HENRY PEREZ

Conflict! Conflict! Everywhere!

HENRY PEREZ is the author of the critically acclaimed thrillers Killing Red and Mourn the Living, a number-one Amazon Kindle bestseller. His latest book is Raise the Dead. He has worked as a newspaper reporter for more than a decade and as a television and video producer before that. Born in Cuba, he immigrated to the United States at a young age, and lives in the Chicago area with his family.

 

 

When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.

—RAYMOND CHANDLER

 

 

 

You’ve written thirty to forty thousand words, and so far your manuscript is filled with complications and possibilities, but now you’ve hit a wall, and the narrative is beginning to slow, or possibly even stop. This can happen to new and veteran writers alike, often somewhere in the second act.

When it does occur, the cause is almost always the same—conflict—or rather the lack of it. This is a common problem for new writers who’ve spent a great deal of time polishing their core story, only to realize that no matter how strong it may be, there’s just not enough there to sustain an entire novel. This can also signify that the story, and quite possibly its characters, are not layered and developed enough to engage a reader for four to six hundred pages. You need to add conflict.

There are two basic ways to remedy this. The first is to place new obstacles in the path of the protagonist. Doing so can give your story a spark, but if it’s done too often or in a heavy-handed way, it can feel contrived and antagonize your readers. The other is to add a subplot or two to complicate your protagonist’s life, and hamper their efforts.

The best option is a combination of the two, in which the subplot generates those complications that become obstacles for the protagonist. In this way, the problems that arise will seem more organic.

In my first thriller, Killing Red, newspaper reporter Alex Chapa must track down a woman who has been marked for death before her would-be killer finds her. That is the core plot that drives the story and sends Chapa off on his primary mission. But there are also two significant subplots. The first concerns Chapa’s struggle to stay connected to his young daughter, from whom his ex-wife is keeping him. The second involves his ongoing issues at work, in an industry that is dying a painful death.

There are several points in each of my books where the main character’s everyday life issues get in the way of his achieving the primary goal. These complications, and how my protagonist responds to them, help to build a more layered character, one who is not solely defined by the task at hand, while also helping to keep the story moving.

Secondary problems and the conflict they create can also be useful in revealing the character’s backstory in a way that avoids clunky exposition or page-long info dumps—those annoying, seemingly endless paragraphs that bring the story to a screeching stop while the author tells the reader everything they need to know about a character.

EXERCISE

On more than one occasion, I’ve heard struggling writers say that they don’t know how to add conflict to a plot that, in their minds, is already fully formed. They have created a terrific setup, know what their resolution will be, but have suddenly run out of dots to connect between one and the other. This exercise is designed to spark your imagination while using real-world situations and problems to add conflict to your story.

STEP 1

Keep a journal of your daily activities, focusing specifically on the conflicts you experience every day. I don’t mean just disagreements with your significant other or arguments with a neighbor (though those would be included), but all kinds of conflict, big or small. Anything that gets in the way of what you want or need to do.

Did you have to rush to work because you overslept this morning? That’s conflict. Did you have to stop and think about whether to use a credit or debit card to pay for gas, because one is maxed out and there’s not much cash left on the other? That’s conflict. Write it down. Did you hear an office rumor that several jobs, perhaps even yours, may be lost to budget cuts? Write that down, too.

Just about all of us experience various forms of conflict every day. And while it may, hopefully, not be as large-scale or as life-threatening as the situations that fuel crime novels, these everyday complications can form the root of those larger problems.

Keep the journal for at least a week or two, perhaps as long as a month. Do not hesitate to write something down because you believe it may be too trivial. There’s no reason to edit yourself in this process.

STEP 2

Now go back through your journal entries, pick out at least a half-dozen, and embellish them. Let your imagination go wild as you create mini-scenarios to explain the possible reasons behind each bit of conflict.

Maybe you overslept that morning last week because the strange noises coming from your next-door neighbor’s house kept you awake all night. And now you realize that though you’ve seen the wife rushing to and from her car since then, you haven’t seen the husband.

Perhaps the reason you have limited funds left in your account is that you loaned a few hundred dollars to your deadbeat cousin. That was two months ago, and you haven’t heard from him since. And why does it seem there’s more money gone from your account than the amount you lent him?

Could be you know the reason for those budget cuts everyone’s worried about might have something to do with that young woman you saw getting into your boss’s car a few weeks ago. And you recall the look of desperation on the boss’s face when you walked into his office last week and caught him in the middle of a hushed telephone conversation.

Everyday issues have now been transformed into a neighbor who might have a murderous streak, a shady cousin who may be stealing from you, and a philandering boss who could be the victim of a blackmail scheme.

Do this with as many of your journal entries as you wish. And have fun with it.

STEP 3

Now let’s apply this same approach to your protagonist. For the moment, don’t concern yourself with what you already have on the page, in an outline, or in your head. Instead, let’s go back to a month before your story begins.

What was a typical day like for your protagonist? What conflicts did they have to deal with? Which ones were resolved, and which lingered? Here’s the key question: Which conflicts can you develop into subplots that can then be weaved into your narrative?

Creating a backstory for everyday events is also a useful approach to develop complications for, and give greater depth to, antagonists and to secondary characters as well.

You may be wondering whether you can skip the personal journal portion and go straight into your character’s background. Of course you can. But using your own life experience as a template will often yield more useful and more inventive results.