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  • A delay. An event that simply delays a hero's or heroine's progress toward

  a goal is only an incident. If another character sidetracks the heroine to talk about an unrelated problem, and this discussion keeps her from confronting the hero, that's not conflict.

  • Failure to communicate. Misunderstanding each other, making wrong assumptions, jumping to conclusions, or wrongly judging one another are not illustrations of conflict, but of the hero and heroine's inability to make themselves clear.

  • The trouble-causing interference of another person. If the meddling of another person causes problems, the main characters can appear too passive to take charge of their own lives or stand up for themselves.

  • A main character's unwillingness to admit that the other person is attractive. Though romance characters attempt to fight off their attraction, conflict lies in the underlying reasons why it seems inappropriate or unwise to fall in love with this person.

  DETERMINING CHARACTER PROBLEMS

  What kind of problems your characters should face depends on a number of factors, including what sort of people they are. Not everybody will be bothered by the same events or issues. A difficulty one person would shrug off might paralyze someone else. The difficulty faced by your characters is particularly important and involving to them because of their past experiences or their personalities.

  The severity and intensity of the problems you give your characters also depends on the size of the book you're writing. The longer the story—the more pages you need to fill—the bigger the problem you need to create for your characters. A story involving the hunt for a serial killer will take more space

  and time than one in which the hero and heroine are figuring out who vandalized the local school.

  Whatever the problem is, it must strike readers as important. A problem that makes the readers roll their eyes and say "Get over it" isn't likely to drive an emotionally compelling story.

  The central difficulty your characters face must be one that can grow more complex and involved as the book continues. If all they do through the whole story is talk about the problem introduced in chapter one, the ending—when they finally settle on an answer that should have been apparent from the beginning—will be unsatisfying. If the supposed conflict arises because the characters misunderstand each other and they don't find out until the last chapter that there's no real problem after all, the story will bog down.

  SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM PROBLEMS

  In order to make conflict even more compelling, you need two problems— not just one.

  First, you need an initial situation that brings the couple together and keeps them together so they can get to know each other. This problem is known as the short-term problem, or the external conflict. It might be a job or a family situation—a difficulty outside themselves that they have to resolve.

  But you also need a deeper difficulty for each character. This deeper problem—called the long-term problem, or the internal conflict—is likely to be a past experience or a character flaw that makes it seem impossible for these two people to ever find happiness together.

  The Short-Term Problem

  The short-term problem is the difficulty or event that puts the couple in contact and causes their initial disagreements. It's often called the external conflict because it is usually caused by something or someone outside of the characters' control.

  Since the action of the story doesn't really get started until the hero and heroine are both present and the conflict is under way, this initial problem appears early in the book—often starting in the first few pages. At the latest, the rough outlines of the short-term problem are in place by the end of the first chapter.

  The short-term problem is often the event described in the back cover blurb. It is usually connected to the hook, the attention-getter that will cause readers to pick up the book.

  You can also think of the short-term problem as the difficulty or obstacle that makes the main characters interesting enough to be the subject of a story. What change does the heroine face that threatens her way of life, that will change her forever? What challenge must she confront? This difficulty is the character's short-term problem—the change, challenge, or threat she faces at or near the start of the story.

  The heroine's short-term problem is not simply the entrance of the hero into her life. He may appear because of the change or threat the short-term problem represents, but simply meeting him is not the problem.

  Each of the main characters will have a short-term problem—though some-limes there's just one short-term problem that affects both the hero and heroine:

  • They're assigned to work on a project together.

  • They're a divorced couple whose grown child is getting married and who insists they sit together at the wedding.

  • He's just bought her family's ancestral estate.

  • There's only one apartment available and they both need a place to live.

  If the short-term problem isn't actually shared, then the two individual troubles will be closely related. Perhaps they can help each other to solve their difficulties:

  • He needs a house and she's a real estate agent desperate for a commission.

  • She's trying to establish a new business; he needs special services from that business.

  • She's inherited a business but can't run it herself; he has the expertise to run it but not the money to buy it.

  • He needs a fiance to help him close a business deal, and she needs money to finish school.

  The more solid and down-to-earth the short-term problem is, the easier it will be to construct a plot. Though the character can have more than one problem going on at a time, it's most useful for story development if the short-term problem is confined to one clearly stated problem per character—either a single problem (hat involves them both or two related problems.

  New writers often come up with very amorphous initial conflicts, such as:

  • Neither of the characters wants to take the chance of trusting again.

  • He has to make her accept a truth she doesn't want to face.

  • They've each been deceived in the past and won't tolerate being lied to again.

  While those concepts can be developed into interesting problems, they're hard to grasp, hard to illustrate, and hard to write about.

  And they're actually long-term problems—character flaws or painful past experiences—rather than short-term ones. Lack of trust, unwillingness to corn-mit, and bad past relationships often play a big part in the characters' eventual development and growth, but they're hard to get a grip on when they're set up as the initial problem.

