Today, Fiona Harper talks about the must-have ingredient of
romantic fiction – internal conflict – and why you need to put your shotgun
away and get your sniper rifle out when it comes to delivering it to your
characters’ doorstep.
Two types of conflict
If you’ve been writing romance for more than five minutes
you’ll know that a good romance needs conflict. Not fighting and bickering
(please, no!), but obstacles that stop your hero and heroine getting together.
And conflict can come from two different sources: external conflict, obstacles that
come from outside the characters, or internal conflict, where the obstacles come from within the characters
themselves.
As romance writers, we want to use strong external conflict
to drive the story, but the main focus should really be on the internal
conflict. But how do we inject that into our stories? What is it and where does
it come from? How can we maximise it to create a really gripping story?
From the inside out…
The clue is in the title. Internal conflict needs to come from inside
your characters, which means you need to know what they’re emotional ‘hot
buttons’ are – you know what I mean, that issue or situation that just drives
them crazy, causes them the deepest pain or makes them the most afraid. This might seem obvious, but many aspiring romance writers don't delve deep enough when it comes to internal conflict and keep everything on the surface.
The sore spot in your
character’s soul
I think of these emotional triggers as being like a bruise –
the skin is tender and painful when you touch it, but it’s not just the surface
that’s the problem. The damage goes deeper than that. You know what it’s like
if you’ve got a nasty bruise… If someone accidentally touches it, you flinch
away, launching into self-protection mode. And so it should be with our
characters. It’s your heroine’s job to find that sore spot of your hero’s and
prod it hard (even if she’s not aware she’s doing it at the time) and vice versa.
Conflict = emotion
Conflict causes emotion – both in the reader and in the
character. When your protagonists are experiencing powerful emotion, your
readers will too. And the source of their conflict often stems from a painful
event in their past. As I mentioned last month, I’ve been reading Understanding
Emotion by Paul Ekman, and he says something very interesting about emotional
triggers and past experience. It’s not
new information – a lot of us will recognise the truth in what he says, in both
our own lives and in our writing – but I’m finding looking at it from a
scientific perspective rather than an artistic one both useful and
enlightening.
The emotion that
lingers too long
Ekman says that emotional responses are often only supposed
to last for a short time, like the pounding of your heart when you miss your
footing at the top of the stairs. Adrenaline shoots through your system, making
you grab for the hand rail before you even think about it, and you are saved
from plunging down the stairs. Within a minute your heart rate subsides and
your breathing returns to normal. That reflex fear response has done its job.
However, sometimes we stay in an emotional state much longer
than we should do, and even if we logically know we should calm down, we can’t
seem to switch the emotion off. Ekman says this usually happens with learned
emotional triggers, rather than the universal ones (like the fear spike at the
top of the stairs). We get an
elongated emotional reaction because the current emotional situation reminds us
of a similar one in the past. The closer the relation of this incident to that
other traumatic incident, the stronger and more long lasting the emotional
response will be, and the interesting bit is that even if you understand you
are being emotional when you have no need to be, you still may not be able to
curtail that emotion.
For example, let’s think up a scenario:
Sarah is out shopping with a small child she is looking
after for someone else. She pauses to look at a pair of shoes in the department
store, and when she looks round the child is gone. The normal response would be
a flash of panic. This helps, getting the adrenalin flowing, making Sarah
alert. She quickly searches around and finds the child hiding behind a display
stand a few feet away. The fear quickly subsides, and they carry on with their
shopping trip. Sarah was able to deal with her fear and handle the situation
calmly and rationally.
But what if Sarah had looked after a niece or a nephew on a
previous occasion and that time the child had run away, fallen over and had
concussion, resulting in hospital treatment? What if it has caused a big ugly
scene and her sister still hasn’t fully forgiven her? Let’s look at the same
situation again…
This time Sarah might have a much stronger emotional
reaction the moment she couldn’t see the child. If the fear was too intense,
she might not be able to get her emotions under control, meaning she panics
instead of hunting calmly for the child who is only a few feet away. Even once
the child is spotted it might take much longer for her to calm down. She might even
feel shaky and out of sorts for the rest of the day. The similarity of this
incident to a previous highly-charged emotional situation has meant the fear
was exaggerated and way out of proportion to the present day event, and Sarah couldn’t
get a grip on herself, even though she tried to.
Why is this important knowledge for a writer? Let me ask you
this: which scenario was more interesting to read about, even in my dry recap
of events? Which situation engaged you more emotionally? Also, in the second
scenario, Sarah was well and truly out of her comfort zone. This is exactly
what we want as writers. When our protagonists feel comfortable they don’t want
to move, they don’t want to act, they see no need to change. A character happily in their comfort zone creates very little conflict. There’s no
sense of emotion and danger for the reader if we know Sarah can calmly handle the situation and keep on shopping.
Match your characters’
backstory to the present-day conflict
This is why we need to know our characters well, and why we
need to build their backstories so they relate to the present-day conflicts
they are facing, especially when it comes to the romance. I know this seems
obvious, but you wouldn’t believe how many manuscripts I’ve critiqued by
aspiring writers who don’t make this connection.
If your hero has been
betrayed by a woman in the past and now has trust issues, don’t pair him up
with Miss Reliable who is never going to be disloyal. Give him a heroine who
has the power to push that sore spot of his, and push it hard! Or give him
someone who he believes he can count on, but when the crucial moment comes she
lets him down (and make sure you give her good motivation, if you’re going to
redeem her later).
Aim for the heart
When you know your characters’ hot emotional buttons, when
you know their heart issues, you can do away with what I call the ‘shotgun’
approach to conflict – throwing all sorts of little issues at them in an effort
to keep the tension up. When you know where their weak spots are, what’s really
going to wound them to the core, you can pick up your sniper rifle. One
penetrating bullet is all it’s going to take, and it’s going to do far more
damage than those pesky little pellets.
So dig deep and tailor-make your characters’ past so it
feeds into the present-day conflict. Once you’ve done that, all you need to do
is get your character in your crosshairs, then aim for the heart!
Fiona's latest book, The Guy To Be Seen With, is part of Harlequin's brand new line, KISS, and is out now.
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