Category Archives: writer

February 5, 2012 · 3:13 pm

Ten Rules for Writing, and a bonus rule

Pathway

Rules are like a pathway and can be helpful.

Despite the writer W. Somerset Maugham’s admonition that there are three rules for writing, but unfortunately nobody knows them, there continue to be plenty of offerings from an ever-growing number of people. Here is yet another set of rules provided by European bestselling author Glenn Meade at the Knoxville Writers’ Guild on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2012. Commentary and fleshing out provided by the blog editor, David E. Booker. A partial list of Meade’s novels are at the end of this entry. Use these writing rules as you see fit.

1) First, action, then reaction

Your protagonist needs to be taking action, not just reacting to the events of the story / novel / film / play. Of course, there is always one major exception to this. That is at the very beginning. At that point, the protagonist is usually reacting to what is referred to as the inciting incident. For example, think of the first Star Wars movie. Luke Skywalker is “stuck” on his uncle’s farm in an out-of-the-way part of the galaxy. He longs for something else, but feels like he will never get it. Then storm troopers arrive, ransack the farm, kill his uncle and aunt, and as it puts it: “There is nothing for me here now.” So, to borrow from another story about a young boy: he lights out for the territories. So, at the start of your story, it is usually the antagonist that takes the first action, to which the protagonist reacts, and then begins action to restore the balance upset by the antagonist.

2) Showing is better than telling

It usually works better if you show how a character feels about another one rather than telling. If boy loves his dog, how does he show it? By feeding the dog, playing with it, letting it sleep with him (especially if his parents object), or in spite of having allergies which the dog dander might aggravate.

3) Every scene has three senses

Photo of three leaves

Every scene has three senses.

There is more than meets the eye on the printed page. How do the flowers smell? What does the rain feel like? Even, how does a particular place make the protagonist feel? Does going back to a childhood home make him feel sad or happy, angry or melancholic? Smells can evoke emotions, so describe how something smells, then maybe describe how the protagonist reacts to the smell, if it is important for him or her to do.

4) If you have two heroines, make one blond and the other brunette

Give your main characters distinguishing physical characteristics, or some sort of distinguishing characteristics. Certainly, hair color is a very easy characteristic, and can help you, the author, tell your characters apart, regardless of their sex.

5) Likeable protagonist

Readers want to at the very least empathize with your protagonist and her situation and the easiest way to do this is to make her likeable. That doesn’t meant she should be perfect. Perfection won’t help your character.

There are other ways to make your protagonist empathetic. One, make her the best at whatever she does. Two, put her in extreme peril early on in the story. This could be mental or physical, though physical might be easier to show. Three, make her the underdog. Almost everybody has a soft spot for the underdog, even a smart alecky one. Four, use humor. Nothing like humor to break the ice and break the barrier between protagonist and reader.

6) Dialogue is people talking

It is not, as it is sometimes referred to: “As you know, Fred” exchanging of information. It is not one chemist telling another chemist something they should both already know about chemical reactions.

It is also not rambling speech that goes nowhere, or tails off, or full of the “ahs” and “ohs” and other verbal ticks we all have.

Dialogue

Dialogue is not as easy as it sounds.

No real-life conversation would work verbatim in a story. Dialogue is “heighten” speech. It gives the impression of everyday speech, but with “half the fat” so to say.

Also, the best dialogue is often not about what the dialogue is about. Or, to quote Bob McKee, from his writing book Story: “If the scene is about what the scene is about, then the scene is dead.” In short, dialogue is often as much about what is NOT said as what is said.

All of the above is part of what makes dialogue tough to master.

7) Speech ties to speech acts

This can be overdone, both in the number of times used and as a way to sneak in adverbs and adjectives. Example: “Hey,” Bob said, waving his hand to get her attention. He straightened his tie as his date approached. This lets the reader know that Bob might be a little nervous, that this could be his first date with the woman. What you don’t want to do is go: “Hey,” Bob said, waving his hand excitedly to get her attention. He straightened his tie nervously as she approached.

