Conflict: The Engine of Storytelling

By Olivia Salter

Conflict is the heart and soul of any compelling narrative. It's the driving force that propels characters to action, forces them to make difficult choices, and ultimately shapes the story's outcome. Without conflict, a story is merely a series of events, lacking the tension and excitement that captivate readers.

Types of Conflict

There are two primary types of conflict:

• Internal Conflict: This occurs within a character's mind. It arises from internal struggles, such as moral dilemmas, personal fears, or self-doubt. For example, a character might grapple with a decision between love and duty or confront their own insecurities.
• External Conflict: This involves a character struggling against an outside force. It can take many forms, including:
• Person vs. Person: A character clashes with another individual, such as a rival, enemy, or romantic interest.
• Person vs. Nature: A character faces challenges posed by the natural world, such as a storm, a wild animal, or a harsh environment.
• Person vs. Society: A character rebels against societal norms, expectations, or laws.
• Person vs. Technology: A character struggles against technological advancements or artificial intelligence.
• Person vs. Supernatural: A character confronts supernatural beings or forces.

The Role of Conflict in Storytelling

Conflict serves several crucial functions in storytelling:

• Character Development: Conflict pushes characters to their limits, revealing their strengths, weaknesses, and true nature.
• Plot Progression: Conflict drives the narrative forward, creating a sense of urgency and anticipation.
• Emotional Engagement: Conflict evokes strong emotions in readers, such as suspense, fear, anger, and joy.
• Thematic Exploration: Conflict can be used to explore deeper themes, such as the nature of good and evil, the consequences of choices, or the human condition.

By understanding the different types of conflict and their role in storytelling, writers can create more engaging and impactful narratives.

Would you like to explore specific examples of conflict from famous works of literature or film? Or perhaps you'd like to delve deeper into how to create compelling conflict in your own writing?

Writing Craft: When You Can’t Finish Your Story by Randy Ingermanson | Advanced Fiction Writing

When You Can’t Finish Your Story

by Randy Ingermanson

Advanced Fiction Writing

When you can’t seem to finish the first draft of your story, that’s a sign something’s wrong. You could try to power through to the end, but if you try that repeatedly and you still can’t finish, then the story is probably broken.

In that case, you have two choices:

• Throw it away and start over.
• Fix it.

Usually, fixing a story is a lot more economical than throwing it away. If the story can’t be fixed, then yes, go ahead and throw it away. But most stories can be fixed. It’s a matter of asking the right questions. Below are a few that may be useful.

Did the Story Have a Plan?

Many writers don’t plan before they start writing. They just write without a plan, and a story emerges.

That’s the theory, anyway, and it very often works beautifully. But in practice, sometimes a coherent story doesn’t emerge. It happens.

When it happens, when you can’t make a story emerge, it may be time to take drastic action. You may need to make a plan, based on the story you have so far. One way to do this is to use the Flowsnake Method that I talked about in the April issue of this e-zine. The Flowsnake Method essentially works my Snowflake Method backward, starting from the story and ending up with a one-sentence summary. And a plan for the story.

Depending on how complicated your story is, using the Flowsnake Method will take you anywhere from a few hours to a couple of weeks. That’s a big time investment, but if you’re stuck, it’s a price you might be willing to pay to get unstuck.

Did the Story Follow the Plan?

You may have started with a plan, but that’s no guarantee of success.

I’m pretty sure no author ever made a plan for a story and followed it exactly. I never have, and I don’t expect I ever will.

Things change as you write the story. Some characters walk on the stage and say things you weren’t expecting. Others just don’t play as big a role as you had expected. Sometimes, small story strands turn into major plot threads. Or the story veers in a direction you couldn’t have foreseen.

Your story evolves. That’s not bad, that’s good. Usually, that evolution takes you to a better place than the story you had planned, and all is well.

But sometimes your story evolves in a way that paints you into a corner. When you’re painted in a corner, you can either walk over wet paint or break a wall. Either way, you need to change from evolution to revolution.

