One Way To Write A Suspense Novel
"Conflict"
By
Russ Heitz
Russ continues to enlighten us with this installment of deconstructing the suspense novel in order to construct one of your own.
No matter what you are writing about, no matter what genre you are working in, your story must have conflicts. If it doesn’t have conflicts, it’s not a story at all. What you have instead is a series of events that plod along in a manner that quickly becomes boring. Conflicts are the lifeblood of any story. They are especially important for suspense stories, regardless of length. It can be a 500 word flash fiction, a 5,000 word short story, or a 50,000 word novel. If it doesn’t have at least one major conflict and an assortment of minor conflicts, it isn’t a story.
But what exactly IS a conflict? It is anything that stands between the hero and his goal. It is anything that makes the path to that goal rough and rocky. It is anything that makes reaching that goal seem to be impossible, or at least very, very difficult.
There are basically two kinds of conflicts: internal conflicts and external conflicts. An internal conflict is any kind of problem, issue, weakness, or vulnerability that springs from the narrator himself.
Years ago, alcoholism was a common internal problem that many protagonists in mystery and suspense novels had to deal with. We’ve all read about the private eye who keeps a bottle of Jim Beam in the bottom drawer of his desk. And even though he hates himself for doing it, he can’t stop himself from taking a mighty gulp every now and then, especially when the tension mounts.
We’ve also read about cops or sheriffs or detectives who have a weakness for voluptuous women with flaming red hair. For female PIs the weakness might be broad-shouldered dudes who have cornflower blue eyes and a devilish dimpled grin. Either weakness can cause the protagonist to stumble, get sidetracked, or distracted from his primary goal, which is catching the villain, or villainess.
In addition to sex and booze, the number of other kinds of internal conflicts is almost limitless. Gambling. Jealousy. Greed. Fear. Stubborness. Drugs. Shame. Anger. All can become a stumbling block, an obstruction between our hero and his goal.
Click on this: next column
Russ Heitz
Author of:
Crosshairs
Dying In Deer Country
Sometimes several conflicts can be combined. This can make the obstruction even harder to overcome. Not only is our hero addicted to gambling, for instance. He also feels an overpowering shame about his gambling because the money he’s throwing away on poker should be going to a new medical treatment that could vastly improve his crippled brother’s life. This hero is also very fearful that his wife—who had threatened to leave him before because of gambling—will find out he’s still betting half of his paycheck every week on the horses. Combined obstacles like this will make it even harder for the protagonist to concentrate on his primary goal.
External conflicts also interfere with our hero’s attempts to solve the case or catch the bad guy. External conflicts can be anything in the real world, the outside world, the world in which our hero lives and struggles every day. External conflicts can be natural phenomena like a hurricane, a snow storm, an earthquake, or a flash flood. They can also be man-made obstructions or events that get in our hero’s way.
A subway motorman falls asleep at the controls of his car. His car and two other cars jump off the rails and smash into a concrete pillar. Many passengers are injured, several are killed. One of those injured passengers is our hero who was on his way to a meeting that would change the course of his investigation. But the meeting must be held precisely at noon. The subway crash happens at eleven-fifty, a mile away from the meeting place.
Other smaller but still obstructive conflicts should also be strewn in our hero’s path. He trips on one of his son’s toys and sprains an ankle. The battery of his car goes dead. A mail truck knocks out a traffic signal and the protagonist’s taxi is now stuck in a line of honking cars that stretches for two blocks.
Conflicts and their resolution are what keep the story moving forward. It is what keeps the reader turning the pages. And whenever one conflict is resolved, another must take its place.
Some conflicts can pop up at the opening of a new chapter and be resolved in a page or two, maybe even in a paragraph or two. Other conflicts might go on for several chapters. And still others, like the story’s primary conflict between the protagonist and his quarry, are ongoing throughout the book. Conflicts like that are usually resolved in the final pages.
The bottom line is this. To keep your story moving forward, give your hero a lot of problems to overcome. In fact, give him almost more problems than he can handle—with the emphasis on almost. Overcoming all his problems, after all, is what makes him the hero.
