Controlling Intensity · 4:07pm Oct 7th, 2015
Invisible Ink
Conflict of Interest: Controlling Intensity
Even stories with very large-scale conflicts between great many people usually focus on a small number of characters whose individual struggles tend to take centre stage. We see this in everything from Lord of the Rings to The Matrix. But all characters are most certainly not equal in this regard. The Nebuchadnezzar had a crew of nine, but both Apoc and Switch are little more than warm bodies to flesh scenes out and die ignominiously when the time comes.
The bottom line is that abstract conflicts are rarely a basis for a story – abstract conflicts are a setting. Most war stories aren’t about the war, but as a setting it constitutes an oppressive force that helps to unify the goals and motivations of the characters and the obstacles they will face. Time and time again I ask an author what the core conflict for their story is, but the answer they give me is only the setting.
So, let me try and be a bit more specific about how these ideas differ. ‘There is a war on’ is such a low-intensity conflict that it is essentially background noise. It’s a setting because on its own it is entirely impersonal. There are no motivations tied to it and there are no inherent obstacles – war only exists as an abstract concept in the first place, thus it requires the perception of minds to make anything of it. A specific character in a war, however, can create a much stronger conflict, since it can be assigned individual goals, motivations, and obstacles. It can be a core conflict if it provides the impetus for a whole story, or it can be a passing occurrence that crops up or resolves as the story progresses. Now take multiple characters with goals and motivations and set the in a war and you have multiple sources of conflict competing and interacting with each other, which is about where you want to be, narratively speaking.
This it probably obvious to many of you, but I feel it’s important to actually demonstrate it on a basic level. The wider the scope, the more vague it is and thus the less intense it tends to be. The more focused it is, and the more personal to one or more characters, the more intense the conflict is likely to be.
You could similarly frame it as the intimacy of the conflict. A single overarching conflict in a story might be vague and undefined in some places, while actively meddling in the antagonist’s lives in others. Clearly, where it is directly present, the intensity of the conflict will be higher. It’s also worth noting that off-screen conflicts, as well as conflicts generated by non-focus characters, are perfectly valid conflicts to a story, but to varying degrees, are reduced by their lack of intimacy.
Where I think people often lose the plot, however, is in the comparison of one conflict’s intensity with another. A conflict that could lead to death is not necessarily more intense than one that means missing out on the last slice of cake. The intensity of the conflict should arise out of the clash between obstacle and goal, and this is entirely dependent on the characters in focus – otherwise we could never have war-comedies like Carry On England (you may assume that my Britishness means I love the Carry On films, but you’d be wrong). If you’re thinking that this, too, is obvious, I can only say that I have seen this facet of conflict misunderstood far too many times: having a literal conflict as background does not mean you have any narrative conflict.
Lastly (for this overview, at least), we can also pay attention to immediacy. Action scenes tend to have the highest inherent conflict because they are happening in narrative ‘real time’, while conflicts that exist only as potential obstacles in the future have little inherent conflict – which is why they are suitable as settings and can be considered background noise.
With an understanding of these factors, an author can fine-tune the intensity of conflicts to establish good pacing in a story. It is important to keep in mind what intensity of conflict is required from a scene while writing it, but again, I often see people matching the intensity to the plot rather than the other way around. You don’t have to plot your pacing in advance, but merely being aware of exactly how high it is at any point can help an author to make sure it varies from scene to scene to keep a reader invested and rested – which I will no doubt speak more about when the topic of pacing, specifically, comes up. Awareness is the first step towards mastery.
Whenever you get stuck writing a scene, take a step back and clearly define what your current conflicts are, and what degree of intensity your are aiming for, to see if that greases any wheels. It’s very easy to be blind to the big picture when you’re focusing on a very small part of it. Moreover, the degree, and type, of intensity should affect word choice and sentence structure, which is exactly what I’m going to talk about next.
Your characters’ motivations are the language through which your story speaks – they are the lubricant that keeps the never-ending engine of conflict turning. Master this, and you can control the intensity of your writing with ease.
On Friday, I will finish this little delve into conflict by tying this all together with ideas on how to actually write this stuff.
-Scott ‘Inquisitor’ Mence
Very true words. The instilled in me the desire to write a scene in which Pinkie Pie has to fight her way through a crowd to get to the last piece of cake that Bulk Biceps is just about to take. Sorry, I can't say serious stuff right now. The image is too strong.