What that means is you need to replan your story. That shouldn’t be hard. You planned the story once, so you ought to be able to plan it again.

But before you make the new plan, write down what’s wrong with the actual story you wrote. And keep that in front of you when you write up the new plan.

Was the Original Plan Bad?

Sometimes, you wrote something pretty close to what you originally planned, but it turned out to be a bad plan.

That can be hard to swallow. You like to think you’re a good writer. It’s tough to admit you made a bad plan. But if the story isn’t working, it’s better to own up to your mistake than to stick to a plan that was bad.

Read the plan again, looking for fundamental errors:

• Can you summarize your storyline in one sentence?
• How does your protagonist change in the story?
• What is the theme of the story?
• Are the storyline and the character arc and the theme in sync with each other?

If you look long enough, you should be able to spot the cracks in your original plan that prevented you from writing the story you wanted.

The hard part is to make a new plan. You may need to break large parts of the story. You might need to throw away some scenes. Or some characters. Or rethink who those characters are.

Do what you need to do to make a plan that actually works. Then get back in gear and follow the new plan.

It’s helpful to remember that writing isn’t some mindless paint-by-numbers thing.

Writing is Hard

If writing was easy, everyone would write a bestseller, and nobody would earn any money, because there would be too many great stories available to buy and not enough buyers to buy them all.

So be glad writing is hard. But that means you’ll often get stuck. Everyone gets stuck. When you’re stuck, you don’t want to hear that writing is hard and everyone gets stuck, but it’s what you need to hear. Because the first step on the road to getting unstuck is to recognize that you’re stuck.

Homework:

• Is your current story stuck in the first draft?
• Did it have a plan to begin with?
• If it had a plan, did you drift so far away from it that you need a new plan?
• If you followed the plan, was it a bad plan to begin with?

---

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

More Advanced Fiction Writing

Writing Craft: Backstory and Front-Story by Randy Ingermanson | Advanced Fiction Writing

 

Backstory and Front-Story

by Randy Ingermanson

Advanced Fiction Writing

Every character in your novel has a past, a present, and a future.

The future is fuzzy and out of focus, but your characters think they know what they want their future to be. 

The future that your protagonist wants is called the “story goal” for your novel, and it drives your story forward.

Your front-story is whatever is happening right now as your protagonist tries desperately to reach his or her story goal. 

The front-story is the reason your reader reads. Without a front-story, your novel is dead in the swamp. As much as possible, you need to always keep your front-story on center stage in your novel.

But your character has a past also—all the things that happened in their life that made them the person they are today. That past is called “backstory.”  

Backstory Matters

Backstory matters a lot. Nobody just walks onto the stage of you

r story without a past. Everybody carries baggage. The older you get, the more baggage you carry, unless you learn to let go. And nobody ever lets go of it all.

But backstory can be a story-killer. Reading a novel that begins with a huge lump of backstory is like going out on a first date and spending the whole time hearing about the other person’s miserable, horrible, no-good, very bad childhood. 

There’s a place for backstory. That place is not at the beginning of the story. At the beginning of the story, you want to be focusing on the front-story. The stuff that’s happening right now.

In Star Wars, we spend quite a lot of time getting to know Darth Vader before we ever learn that he’s Luke’s daddy. If we found that out in the first ten minutes, we wouldn’t care. Because we wouldn’t know Vader and we wouldn’t know Luke enough to care yet. But at the right place in the story, that little bit of backstory carries the force of a proton torpedo.

The Cardinal Rules of Backstory

So how do you know when to bring in backstory?

Here’s are two simple rules I use that guide me well most of the time:

• Bring in the backstory at exactly the point when the reader must know it in order to make sense of the scene I’m writing right now. 
• Tell only as much backstory as the reader needs to understand just this one scene.

These are not iron-clad rules. They’re useful rules of thumb. Use them when they improve your story. Ignore them when they don’t.

The TV series Lost used backstory heavily. Lost had a very large cast of characters, and it took many episodes to get to know them all. 