Speech ties to speech acts is also the simple matter of if there is an action that follows somebody speaking, the action is that of the person speaking. Example: “Hey,” Bob said. She waved her hand to get his attention. Unless Bob is short for Bobbie is short for Roberta and “Bob” is how she is usually referred to and the reader knows this, the above is one person speaking followed by another person doing an action.

8) Paragraphs are for point of view

Within a paragraph, stick to one character’s point of view. If you need to switch points of view, start a new paragraph.

9) Scenes have a certain movement

Each scene or chapter has its own small arc to it. A chapter might have several small arcs to them. Within that arc, there is movement: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. That movement is generally from a negatively charge beginning to a positively charged ending, or from a positive beginning to a negative ending.

Example, if in scene A, your protagonist is trying to get to a friend’s house, the end of that scene will be when he gets there or doesn’t. But along the way, he shouldn’t stop to buy a Mother’s Day card for his mother, a sweet role for his breakfast, stop and read the newspaper (whatever that is), or anything else that interrupts the flow. Certainly, the protagonist can run into obstacles, but the obstacles should be in importance to the scene and story. For example, if the protagonist getting to his friends house is a minor part of the story, it should not be weighed down with major obstacles. The only possible exception to this is if you are writing a humorous story, the obstacles can be out of proportion, but they should still be weighed against the overall flow of the story. After all, a humorous story with one scene that is much more funny than the rest of the story will only make the rest of the story seem flat.

10) Stick to the rules

If a character has a characteristic on page one, she should still have that characteristic on page 10 and throughout the story.

11) Upon occasion, don’t be afraid to break the rules

Know the rules, but also know when to bend or even break them. God won’t smite you and sometimes it’s necessary. But it should not be the first thing you try and like seasoning in a soup often works best when done in small amounts. A little salt can go a long.

Writing books to consider:
Stein on Writing by Sol Stein
Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass
Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee.

Some novels by Glenn Meade:
The Second Messiah: a Thriller
Snow Wolf
Resurrection Day
Web of Deceit
The Devil’s Disciple.

Young writer at work

Young writer at work.

Some novels by the web log editor:
Not one. Not yet, anyway. Working on it.

Disclaimer: any errors are mine. Somebody has to own them.

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January 14, 2012 · 12:44 pm

The Writing Life: The point of the long and winding sentence

Pico Iyer says writing longer phrases is a way to protest the speed of information bites people are subjected to each day.

By Pico Iyer, Special to the Los Angeles Times

January 8, 2012

“Your sentences are so long,” said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn’t quite mean it as a compliment. The copy editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes on-screen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn’t want to break up my sentences or put less material in every one. Both responses couldn’t have been kinder or more considered, but what my friend and my colleague may not have sensed was this: I’m using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment.

When I began writing for a living, my feeling was that my job was to give the reader something vivid, quick and concrete that she couldn’t get in any other form; a writer was an information-gathering machine, I thought, and especially as a journalist, my job was to go out into the world and gather details, moments, impressions as visual and immediate as TV. Facts were what we needed most. And if you watched the world closely enough, I believed (and still do), you could begin to see what it would do next, just as you can with a sibling or a friend; Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie aren’t mystics, but they can tell us what the world is going to do tomorrow because they follow it so attentively.

Yet nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the “gaps,” as Annie Dillard calls them — that don’t show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker.

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).

“There was a little stoop of humility,” Alan Hollinghurst writes in a sentence I’ve chosen almost at random from his recent novel “The Stranger’s Child,” “as she passed through the door, into the larger but darker library beyond, a hint of frailty, an affectation of bearing more than her fifty-nine years, a slight bewildered totter among the grandeur that her daughter now had to pretend to take for granted.” You may notice — though you don’t have to — that “humility” has rather quickly elided into “affectation,” and the point of view has shifted by the end of the sentence, and the physical movement through the rooms accompanies a gradual inner movement that progresses through four parallel clauses, each of which, though legato, suggests a slightly different take on things.