  If the characters' mutual problem is lack of trust, what do they talk about throughout the story? If they could actually discuss their difficulty in trusting, they'd be two-thirds of the way to solving the problem—but they can't trust each other enough to talk about it. Worse, without a certain amount of trust, there's not much else to talk about—and characters who have nothing to talk about are very hard to write about.

  If, on the other hand, your two characters are at odds about who gets custody of the kid, or how to handle the business they've inherited, or what they're going to do about their marriage of convenience after it's not convenient to be married anymore, then they have lots of stuff that they must talk about—and they have many opportunities to test, explore, and discover that the other is a person who can be trusted after all.

  Remember that a short-term problem is not a single event, so it can't be solved in a single step. "While rock climbing, Julie falls off a cliff" isn't a true short-term problem; she'll either be rescued or she'll die, and in either case the story is over.

  The real short-term problem is what got her onto the cliff in the first place. Is she trying to protect the precious papers she's carrying from the bad guy who's pursuing her? Is she learning to climb because the man she thinks she loves insists he won't marry her unless she shares his hobby of rock climb
ing? In either of these cases (or a hundred others), when she's rescued she still faces the problem that got her onto the cliff, plus she has the complications of a broken leg and a black eye and the hero—who rescued her—hanging around.

  Some additional examples of complex short-term problems include:

  • A hero who is offered a job in a different city, but a heroine who doesn't want to leave her challenging career to follow him.

  • A heroine who wants to have a baby, but a hero who thinks he'd be a terrible dad.

  • A heroine and hero who must work together despite a painful past relationship.

  The key to all of these problems is that they create conflict and tension between the two characters, and they all offer potential for increasing complexity and involvement.

  If your short-term problem isn't the sort that grows more complicated, you may be tempted to toss in unrelated obstacles in an attempt to create extra trouble for the characters. Your heroine might fall out of a tree, get hit by a car, and encounter a rattlesnake all in the first three chapters. But adding obstacles is not the same as developing a conflict, because one obstacle doesn't lead into or cause the next; they're just random happenings. Unless each event contributes to the advancement of the story and relates to all the other events in a meaningful sequence, the story is contrived.

  Another type of weak short-term problem is one in which there simply aren't enough honest differences of opinion or conflicting goals to keep the readers

  interested. Misunderstandings that can be solved with a few minutes of honest conversation fall into this category.

  In Beth Cornelison's long contemporary In Protective Custody, her hero, Max, is faced with his short-term problem when his injured sister asks him to hide her infant son from the grandparents who are trying to kidnap him.

  Gasping her beliefs one key word at a time, she argued breathlessly that if the Rial-tos got the baby when he was released from the hospital, they'd take him out of the country and fight her custody rights. Her impassioned pleas for her child, even as she fought for her own life, wrenched Max's emotions in knots.

  "You're only ... one I ... trust. Don't. ... let baby ... outta ... your sight. ..." Max placed his free hand over her lips. "Easy. Hush now. ... I won't let Joe's family get near your son. I promise."

  ... Relief softened the tension in her face. "You'll take m'baby? Hide?" ... What else could he do? The Rialtos didn't negotiate.

  This short-term conflict is important, it's emotional, and it has very high stakes. Add to it that Max knows nothing about babies, and you have a built-in role for the heroine—who happens to work in a day care center and can't stand to see a child in danger of being mistreated or neglected.

  The Long-Term Problem

  The long-term problem is something about the characters' personalities or pasts that makes it seem impossible for them to reach a happy ending together. It's often called the internal conflict because it's usually something inside the character—a character flaw or a reaction to a past experience—that makes it difficult for her to make a lifelong commitment to the other.

  Here's where lack of trust and reluctance to face unpleasant truths belong. With long-term conflicts as well as short-term ones, however, the more concrete the problem, the easier it will be to write the book. Rather than just saying that your character's problem is an inability to trust, look for the reason she can't trust.

  A guy who's been jilted will have trust issues. So will one who was abandoned as a child. But the effects of those two situations will be different, so the actions and attitudes of those two men will be different even though they share a basic problem. The long-term problem may be something that makes the character reluctant to fall in love at all:

  • She caught her previous fiance in bed with another woman.

  • His parents experienced a bitter divorce and he doesn't want to risk having it happen to him.

  • Everyone she's ever loved has died and she's afraid to try again.

  Or it may be something that makes the character reluctant to fall in love with this particular individual:

  • She's terrified of heights, and he's a mountain-climbing instructor.

  • She grew up in poverty because her father was a compulsive gambler, and the hero makes his living running a casino.

  • He rejected her once before, so she's afraid he'll do it again.