Typically, each episode highlighted just a few characters, and one or two of those would have a flashback that showed off some essential piece of backstory in their lives.

When I say “some essential piece of backstory,” I mean that piece is essential to understand the episode in which it appears.

Over the course of six seasons, we saw more and more backstory about each character, and understood them better and better.  

If you liked Lost, I suspect that part of the reason you liked it was that the backstory was strong. The backstory served the front-story.

Developing Your Backstory

There are two basic ways that novelists use to create their backstory:

• Figure it out before you need it
• Make it up as you need it

People who like to plan their novel before writing it (such as outliners or Snowflakers) usually figure out most of their backstory before they write their novel. Of course, during the process of writing the story, they’ll think up new bits of backstory and add that to whatever they started with.

People who like to write their novel without preplanning it (such as seat-of-the-pantsers and edit-as-you-go writers) usually make up backstory as they’re writing scenes. Then when the story is finished, they may need to do some work to make it all consistent and fill in any gaps. 

It really doesn’t matter which way you do things. Your brain is wired to favor one method over another, and I don’t recommend fighting the wiring in your brain. Work with your brain, not against it.

But however you prefer to work, I strongly recommend that you spend some time making sure your backstory is strong. It should be a reasonable explanation of how your character came to be the person they are. It should increase the conflict your character feels during the front-story.

Editing for Backstory

I also strongly recommend that when you edit the second draft of your novel, you should fire-test each chunk of backstory as it comes up in the story. Could you delay telling this bit of backstory until later in the story? Would that improve things? If the backstory is essential right now, could you tell less of it? Would that improve things?

The goal here is not “to get rid of all the backstory.” That would be like cutting off your nose to improve your smile.

The goal here is “to use the backstory to make the front-story as good as possible.”

---

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

More Advanced Fiction Writing

Creating: A Failure To Communicate | Advanced Fiction Writing

Creating: A Failure To Communicate

by Randy Ingermanson

Advanced Fiction Writing

There's a famous line in the movie COOL HAND LUKE:

"What we've got here is failure to communicate." The line comes twice, once said seriously by the evil prison warden and once said mockingly by the title character, Luke.

Failures to communicate are pretty common in real life, and in many cases, they're caused by different personality types. In last month's column, I talked about the Myers-Briggs scheme of classifying personalities into 16 different types.

This month, I'll look at a somewhat simpler scheme developed by D. Glenn Foster, who started his career as a polygraph examiner. What Foster discovered was that his own observations of his subjects told him a lot more about their guilt or innocence than his lie-detector machines could.

Foster's original idea was that there is no one best way to interrogate somebody. Methods that work on one personality type won't work on another. So if you want to get a confession, your first task is to "read" your prisoner's personality type. Then you use the appropriate methods to get your confession. Of course, if the prisoner isn't actually guilty, you'll discover that soon enough.

Eventually, Foster became an "interview consultant" who taught methods of interrogation to law enforcement agencies to help them get confessions from prisoners. I recently read his book, "HOW CAN I GET THROUGH TO YOU?" -- coauthored with Mary Marshall -- on the subject of interpersonal communication.

You might think that Foster's methods are only useful to novelists writing police procedural mysteries. Nope. An interrogation is only one of many ways that people communicate -- or fail to. The book by Foster and Marshall is actually aimed at anyone having communication failures. Whether you're not communicating with a friend or a family member, a co-worker or a Congress-critter, this book shows you how to read people and analyze what's gumming up the communication lines.

