7 Writer Tips: Characters in Conflict

When I was a student of writing at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, my friend there was a visual artist, mostly a painter.  I remember she got lost in the art store fingering the brushes and testing the tubes of color. She mooned over canvases of different textures. She took a clay-modeling class to learn to visualize objects in depth.  These were the tools of her trade that she examined and experimented with and combined and recombined to gain unique effects.

Writers have many tools for experimentation: inner thoughts, descriptions of sword fights, worlds-building, emotion in subtext, and many more including dialogue.

My playwriting students don’t see the need for the class exercises since they will not mount a production for the play.  I tell them that the skills they gain will inform their prose writing by putting the characters in the moment and in conflict.

And how is that done?

Playwrights remove all the exposition –the explaining by the writer – leaving only words and gestures of characters on a single set piece that doesn’t change for the camera angle. Prose writers get frustrated to the extreme because the voice they have developed is their own as the narrator. That voice is silenced in stage plays. “But how will the audience know?” my students ask.

A mother and young son sit in a restaurant booth with too much luggage pushed in beside them. The boy is eating pie and the mother has only coffee while she studies a roadmap spread on her side of the table. A Greyhound bus pulls by outside the window.

2.  Remember that there’s no single POV character

The mother counts out her bills and change. A man approaches to offer a hand-out from charity but is rebuffed from suspicion.  He takes insult and calls her a hard name. The son stands and kicks his shin. The waitress must stop the boy to keep order in her section.

3.  All characters have needs, fears, frustrations

The man is genuine in his charity without seeing the insult. The mother is over-protective. The son feels exposed and acts out.  The waitress fears her job is at risk.

Hesitation, indifference, fear, misdirected angry outbursts from old hurts can all play into the obstacles that the characters present to each other. Some back down; some don’t. Use the declarative voice and imperative demands. Short demanding sentences with some repeating of phrases for emphasis.  

5.  Silences in dialogue are good

Silences (hesitations while a character chooses) allow the audience to catch up with the characters and anticipate what may happen next. Keep them guessing with pacing and offering several possibilities for outcomes.

6. Action happens in real time

The audience is engaged with what happens next, not what happened when the generous man was a child himself. Don’t slow the action with long anecdotes of yester-year – unless you have the needed room trying to fill a seven-season series.

Not everybody gets what she wants, but everybody grows or learns something, if only to leave suffering people to their own thoughts.

My students who embrace the lessons of writing dialogue are often amazed at how the exercises push the writer into the immediacy of the scene, standing in the shoes of each character, to bring the moments alive for the writer — and the reader.

I add in-line edits for bad habits with dialogue too. We will look at each of these problems in later discussions.

• Too wordy
• Too formal
• Too sure-fire
• Too much explaining
• Too nice