict of the story, you do several things:
- You give your main character an opportunity to introduce him/herself through action and judgment
- You give your main character the opportunity to introduce his/her world through action and judgment
- You orient readers and establish where the story will be going next
- You place the drive (the hook!) of the story front and center so readers can catch hold
- in what context could the main character best demonstrate his/her core motivations, possibly through indirect reference to backstory?
- in what location the main character could best portray the conditions of his/her world that have the greatest bearing on the story as it goes forward?
- in what situation would the significance of the main conflict to this character become most evident?
Dive in and go for it. These are just a few things for you to think about as you prepare to do so.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
External and internal conflict
Ever since reading Janice Hardy's thoughts about the topic on Friday, I've been thinking about external and internal conflict. That very day I realized that the reason a story I've been writing wasn't working was that I didn't have both external and internal conflicts - only external. I found myself asking a question:
Why is it so important to have both external and internal conflicts in a story?
One reason is complexity. A story with only external conflicts feels somewhat shallow to me, no matter how thorny the external conflict becomes. I always like to have the sense that the protagonist is somehow at odds with the external realities of his or her situation.
Another is unpredictability. I always like a story that is hard to predict, and as Janice notes, when you have external conflict driving the story in one direction, and internal conflict driving it in yet another, "crashing them together," the story's direction becomes more difficult to guess.
Both of these are reasons I've thought through before, but this week the problem hit me from another direction, and I came up with a third.
It feels more real.
Now, why would that be? Maybe because it's plausible to think that most people have internal issues they're working through. On the other hand, why would it be so appropriate to have the protagonist dealing with internal conflicts that directly contrast with the external ones? Wouldn't that feel more coincidental? To me it doesn't. After much thought, what I decided was this:
An internal conflict that contrasts with an external one lets the protagonist fight directly against the author.
As a reader, I know that the external conflict is controlled by the author - an outside force that throws things at our beloved protagonist. I don't feel the same way about conflict inside the character, for some reason, even though I know the author is just as much in control of the conflict inside the character as they are of the conflict outside. I think it's because a well-crafted character will feel like her motivations grow naturally from personality, experience and other factors. Thus, so long as the protagonist feels like a real person, then her struggle with internal conflict, while dealing with the events of the plot, will take on additional dimension. Not only will the protagonist's choices be unexpected, but she will take on that quality that I love to feel when writing a character - the feeling that she is acting on her own against me and against what I might (as the writer) want to make her do.
I urge you to think through internal conflict as well as external. It will really make a difference to your story.
Why is it so important to have both external and internal conflicts in a story?
One reason is complexity. A story with only external conflicts feels somewhat shallow to me, no matter how thorny the external conflict becomes. I always like to have the sense that the protagonist is somehow at odds with the external realities of his or her situation.
Another is unpredictability. I always like a story that is hard to predict, and as Janice notes, when you have external conflict driving the story in one direction, and internal conflict driving it in yet another, "crashing them together," the story's direction becomes more difficult to guess.
Both of these are reasons I've thought through before, but this week the problem hit me from another direction, and I came up with a third.
It feels more real.
Now, why would that be? Maybe because it's plausible to think that most people have internal issues they're working through. On the other hand, why would it be so appropriate to have the protagonist dealing with internal conflicts that directly contrast with the external ones? Wouldn't that feel more coincidental? To me it doesn't. After much thought, what I decided was this:
An internal conflict that contrasts with an external one lets the protagonist fight directly against the author.
As a reader, I know that the external conflict is controlled by the author - an outside force that throws things at our beloved protagonist. I don't feel the same way about conflict inside the character, for some reason, even though I know the author is just as much in control of the conflict inside the character as they are of the conflict outside. I think it's because a well-crafted character will feel like her motivations grow naturally from personality, experience and other factors. Thus, so long as the protagonist feels like a real person, then her struggle with internal conflict, while dealing with the events of the plot, will take on additional dimension. Not only will the protagonist's choices be unexpected, but she will take on that quality that I love to feel when writing a character - the feeling that she is acting on her own against me and against what I might (as the writer) want to make her do.
I urge you to think through internal conflict as well as external. It will really make a difference to your story.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Inherent Contradictions in Character
Everybody has inherent contradictions in their personality. The minor ones may barely be enough to make us hesitate in a decision. Major ones may lead to internal conflicts that haunt us constantly. Because this is something that is so terribly common in real people, it makes for very strong reactions when I read fiction.
