Monday, September 7, 2020

Conflict: Too Easy? To Hard?

 Conflict is the driving force in your novel. It is the thing the readers are working through with your characters as they attempt to not only solve the conflict, but figure out how the characters are going to get through it as well. This is also, both the characters internal conflicts as well as the external conflict that has probably driven the characters together. Unfortunately, it is the conflict that I often come back to as a reason why I end up rejecting an author. 

For many authors, they have created a conflict that is simply too easy to solve. In this case, the author has really only created a complication and not a significant conflict. Think of sitcoms. The things the characters face can easily be solved with someone just saying something. These are those things where someone just overheard someone else saying and misinterpreted it. When we have situations like this, the readers are just disappointed. Why are we even reading this story?

On the opposite end are the conflicts readers create that are simply impossible without an act of the gods to solve it. The characters have nothing within their "tool kits" to fix the problem, the lack the intellectual ability to solve it, or it is, as I said, simply impossible. When we have things like this, authors often resort to that omniscient god like solution. For example, the characters are in a situation where legally and financially they are going to lose everything, say a company. The end is near. And then one of them plays the lottery and wins $25 Billion dollars. or someone has an uncle who happens to die and leaves the company to them because of a secret dealing that no one knew about. 

Not realistic.

Not satisfying.

Look, we wanted the characters to solve this, not some dead uncle. 

You have to be like the baby bear in Goldilocks. Not too hard. Not too soft.

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