bickering a.k.a. conflict

[marycatelli]

An Orson Scott Card essay on conflict, particularly the forms he refers to as "complication" and "entertainment."

I do not think my meditations will be meaningful without you having read it first -- go ahead, I'll wait.  0:)

One thing he doesn't mention about these conflicts is that they can also be a means of characterization.  When the writer gives every character a distinct trait to full-blown personality (whether from a Greek god or by other means 0:), the characters will differ from each other.  (If not, if you have identical characters -- well, that's when I haul out the Greek gods technique.)  But putting them bickering with each other is one of the best ways to show the contrast.  If one guard is, like Hades, rather introverted and reclusive, and one is, like Hermes, full of talk to the point of slickness, keeping watch will be lively even before the hero shows up.

Conversely, having two character in a place, you can put them to bickering and thereby discover what characters they have.  Like assigning a trait, this can bring them quickly in the full life and showing up elsewhere.  However, one thing to watch is that how they acted at this particular point can dominate their character; you have to consider whether that situation, even though they were born there, was really atypical for them.

Plus, of course, you can use them for exposition.  If one character is jeering at another for fussing over surveillance equipment, you can slither in quite a bit (plus bridging conflict before the equipment picks up something).  If mercenaries argue about which lord to sign up with, they have every reason to thrash out what the lords are like.  Nothing like giving characters a motive  to talk about stuff they already know.

Comments

[superversive.livejournal.com]

If one guard is, like Hades, rather introverted and reclusive, and one is, like Hermes, full of talk to the point of slickness, keeping watch will be lively even before the hero shows up.

Brilliantly done with the two villains in Fargo, where the little slimy fellow (Steve Buscemi) keeps trying to make conversation with the big scary guy (Peter Stormare), but the only time the latter condescends to string four words together is to say, ‘We stop at pancakes house.’ Since, otherwise, their psychopathy is the sole visible driving force of both characters, it takes this bit of side conflict just to make them seem human. We thoroughly dislike them both, but we are not bored by them, because of that touch of common experience: everyone has had to deal with a garrulous bore who would not shut up, and with a taciturn lump who would not open up. Their mutual exasperation is their most appealing quality.

[marycatelli]

And -- it means they aren't redundant. Why two psychopaths? Because they are different. (Plus, of course, any plot reasons.)

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to think about this, because I think it may shed some light on the problems I'm having with a book I'm reading right now to review. I've been trying to articulate what I find wrong with it, why the training scenes seem to just draaaaaaaag to the point that it feels like a chore to slog through them and I want to yell at the author "come on, let's get to some real action." I understand intellectually why the training scenes need to be there, but the average reader is reading the book for entertainment, not to gain an appreciation for the hard work it takes to build unit cohesion, etc.

And the sad thing is that this author can write about military training in a way that engages the reader -- he proved it in his very first novel. It would never have been published if the scenes of the characters in boot camp dragged the way the specialist training chapters in this book do. It just seems that now that he's become one of the company's biggest sellers, he's not being edited as rigorously as he needs to insist that these kinds of scenes be made to work as entertaining fiction, and not become a chore for the reader to slog through (or perhaps skim through).

[marycatelli]

Dear me. If unit cohesion has to built, how is the lack of it manifested prior to that point?

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

By the previous non-existence of the unit. It's a mobilization story, in which people who were previously in civilian life are pulled into the military in response to a new and previously unknown threat (since it's science fiction, it's plausible that a previously unknown militaristic interstellar empire could suddenly invade the multi-star polity of the protagonists). Which is why the transformation of a collection of individuals into a cohesive unit that works together is an important part of the storyline -- but it needs to be told in a way that entertains the reader instead of being "I've suffered for my art, so now you will too."

[marycatelli]

And one way is to show them not working together -- otherwise it's not convincing that it's needed.

Plus, the bickering can keep us awake.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

" Nothing like giving characters a motive to talk about stuff they already know."

Plenty of examples of that on the Internet!

[marycatelli]

Ah -- but would you put that in a story?

I haven't read much of Card

[notr.livejournal.com]

but this essay gives me a little insight into my (very superficial) judgment of his character writing as seeming a little superficial to me. When he suggests that the friendly conflict in a buddy-cop or quarreling-lovers movie is not essential to the story, I have to wonder just what he thinks the story is. Is the central premise of the character interaction somehow just icing on a cake of object-driven plot?

(This snap judgment may, of course, be entirely wrong and based on faulty memory of what little of Card's I've read.)

Re: I haven't read much of Card

[marycatelli]

Kinda depends on what the story is, isn't it? 0:)

But the point of that bickering is to put off the climax by a plausible means.