I admit it: whenever I run across a character who appears to have no inherent contradictions, I tend to demote them on a subconscious level. If it's a minor character, I start thinking they're just window dressing. Even if it's a major character, I suddenly find them much less interesting. I hate to say it, but Baron Harkonnen of Dune was like this for me. Bad for bad's sake, ho hum. A being of pure evil is more of a fable-like creature, or devil archetype. I was glad that Sauron never took on human form in The Lord of the Rings, because as a being of pure evil he belonged where he was, offstage, trying to create conflicts in and among all the others.
I remember as a kid playing this game we called "Monsters" but what was really a free-form precursor to live action role-play. Each of us got to make a character, and each of us got one power and one weakness. People who refused to pick a weakness didn't get to play.
Now, I'm not saying every character in a story has to have a "weakness," per se - but contradictions are more complex than that.
Take Nya in Janice Hardy's The Shifter - Nya has a strong sense of family and solid morals, but her greatest power just happens to conflict directly with those morals. Janice turns that contradiction into a fabulous conflict when Nya has to use her power to save her sister.
Rulii in "Cold Words" depends for his social progress on his ability to fight and negotiate. However, neither of these skills will help him if he's ever seen to shiver with cold. He uses molri to stop his shivering - but his addiction to it has adverse effects on his personality, making it harder for him to fight and negotiate. In addition to which, if anyone finds out about his molri addiction, he'll be put to death. The base condition for his success puts him at risk of failure, which leads to more interesting conflicts.
Nekantor in "The Eminence's Match" is an evil ruler, and not just because he was brought up that way. He suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which serves as his own sort of internal contradiction. The disorder makes him endlessly demanding (a typical evil ruler characteristic). It gives him advantageous skills for managing political conflicts, but simultaneously wears him down and makes him vulnerable.
I picked these three characters because each one has a single characteristic which lies at the heart of their internal contradiction - Nya's shifting power, Rulii's drug dependency, and Nekantor's obsessive-compulsive disorder.
There are of course other ways you can approach this - giving a character a backstory which gives them internal conflict, for example. I think immediately of the character of Zuko in Avatar: the Last Airbender, who embodies the conflict between good and evil in part as a result of the conflict he's witnessed between his powerful father and the mother whom he loved best.
Whether good guy or bad guy, main character or subordinate character, your character will gain dimension from inherent contradictions. Keep an eye out for opportunities to develop them, because it will do wonders for your story.
I admit it: whenever I run across a character who appears to have no inherent contradictions, I tend to demote them on a subconscious level. If it's a minor character, I start thinking they're just window dressing. Even if it's a major character, I suddenly find them much less interesting. I hate to say it, but Baron Harkonnen of Dune was like this for me. Bad for bad's sake, ho hum. A being of pure evil is more of a fable-like creature, or devil archetype. I was glad that Sauron never took on human form in The Lord of the Rings, because as a being of pure evil he belonged where he was, offstage, trying to create conflicts in and among all the others.
I remember as a kid playing this game we called "Monsters" but what was really a free-form precursor to live action role-play. Each of us got to make a character, and each of us got one power and one weakness. People who refused to pick a weakness didn't get to play.
Now, I'm not saying every character in a story has to have a "weakness," per se - but contradictions are more complex than that.
Take Nya in Janice Hardy's The Shifter - Nya has a strong sense of family and solid morals, but her greatest power just happens to conflict directly with those morals. Janice turns that contradiction into a fabulous conflict when Nya has to use her power to save her sister.
Rulii in "Cold Words" depends for his social progress on his ability to fight and negotiate. However, neither of these skills will help him if he's ever seen to shiver with cold. He uses molri to stop his shivering - but his addiction to it has adverse effects on his personality, making it harder for him to fight and negotiate. In addition to which, if anyone finds out about his molri addiction, he'll be put to death. The base condition for his success puts him at risk of failure, which leads to more interesting conflicts.
Nekantor in "The Eminence's Match" is an evil ruler, and not just because he was brought up that way. He suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which serves as his own sort of internal contradiction. The disorder makes him endlessly demanding (a typical evil ruler characteristic). It gives him advantageous skills for managing political conflicts, but simultaneously wears him down and makes him vulnerable.
I picked these three characters because each one has a single characteristic which lies at the heart of their internal contradiction - Nya's shifting power, Rulii's drug dependency, and Nekantor's obsessive-compulsive disorder.
There are of course other ways you can approach this - giving a character a backstory which gives them internal conflict, for example. I think immediately of the character of Zuko in Avatar: the Last Airbender, who embodies the conflict between good and evil in part as a result of the conflict he's witnessed between his powerful father and the mother whom he loved best.
Whether good guy or bad guy, main character or subordinate character, your character will gain dimension from inherent contradictions. Keep an eye out for opportunities to develop them, because it will do wonders for your story.
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