Many a reader will have no time for this; William Gass or Sir Thomas Browne may seem long-winded, the equivalent of driving from L.A. to San Francisco by way of Death Valley, Tijuana and the Sierras. And a highly skilled writer, a Hemingway or James Salter, can get plenty of shading and suggestion into even the shortest and straightest of sentences. But too often nowadays our writing is telegraphic as a way of keeping our thinking simplistic, our feeling slogan-crude. The short sentence is the domain of uninflected talk-radio rants and shouting heads on TV who feel that qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity (and not, as it truly is, integrity’s greatest adornment).

If we continue along this road, whole areas of feeling and cognition and experience will be lost to us. We will not be able to read one another very well if we can’t read Proust’s labyrinthine sentences, admitting us to those half-lighted realms where memory blurs into imagination, and we hide from the person we care for or punish the thing that we love. And how can we feel the layers, the sprawl, the many-sidedness of Istanbul in all its crowding amplitude without the 700-word sentence, transcribing its features, that Orhan Pamuk offered in tribute to his lifelong love?

To pick up a book is, ideally, to enter a world of intimacy and continuity; the best volumes usher us into a larger universe, a more spacious state of mind akin to the one I feel when hearing Bach (or Sigur Rós) or watching a Terrence Malick film. I cherish Thomas Pynchon’s prose (in “Mason & Dixon,” say), not just because it’s beautiful, but because his long, impeccable sentences take me, with each clause, further from the normal and the predictable, and deeper into dimensions I hadn’t dared to contemplate. I can’t get enough of Philip Roth because the energy and the complication of his sentences, at his best, pull me into a furious debate in which I see a mind alive, self-questioning, wildly controlled in its engagement with the world. His is a prose that banishes all simplicities while never letting go of passion.

Not every fashioner of many-comma’d sentences works for every one of us — I happen to find Henry James unreadable, his fussily unfolding clauses less a reflection of his noticing everything than of his inability to make up his mind or bring anything to closure: a kind of mental stutter. But the promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can’t get your mind, or most of your words, around.

When I read the great exemplar of this, Herman Melville — and when I feel the building tension as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” swells with clause after biblical clause of all the things people of his skin color cannot do — I feel as if I’m stepping out of the crowded, overlighted fluorescent culture of my local convenience store and being taken up to a very high place from which I can see across time and space, in myself and in the world. It’s as if I’ve been rescued, for a moment, from the jostle and rush of the 405 Freeway and led back to something inside me that has room for certainty and doubt at once.

Watch Dillard light up and rise up and ease down as she finds, near the end of her 1974 book “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” “a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair. Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world’s rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down.”

I love books; I read and write them for the same reason I love to talk with a friend for 10 hours, not 10 minutes (let alone, as is the case with the average Web page, 10 seconds). The longer our talk goes, ideally, the less I feel pushed and bullied into the unbreathing boxes of black and white, Republican or Democrat, us or them. The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves from the machine-like world of bullet points and the inhumanity of ballot-box yeas or nays.

There’ll always be a place for the short sentence, and no one could thrill more than I to the eerie incantations of DeLillo, building up menace with each reiterated note, or the compressed wisdom of a Wilde; it’s the elegant conciseness of their phrases that allow us to carry around the ideas of an Emerson (or Lao Tzu) as if they were commandments or proverbs of universal application.

But we’ve got shortness and speed up the wazoo these days; what I long for is something that will sustain me and stretch me till something snaps, take me so far beyond a simple clause or a single formulation that suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself in a place that feels as spacious and strange as life itself.

The long sentence opens the very doors that a short sentence simply slams shut. Though the sentence I sent my copy editor was as short as possible. No.

Iyer is the author, most recently, of “The Man Within My Head,” published this month.

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

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January 10, 2012 · 9:34 pm

Epic fight to put awesome in its place

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-holland-20120106,0,2183189.column

Trying to drive a stake through a conversational staple

British-born poet and journalist John Tottenham says that saying ‘awesome’ in his presence is like ‘waving a crucifix in a vampire’s face.’

Gale Holland, Los Angeles Times

January 6, 2012

“Awesome,” according to one dictionary of slang, is “something Americans use to describe everything.”

The linguistic overkill horrifies John Tottenham. So the British-born L.A. poet, painter and journalist has launched what he calls the Campaign to Stamp Out Awesome, or CPSOA.

