Conflict: Raise the Stakes

Welcome back to Write Better Right Now. I have been talking about conflict, which is why it is difficult for characters to achieve their goals. You want a lot of conflict in your story in order to keep the reader's attention and keep things exciting.

If you have just things coasting along easily, the character is trying things and they're succeeding and they're reaching their intermediary goals, you're going to have this flat line and that's kind of boring.

But where it gets tricky is that if things are at a high level of excitement, a lot of tension, but they're still the same all the way across, you still have that flat line.

You actually want a lot of ups and downs. You want to build tension, have the characters, and thus the reader, get excited or scared or feeling like they're failing—Then you have a success. Ups and downs keeps things more exciting. The reader has a little bit of a mental break when things are good, and then they can get wound up again.

But overall, you want a line that increases as the story goes along. It gets more dramatic as the story progresses.

In the book Scene and Structure, Jack M. Bickham said, “Well-planned scenes end with disasters that tighten the noose around the lead character's neck. They make things worse, not better. They eliminate hoped-for avenues of progress. They increase the lead character's worry, sense of possible failure, and desperation, so that in all these ways, the main character in a novel of 400 pages will be far worse shape by page 200 than he seemed to be at the outset.

So things get worse as the book goes on. The main character actually seems to be moving farther away from their goal rather than just making steady progress toward it. That's where you get a lot of drama.