Writing Interpersonal Conflict

Crushing your characters’ most important self-concepts (Hit them where it hurts!)


Stories revolve around conflict. Without it, there is nothing to struggle for, to strive against; if Frodo had no trouble just wandering off to Mordor to dispose of the ring, how interesting could Tolkien have kept The Lord of the Rings? There has to be something to work with, to make the reader cheer for your protagonists, and urge them on despite all the obstacles in their path.

There are five classical conflicts accepted by literary theorists, though in modern times man vs machine has become the sixth. The other five are:

Man vs. Himself
Man vs. Man
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. the Supernatural
Man vs. Society.

Interpersonal conflict revolves around the first two – man vs. himself and man vs. man.

A friend of mine has the unfortunate talent of being able, in the heat of an argument, to say exactly the worst possible thing she could say to whoever she is arguing with to make it really hurt. Whatever that person holds as their most important self-concept is where she’ll hit. Now, in real life, this is not much fun, to put it mildly. But in writing, you can use something like that to create major conflict between characters.

First, think – what is the most important self-belief your character holds? Is the fact that she knows she’s pretty enough sometimes to comfort her? Does he pride himself on being there for his family when they need him? And so – what is the absolute worst thing that could be said to them, to flay that open and make it sting?

What if someone turned around to him and listed times when he had failed his family, voice dripping with disdain and venom? How will he react?

If you can get your character to fighting with himself, then it’s going to take a lot to pull them out of it. Where does that take your story?

Interesting, isn’t it?

Naming Characters

Names are powerful things. There’s a reason the old legends say that you can control someone if you know their true name – just try to ignore it when somebody unexpectedly yells your name on the street from behind you. You immediately turn around to see if they’re shouting at you. It’s almost a hardwired response.

Names are evocative. They can be icons of perfection – just saying ‘Princess Diana’ has instant effect, and though we know – thank you, newspapers – about a lot of the things she didn’t do right, her name is still a strong positive name, one that – in the first instant you hear it said – has good attachments. Maybe after a moment you’ll remember some of the other things. But beauty and kindness and charisma are what strike you first.

What if I say ‘Adolf Hitler’? If names had no power, then why would you never consider calling your child that? (I would hope not, anyway.)

Names are important. So it’s important that you name your characters well. I remember reading a fantasy novel once where the romantic hero was called Kevin. Instantly my brain went, ‘Okay, no. Just no.’ And it took a lot of persuading on the part of the author – mostly by being a kick-ass writer – to make me accept that as being his name. No offence to anyone called Kevin, but it didn’t fit the character.

Similarly, if you wanted to name your strong, ethical, intelligent female character, would you really call her Britney, or Tiffany? Unless, of course, you’re deliberately using a name with different stereotypes attached to it for effect, you wouldn’t. Just as you would choose particular types of names for older people, or younger people. The name has to fit.

It drives me crazy when I can’t think of a name for a character, because normally I just know. It’s like serendipity. The name just drops into my mind and it’s perfect. But when that doesn’t happen – and it does sometimes – it drives me mad, because I’m always convinced that there’s a better name out there that I just haven’t thought of.

If I have to go looking for a name, I hit the baby name websites. I try and pick a good one from Google, one with the facility to search for both beginning letters and/or meanings, and, if I can find it, one that will filter by name origin, so I can tie it in to my character’s ethnic background. Then I trawl through the results until I’ve got a shortlist of names I like. Then I have to make up my mind. This can take some time.

How do you find names for your characters? Do you just pluck them out of thin air, or do you go looking? I’d love to know.

Designing Your Characters

(Or, how not to end up with Princess Froufrou-Trixiebell the Fourteenth and her shining purple eyes)

Small aside: I've noticed that on the livejournal feed for this blog the link near the bottom of this article is messing up the HTML. There's nothing wrong with the HTML on this end, so I can't fix it. Sorry.

Fiction involves a certain amount of suspension of disbelief as a part of its very nature. We cut out all the ums and ahs of real conversation, unless they illustrate a character’s indecision and uncertainty, along with all the repetition you get from real people – further to that, when was the last time you read a book where it showed you that the character went to the bathroom anywhere near as often as is humanly necessary, or even (most often, and with good reason) at all? I think we can all agree that we don’t really want to read about every potty break, every time somebody felt it necessary to repeat themselves ad infinitum for no reason, each individual falling asleep and waking up the next day.