“Saying the word in my presence is like waving a crucifix in a vampire’s face,” Tottenham says. “It’s boiled down to one catchall superlative that’s completely meaningless.”

I met with Tottenham last week at CSPOA headquarters inside Stories, the Echo Park bookstore he is trying to turn into the world’s first awesome-free zone. “Ground zero for a quiet revolution,” Tottenham calls the cafe and shop, where he has a day job. The group’s manifesto is posted at the counter, and no-awesome stickers with the usual diagonal slash are on sale, with T-shirts to follow, Tottenham said.

“It’s a matter of semantic satiation,” Tottenham told me. “Sometimes I’m sitting in a crowd and I hold my breath until someone says it. Seldom do I die of asphyxiation as a result.”

There’s no arguing with Tottenham’s premise that “awesome” is seen and heard everywhere, from the sign on the tchotchke aisle at the 99-cent store to the lips of supermarket cashiers. UC Santa Barbara linguist Mary Bucholtz says that from its dusky origins, perhaps in 1970s surfer slang, it’s spread to Australia and English-speaking India.

But Tottenham failed to convince me it’s a bad thing. What’s wrong with bathing everything in the sunny light of superlativity? I asked him.

I admire the “awesome” generation’s ability to talk at all with only a few words at its disposal.

The economy of expression is poetic, I argued. The conversations go like this:

Caller 1: Dude?

Caller 2: Dude.

Caller 1: Whadup?

Caller 2: Chillin.

Caller 1: Awesome. Want to kick it?

Caller 2: I’m down.

Caller 1: Now?

Caller 2: Awesome. I’m out.

Caller 1: Peace.

Somewhere, DEA agents are holed up in a hotel room listening to this for hours on end and going out of their minds.

But there’s a subtle genius in language that has been wiped clean of almost all content. Nobody has to risk expressing a real thought or sentiment. Bland affirmation is an impenetrable defense. No one can object. As Syme, the language specialist in charge of shrinking the dictionary in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” put it, “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

Tottenham was having none of it.

“The bogus sense of positivity has a demoralizing effect,” he said. “People resent it if you don’t say you’re doing great.”

Bucholtz, the linguist, pointed out that every generation thinks the next one is wrecking the English language. Tottenham, an old punk rocker who fled dreary old England for the Wild West, gave that point some consideration. But in the end, he rejected it.

“I hated it when I was young, ” Tottenham said. “It is the most irritating word.”

Tottenham said his linguistic cleansing movement has mostly been embraced, at least within “the two-block radius of Echo Park where I am a minor celebrity.” One Stories customer bristled when he tried to get her to honor the awesome ban, though.

“But I’m from California,” she said. “I can’t help it.”

As we chatted, a man in a cowboy shirt came up to congratulate Tottenham on his recent performance of an anti-awesome screed at a local gallery.

“That was awesome,” the man said, grinning widely.

Tottenham smiled back sourly.

“I know I’m setting myself up as a target to be churlishly bombarded by people who use the word to irritate me,” Tottenham said. “People who know about the campaign and want to further express their lack of verbal ingenuity….They do it because they think it’s witty, which it isn’t.”

“But I’m willing to take it on the nose in an honorable cause,” he said.

Tottenham already is looking toward other cliches to conquer.

“Other words will be addressed once we get rid of awesome,” Tottenham promises. “‘It’s all good.’ That’s definitely crying out to be done.”

But as with all social engineering movements, Tottenham has hit unexpected obstacles. As we chatted, we walked to a nearby cafe that had posted his no-awesome sticker in the window. The waitress stopped by to say the restaurant had been forced to take the sign down.

“The staff vetoed it,” she said. “They’re afraid people are going to think the restaurant is not awesome.”

gale.holland@latimes.com

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

[Blog editor’s note: The title of this blog entry is mine, and is done a bit tongue-in-cheek. I approve this poet’s efforts, as all writers should. Poor and inadequate as they are at times, words are all we have to build our stories, poems, essays, novels, and other word constructs for examining life and who we are. Words are our tools and they deserve our respect.]

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January 2, 2012 · 3:12 pm

Writer’s Block

Writer’s Block, n.: The place where a writer lives with his/her imaginary friends. Something like the neighborhood of make believe.

