Start your writing with conflict if you want to guarantee sales, grab an agent or publisher, get paid a big advance. Your protagonist wants something and your antagonist wants to block it. If you want to be the publisher’s star-of-the-month, just hand out a strong dose of conflict right up front. Bold like. Then, they’re wrapped up in your story and it’s too late for them to escape. Readers, agents and publishers are going to consider writing with a strong dose of conflict as good fortune for their company. Readers will not want to put it down. The big boys just might pat you on the head and pay you a six-figure advance.
As conflict is so essential to good writing, whether it’s
fiction, or nonfiction, children’s books or memoir, it will aid your
attention-getting cause. I suggest you start practicing the art of writing
conflict right now for your openings. Read the examples and write your own:
· James walked in ready to crash and that’s when he saw the
monster. (Antagonist wants to take protagonist's calm time away)
· When I walked in, Emily had on my favourite blouse I was
going to wear tonight. She stood there trying to apologize for tearing it. (Antagonist
has blocked protagonist from wearing her favourite blouse tonight.)
· Jimmy worked ten hours at ten dollars an hour, and now
John was saying he was worthless, he wasn’t going to pay. (John wants to take
Jimmy’s earning away).
The sentences are off the top of my head and I don’t
consider them profound. But remember, the job is to make all of the big,
foreign sounding things simple. The sentences clearly show characters in
conflict. You can “feel” the tension. Your protagonist wants something and your
antagonist wants to take it away. Your antagonist may not even be a person. It
may be a rock against the door, keeping your protagonist from escaping the villain.
In the novel, The Mayor’s Wife Wore Sapphires, the mayor’s
young wife wants to change the image of an inner city by making it the Black
Camelot; her antagonists want to destroy the incubator idea that could make
that happen.
It is conflict that grabs the reader’s attention. Eighty
percent of all readers continue to read because of conflict. If there is no
conflict, the story lies flat on the page, it falls apart and loses the
reader’s interest. It’s yawning-kind-of dull.
When conflict is present, readers perk up and wade through bad syntax,
misspelled words, structure flaws, and bland dialogue to find out how the
conflict ends. I’m not suggesting that you neglect any part of the writing
craft, though. It’s just that conflict is one of the strongest elements of good
writing, and all too often we lose the reader’s attention because we neglect
that writing tool.
So, when you want to grab an editor, an agent, or a
publisher’s favour, just allow them to feast on gripping conflict from the very
first line and see your story rises through the slush pile to increased sales.
In the Mayor’s Wife Wore Sapphires, the story opens with two
unknown characters, whispering in what seems like a clandestine place. The host
balls the newspaper in rage and throws it on the dark wood table. We see that
it states: Council Upset Rumored. Now the guest thrust his head out of the
shadows and says that “In my country, his kind disappears without a trace.” He
wants to take out the mayor; his opposition wants to fix the situation before
the council meeting.
In The End Justifies The Means, the protagonist, Jalen, is
trying to sleep; his mother and father are having a violent argument. He wants
them to stop it; they get louder.
In the Color Purple, Celie’s baby is happy for giving birth
to her baby; the antagonist, her father, is taking the baby to give her away.
She is screaming, “No!” The father is already gone.
Agents and publishers are trained to recognize conflict, and
they look for it. So, take advantage of that now. Write conflict in your first
line for practice.
The end.
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