Revising for Conflict: The Four C’s - Part 2
Conflict, we avoid it in real life, but we’re endlessly entertained by it in our fiction. Read on to find out how you can revise your novel to have high stakes and engaging conflict.
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In my last blog post, I talked about the Four C’s—a framework that you can use to revise your novel at a structural level.
First, a quick recap. The Four C’s are four critical elements of your story that need to be addressed in revision so that you can get your novel right. These four elements help you hook readers on page one and keep them flipping pages until they reach the end.
They are:
Conflict
Character
Cause/Effect
Change
In this blog post, I’m focusing on conflict. In fiction, conflict refers to anything that goes wrong in your story. Conflicts can include arguments or fights between two people, natural disasters, animal attacks, social upheavals, or anything else that gets in the way of your character achieving their story goal.
With that definition in mind, let’s dive in!
Revising for Conflict
We live for conflict. In our entertainment, that is.
Let’s look at reality television as an example. There are no reality shows about people with normal, happy lives.
Instead, we have The Real Housewives (and an infinite number of spin-offs), Love is Blind, Below Deck, Ice Road Truckers, 90-Day Fiancé, and many, many more shows that all focus on messy relationships, difficult occupations, and other forms of can’t-look-away drama. Even nature documentaries play up the drama as we watch animals fight through life-and-death scenarios.
No matter how much we struggle to avoid conflict in our own lives, we are drawn to conflict in the stories we read, watch, and hear.
No matter the genre, stories revolve around problems, whether romantic, supernatural, existential, or mundanely annoying. Stories in which everything goes right are boring. They feel like they’re going nowhere or like they don’t matter. Even stories that have big, earth-shattering conflicts can fall short if the conflicts if they conflicts feel unimportant to the readers.
To create conflict that delivers, make sure you can answer “yes” to these four questions:
Question #1: Are the stakes of your novel death?
According to James Scott Bell in Conflict & Suspense, the stakes of your novel should always be death. If you’re writing romance and wondering how this advice could possibly apply to your story, stay with me for a second. The stakes don’t have to be literal death to fit this criteria. Bell refers to three distinct types of “death” that your characters can face: physical (a.k.a. literal death), psychological, or professional. At least one of the three needs to be on table for your characters.
Here’s what that might look like in different genres:
In contemporary YA, the main character may risk embarrassment in front of their peers. If they don’t succeed, it will feel like they’ve died because they won’t ever want to show their face at school again and they will never recover their social standing. {Psychological Death]
In a romance, messing up the relationship could mean the protagonist will spend the rest of their life alone, always thinking about the “one that got away”. Okay, maybe that’s not literally what would happen, but it should feel that way to them and to readers. [Psychological Death]
In an urban fantasy, failing to stop the impending werewolf war could put everyone the protagonist loves in danger of being killed. [Physical Death]
In a legal drama, taking on the wrong client could lead your protagonist down the wrong path, a path that could lead to them getting disbarred and losing their dream career. [Professional Death]
I could go on and on. The point is that high stakes are relative. There is no one right way to create high stakes. There is only what makes sense for your characters and your story.
The key is to figure out what is most important to your characters and threaten to take it away permanently. Give your character a reason to fight like hell to defend that thing. Otherwise, your conflict and your story will fall flat.
Question #2: Do the secondary conflicts in your novel matter?
We’ve already established that the stakes of your main conflict need to be death. This question addresses the smaller obstacles and issues that pop up along the way. No matter how small the conflict, it has to matter to the rest of the story.
Look at the smaller conflicts in your novel.
Do they make the main conflict of the story worse?
Do they aggravate your main character’s flaw, forcing them one step closer toward change?
Does that small conflict allow a side character to demonstrate a special skill that will come back to save the day at the climax?
Something else?
There are multiple ways to make your secondary conflicts purposeful. Just make sure that these secondary conflicts are enhancing the storyline in some way. If they aren’t, they don’t deserve a place in your novel.
Question #3: Have you taken each conflict as far as it can go?
As a developmental editor, I read a lot of manuscripts by newer writers. One of the biggest issues I see in these stories are conflicts that don’t go far enough. Conflicts pop up with tons of potential, then peter out just as quickly.
Usually, one of two things happens:
The conflict disappears without resolution.
The conflict is solved by a third party (i.e. not the main character) or with very minimal effort from the main character.
The result is a conflict that feels aimless or a missed opportunity to test your characters and increase the tension in your story.
Instead, try taking things just a little bit further. Add one additional layer of complication. Find a way to make things a little bit worse before they get better. Delay the resolution of that conflict to create uncertainty that will keep your readers turning pages late to find out whether your character survives or not.
Writers often grow attached to their characters—that’s only natural—you pulled them out of your soul and created them, after all! Sometimes, the love we have for our characters can make it difficult for us to hurt them. When it comes to conflict, fight the urge to protect your characters. Let them suffer. They’ll come out better for it on the other side and so will your story.
Question #4: Do your characters actively create OR solve their own problems?
In addition to letting your characters suffer, you also need to make your characters work. When it comes to conflict, your characters should have agency. That means their decisions should impact the story in both positive and negative ways.
First, make sure that your characters cause some of their own problems.
Let a decision backfire on them. Have them choose a path that leads to spectacular failure. Have them trust the wrong person or kick the hornet’s nest or walk down the dark alley. All of these mistakes and little moments of stress will make for a stronger, more engaging story.
Second, make sure your characters actively solve their own problems.
While it might be nice to have a knight in shining armor swoop in to save your character, don’t let other characters solve their problems all the time. Your character may not succeed all the time, but they should at least try to create their own solutions to problems.
You can even combine these two rules by having your character attempt a solution that backfires, thus creating a new problem for them to deal with later in the story.
The bottom line: don’t let your protagonist sit around waiting for bad things to happen. Get them moving, acting, doing, and engaging your readers.
Alright, that’s a wrap on conflict! With these four questions, you now have the tools you need to analyze the conflict in your novel and make sure you’ve taken it far enough to create a satisfying story for your readers.
In my next blog post, I’m addressing the next “C” in the Four C’s Framework: Character.
In the meantime, happy writing!
FYI: This post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something, we may earn a commission. For more information, click here and thanks, as always, for your support!