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September 16, 2011 · 10:06 pm

Self-mutating

Sel-protrait of sorts

Captured on pixels and only on pixels. Don't try this at home, unless you want to be silly.

Who says you need a professional photography to get a good portrait photo? suitable for framing, for use on resumes, or to simply impress a date on your dating web site page or personal blog. And for the mere price of three easy installments of $39.95 each, I will teach you the same tricks and tips that I know.

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September 11, 2011 · 2:57 pm

Building a better story: Tension

In the last installment, I said there was a difference between conflict and tension. Conflict, as Bob McKey pointed out, is the gap between expectation and result. The gap can be small, such as being overcharged a dime or great, such as losing a loved one when you thought he would survive.

The best way to explain tension is to refer to a small book on writing by the writer and editor Algis Budrys, Lithuanian for “Gordon John Sentry, more or less.” His book, Writing to The Point: A complete guide to selling fiction is only 64 pages long, and may be hard to get. But this Strunk and White-sized guide to writing is worth your time (and it even covers manuscript formatting).

For Gordon John Sentry, more or less, a story consists of seven parts: 1) a character 2) in a context with a 3) problem, who 4) makes an intelligent attempt to solve the problem and 5) fails, tries a second time and fails, tries a third time and finally 6) succeeds or completely fails, and whose actions are then 7) validated by another character in the story.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? That is the allure of telling a good story. But the execution is often more difficult, for writer as well as story character. Step 4 – 6 above is where in a story you find tension. The key is that the character makes an intelligent attempt and fails. With increased knowledge, he or she tries again, and fails. The increased knowledge increases the stakes in the attempt and thus increases the tension. After all, it should succeed, right? Then there is a third and final attempt. This is, in essence, all or nothing, so the tension should be at its highest here.

Grimm reaper and man

Tension, while often confused with conflict, is not the same thing.

Tension, then, is something that builds over the life of the story, fueled by and feeding into the conflict. A well known love story may provide the clearest example. Romeo and Juliet loved each other. Their families, however, were adversaries. Romeo and Juliet attempted to find a way to manifest their love in the midst of this conflict, each time failing until each makes one last effort that leads to both their deaths. In this example, the tension builds in opposition to the conflict, which is fairly clever if you think about, and because of that opposition, the conflict works to heighten the tension.

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September 10, 2011 · 5:54 pm

The Kibitzer and the Kidd, parts 1 and 2

888888

The Cough Drop Kidd and the Kibitzer rode into town. It would have been in a cloud of mentholated dust, but because it was raining, it was in a slosh of mud and a cough laced with glycol. They were almost out of cough drops and the Kidd was not happy.

“Kibitzer,” he said between sniffles, “go get us some.”

“I’m only here to watch,” the Kibitzer said, “and for the popcorn.”

The Cough Drop Kidd pulled his six-shooter and pointed it at the head of Kibitzer’s horse. “You wanna observe riding or walking?”
The Kibitzer’s horse’s ears flicked back and forth as if trying drive away a fly. The Kibitzer blinked a couple times and finally said, “I’ll go watch the apothecary mix up a batch.”

The Kidd nodded and raised the barrel of his pistol skyward. “Be quick about it. I’ll be in the saloon getting a hot toddy. A little honey will help my throat.”

888888

The Kidd entered the saloon. It was beat up ol’ place with chairs that had legs that didn’t match and a bar rail so wobbly it had a hand printed sign hanging from it that said: Donut touch. That means u.

The floor creaked to the point he was sure it was talking to him, saying something like, “Donut go there.” But he paid it no heed as he stepped toward the bar. This part of the Wild Side was full of things that spoke when not spoken to. Some said it was haints. Others said it was spirits. And some even said it was bottled spirits. Even though he was wet all over, the Kidd was parched.

“Hey, dandy boy, wipe your feet. What do you think this is, your corral?”

A few people looked his way and a couple of folks chuckled, but most kept doing the mopping and card playing and lying they were doing before.