But that can be taken too far, and nowhere so much as in character design. How many people do you know who are truly, from every hair on their heads to everything they do, absolutely perfect? Not a single flaw? Nobody, of course, and that’s probably a good thing, because admit it, they would be absolutely nauseating. So why do so many writers feel it necessary to make their characters so perfect that it’s impossible to suspend our disbelief, when we’re so prepared to do it?

There’s a term for it in fandom – Mary Sue, or Gary Stu, fiction. The author has written the character she would want to be in the story, and so of course she is wonderful in every way. Everybody loves Mary Sue, passionately and without reservation, and not only is she the most powerful in all the land she is also the most beautiful. Is there no limit to her perfection? She never puts a foot wrong, never says the wrong thing, never gets a spot on her alabaster skin. It’s sickening. On top of that, she usually has a ridiculously overblown name, like Rainbow Blossom, or Aramantha Felicity Softfeather. All in all, it’s the ultimate turn-off, and back-buttons are hit on browsers all over the internet. The only difference with books is that you can, in fact, burn them and get the visceral pleasure of seeing the horror inflicted on you turned back on the book, as well as taking out the wasted £5.99 from its paperback hide.

Believable characters have flaws, both physical and personal. Maybe his nose is a little crooked, or her belly a little soft. Even making somebody short can be enough, sometimes. I’m not saying make your characters hideous, but make them feasible. My main character in my WIP, Halley, is has a lot of self-confidence and trust issues, to the point of a fault. She’s pretty but not gorgeous – her figure is average, her hair is brown instead of platinum blonde.

That’s an important point, by the way. I’ve deliberately chosen for her to be a brunette, not because brunette is unattractive – far from it, and I’m brunette myself – but because it’s the second most common hair colour in humans after black. Some writers will have a million and one redheads, and it’s just not that common a hair colour outside of the Weasley family tree. (In fact, it’s the least common colour of all.) After a while it stops being a way to differentiate a character and starts being OTT. The same can be applied to eyes, though less so. Unless, of course, you give your character purple eyes for no good reason. If you’ve got a reason – it marks them as a Mage, maybe, or it’s a distinguishing feature of the royal family – fine, that’s great, go ahead. But don’t do it ‘just because’.

One of my favourite book series, “Resenting the Hero” and “The Hero Strikes Back” by Moira J. Moore, has a main character who has red hair, but is neither curvy nor petite, so in fact has a very average and not-terribly-remarkable figure, and describes herself as needing a lot of work to make herself worth looking at. Admittedly this is from first-person, so we can assume she might not be totally correct, but the point is that she has chosen a description that works to make us believe her as a real person. It doesn’t extend to her super-hot hero, of course, but there’s a reason he’s that hot, so it works.

Personality-wise, everyone has something wrong with them, as it were. Maybe the character is obsessive-compulsive, or always says the wrong thing, or is prejudiced against one thing or another. Just give them something to make them real, to make them sympathetic, because somebody who’s perfect most definitely isn’t.

Gail Gaymer Martin has done some very good posts over on her blog lately about character design. It’s worth checking out here, anyway – she gives some very good advice.

The best thing you can do when creating characters is to think about them. What makes them tick, what makes them real people. How would they react to various situations? If you’re the sort of person who finds that writing exercises help you to understand people and situations in your work better, try thinking of some really stressful scenarios and writing them out with your characters. How do they behave? Where do they go wrong, and where do they triumph over their own faults? And how damn good do they look in the mirror, without having been sculpted by a plastic surgeon (I would assume? Okay, though, here’s a random factoid for you from one of my lecturers – plastic surgery always leaves scars. Always. It’s just that the really good surgeons know how to hide them – under your eyebrow, in your armpit, etc. So don’t go relying on plastic surgery for a plotline unless you’ve got some futuristic face-changing tech. For facelifts? They cut your skin at the hairline, peel your face half off and do the surgery, then reattach it, so that the scar is hidden in your hair. I’m not even kidding. Creepy much? I think you get my point.)

The more believable the character, the more believable the story is, as a general rule. Why make things difficult for yourself from the get-go when you don’t have to?