  Often the long-term problems aren't shared with the readers until fairly late in the story. Frequently that's because the character herself doesn't recognize her character flaw until the pain of the current situation forces her to reassess the choices she's made in the past and the impact those choices continue to have on her life.

  The readers may know right away that the heroine has been widowed but not find out until the last chapter that she's reluctant to love again, not because she adored her late husband, but because he was unfaithful to her.

  Even if the details aren't shared with the readers up front, however, the long-term problem will affect all of that character's actions. The hero may not talk about his parents' tragic marriage, but his experience will affect how he acts toward the heroine.

  Sometimes, in developing long-term problems for your characters, it's useful to ask, "Why are these people wrong for each other? Why is he the worst possible guy for her to fall in love with? Why is she the absolutely wrong woman for him?"

  If the heroine's ex-husband was a crooked cop, then the worst possible person for her to fall in love with is probably another cop. If the hero's parents tried to control his life, then the worst possible person for him to fall in love with may be a woman whose family members are always minding each other's business.

  Of course, in the long run these people aren't actually bad for each other, because the second cop isn't dishonest and the heroine's family isn't controlling. But it's only logical that, at first, the pairing appears to be a very bad combination; and it's also logical that it takes a while for the characters to figure out that things are different this time around.

  In Beth Cornelison's In Protective Custody, Max and the heroine, Laura, are on the run to protect Max's newborn nephew. But each of them has an internal reason why playing house, pretending to be a family, and falling in love are all very bad ideas. Max is still recuperating from a marriage that failed because he couldn't father children:

  It had been three years since he'd slept with a woman. More like six years since he'd made love for the sake of pleasure and sexual gratification.

  In the final years of his marriage, sex had been about ovulation and conception and maximizing windows of opportunity. ... Knowing he couldn't get a woman pregnant had struck a massive blow to his sense of masculinity.

  Meanwhile, Laura—the product of a long series of foster homes—wants nothing more than a family of her own.

  The desperate yearning for her own baby, a desire she'd suppressed for years, blossomed inside her and left a hollow ache in her soul. How could she ever have children of her own when she was scared to death of forming a relationship with a man? ... She could never risk that sort of betrayal and abandonment. Hadn't the difficult years, bouncing between foster homes, left enough scars?

  Is there anyone who could be worse for a woman who's longing for a family than a guy who can't give her a baby? Is there anyone who could be worse for a man with a shaky sense of masculinity than a woman who's skittish about trusting men at all?

  How the Short- and Long-Term Problems Fit Together

  A character's short-term and long-term problems need to be closely related, because the short-term problem focuses a spotlight on the long-term one. The immediate, life-altering threat or challenge (the short-term problem) is what forces the character to own up to and deal with the character flaw or the troublesome past experience (the long-term problem).

  The long-term problem is the reason a character finds a particular short-term problem so hard to face. When Beth Cornelison saddles her hero-who-can't-be-a-father and her h
eroine-who-wants-to-be-a-mom with an infant, it's like holding a magnifying glass on their long-term problems. A different sort of short-term problem would have had much less emotional appeal.

  When the immediate difficulty (the short-term problem or external conflict) the hero and heroine face is complicated by the kind of people they are (the character flaw or past experience that is the long-term problem or internal conflict), then you have the potential for a deeply emotional story that the readers can never forget.

  For instance, if an infant were dumped on the hero's doorstep with a note implying that the hero is the father, any heroine would be upset. But for a heroine who was raised in an orphanage and who has struggled with her own issues of abandonment, this situation would be particularly horrible. How could the hero not know about his baby? How could he have turned his back on his child?

  If the short-term problem is that your hero has suddenly lost all his money, perhaps the long-term one is that he's always bought whatever he wanted—and that, in his experience, others liked him mostly for what he could give them. Because he's always been able to buy everything, the loss of money is more difficult for him to hear than it would be for someone who was less materialistic to begin with.

  If the long-term problem is that the young widow refuses to deal with her loss and go on with her life, perhaps the short-term problem is that she is suddenly forced to move out of the home she shared with her husband. Nobody

  likes to lose a home, but because she has turned the house into a shrine for her late husband, having to move would be a bigger blow for her than it would be for other people.

  Developing Complementary Short- and Long-Term Problems

  In a romance novel, the long-term problem for each character is always, in essence, what tendency or flaw makes it difficult for the couple to end up together. In each story, however, the precise problem is different.

  Can Mary overcome the trauma of her family's poverty and accept that John is not really a free-spending gambler like her father?

  That's a long-term problem—the effect of her father's gambling on the family is a past experience that colors everything in Mary's life today. If you then establish that John owns the casino where Mary's father gambled, and begin the story with Mary trying to find a way to close it down or to convince John to return enough of her father's losses to allow her mother to get necessary medical treatment, then you have tension-producing short- and long-term problems that are closely related and intolerable for the character.