The woman yelling at him was tall and a little on the heavy side, which meant this business had been good to her. The Kidd liked that about her. She was standing behind the bar, so thus far what he liked was only from about the waist up. She was wiping out a glass.

When he was up near her, he whispered, “I’ll have a hot toddy.” His voice was about gone.

“Well, I do declare,” she said, “the dandy wants a hot toddy.”

“A what?” somebody at the bar asked. His back was to the Kidd, so the Kidd didn’t know what he looked like.

“A toddy. A hot toddy.” She said the words again and winked back at the Kidd. He wasn’t sure if it was a friendly gesture, or a twitch.

The man turned around. His face was as scuffed as the floor and as beaten up as the chairs. Tobacco juice ran out of one of the corners of his mouth. One eye was lazy and one earlobe looked as though a coyote had chewed on it.

“Dandy,” the man said, spitting on the floor, “we don’t serve your kind.”

It was that moment that the saloon went quiet, except for the gentle swinging of the saloon doors and the floor saying, “Told you.”
“Package,” a voice said. “Package for a Cough Drop Kidd. Is there a Cough Drop Kidd here?”

All eyes turned toward the Kidd.

The Kidd turned toward the delivery boy in his granny spectacles, gray cap with a black bill, and clothes too starched and too new to have been worn much in this town.

“One D or two?” the Kidd asked, lightening still flashing just outside the saloon doors.

“Ah,” the delivery boy looked down at the package, “two.”

“Good. The Kid with one D works the lower territory south of the divide. We call the divide the D-M-D for short.”

“And for long?” the boy asked.

“His D ain’t that long,” some cowboy shouted.

The others in the saloon chuckled.

The delivery boy turned bright red, dropped the package, and skedaddled out of the saloon, getting immediately struck by a lightning bolt. The box hit the floor and broke along one of its sides. It bulged open, spewing books across the hardwood, every last one of them different, one of each and each one about vampires.

“So, you a blood sucker, Dandy?” The floor-faced man stepped away from the bar and his hand rattled toward his holster. He had rattlesnake rattles in a band around his wrist and his hand twitched slightly.

The Kidd glanced around. The card games had stopped. The lying had stopped. Even the moping had stopped. The woman behind the bar twitched him another smile and then ducked down behind it. She moved quick for a big woman.

This town is cursed, thought the Kidd. But he didn’t have much time to think anything else. The floor-faced man’s hand was at the top of his holster.

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September 9, 2011 · 4:22 pm

If love the answer

If love the answer,
do I know the right question?
Silence enfolds me.

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June 12, 2011 · 12:30 pm

Writing Tip: Conflict

In the last installment of this feature, I put forth a little paradigm about writing that started off with “Drama is conflict….” But what is conflict? Is it open hostilities between two armies? It can be. It is the harsh words a husband has for a wife? It can be that, too. It is dealing with opposing desires or wants, such as deciding between love and honor? Yes, it can be that as well.

But all three examples listed above and in a host of others there is a common thread, something unspoken, and as important as words are, it is often the unspoken or unwritten element that defines a scene in a story and sometimes the story itself.

As I said in the previous article, I learned the paradigm that begins “Drama is conflict …” in 1993. Some twelve years later, and even though I wasn’t looking, I learned from author, screen writer, and teacher Steven Womack a definition of conflict that adds depth and, dare I say, meaning to the word conflict and the entire paradigm. He credits learning it from Bob McKey, a script doctor. McKey has made a living and a small fortune fixing other people’s scripts though he often doesn’t get screen credit for it. All scripts need conflict; conflict drives the story forward. How will the protagonist react? What will she do? But conflict is not car chases, gun battles, or galaxies spiraling out of control. Conflict, McKey said, is the gap between expectation and result. That’s it.

Pen chasing man

Conflict can be a small thing, or a large one, real or imagined.

Conflict can be as small as being overcharged a dime and how your protagonist reacts or as great as losing a battle when the protagonist fought hard to win. In both examples, there is a gap between expectations and results. How your protagonist deals with that gap and what steps he takes to close it are what drives a story forward, whether the story is a script, a short story, or a novel. The obstacles in the way preventing the protagonist from easily closing that gap are what are called tension, but that is a discussion for another time.

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