Foster categorizes people into four basic types:

• Feeler
• Driver
• Analyzer
• Elitist

Let's look at each of these in turn:

• A FEELER likes to get along with people. Feelers put other people's feelings first. A Feeler wants to get along with you and will try to accommodate you, if possible. Feelers are people persons. If you run a business, you want your receptionist and your PR director to be Feelers.
• A DRIVER likes to get things done. Drivers don't much worry about hurting somebody else's feelings, so long as they hit their task objectives. A Driver likes to argue and doesn't get a bit offended if you argue back. In fact, a Driver likes that and respects you if you push back. If you run a business, you want the sales-droids who make cold calls to be Drivers, because they don't take no for an answer.
• An ANALYZER likes to figure things out. Analyzers don't have any need to "share their feelings" with others. They'd much rather share their thoughts. Analyzers don't mind a spirited discussion, so long as it's about ideas and doesn't get personal. Analyzers dislike "ad hominem" arguments and will walk away when the heat turns on. If you run a business, you want your business strategist and your engineers to be Analyzers.
• An ELITIST is a one-of-a-kind person. The Elitist marches to his own drummer. There's a bit of the Feeler, the Driver, and the Analyzer in the Elitist. The Elitist rarely gets close to anyone, because there just isn't anybody like him. If you run a business and you need a visionary who thinks differently, then an Elitist might be what you need.

When two people are talking, they tend to treat the other person the way they expect to be treated. This works fine, if they're both the same personality type, because they have a common idea of how to communicate.

A Feeler talking with a Feeler will get along fine, because they both want the other person to feel good about the exchange. Each will bend over backwards to accommodate the other. No hard words and at the end, everybody's happy.

A Driver talking with a Driver will also do great. They'll likely get into a spirited argument, each giving no quarter, hacking away at each other until one of them wins or they reach a happy stalement. Plenty of hard words, but no hard feelings, because shouting is just part of the game, and at the end of the game, everybody knows who won.

An Analyzer talking with an Analyzer will have a terrific time. They'll get into a deep discussion about ideas. It may or not be an argument, but even if there's a strong difference of opinion, each will take care to attack the other's ideas, not his person. No hard words, no hard feelings, and at the end, one or both of them may have changed his mind, but both will feel like they learned something.

An Elitist talking with an Elitist rarely happens, because there just aren't that many Elitists. Each will recognize that the other is someone special and rare, because all Elitists are special and rare, but always in different ways. Elitists most likely won't share their feelings, not even with another Elitist. If necessary, they may argue like a Driver or reason like an Analyzer, but at the end of the game, they're really above all that.

When members of two different groups talk, it's a different story. Each will treat the other the way they want to be treated. But neither will be treated the way they want. Let's look at what can go wrong. We'll be brief here, because we have six different kinds of pairs:

When a Feeler talks with a Driver, she may very well be irritated by the Driver's "pushiness." Feelers see Drivers as being "control freaks" who want to "run over everyone else." The Driver will be annoyed by the Feeler's wimpiness. Drivers expect push-back, and when a Feeler just gives in, where's the fun in that? Drivers see Feelers as being "spineless" slugs who "beat around the bush" and "won't stand up for themselves."

When a Feeler talks with an Analyzer, she'll be annoyed by the Analyzer's "coldness." Feelers see Analyzers as being "too much in their heads" and as eggheads who "don't care about other people's feelings." The Analyzer will be irritated by the Feeler's "mushy-headed" approach to life. Analyzers see Feelers as "uninterested in ideas" and "losing their heads in a crisis."

When a Driver talks with an Analyzer, he may be annoyed by the Analyzer's cautious "look before you leap" foot-dragging. A Driver wants to forge ahead, because "he who hesitates is lost." The Analyzer will be especially infuriated when a Driver makes a "personal attack" in an argument. The Analyzer is sensitive to personal criticism and wants to "focus on ideas, not personalities."

When a Feeler, Driver, or Analyzer talks with an Elitist, they'll be put off by the Elitist's "arrogant and condescending" attitude. Since Elitists generally dress with excellent style, Feelers, Drivers, and Analyzers may criticise the Elitist for being "aristocratic." Elitists have elements of the Feeler, the Driver, and the Analyzer, so they have all sorts of ways to cross communications. The Elitist may see the Feeler as "weak" or "spineless"; may see the Driver as "pushy" and "overbearing"; may see the Analyzer as "cold" or "smart, but lacking vision."

There's a lot more to be said on Feelers, Drivers, Analyzers, and Elitists. I highly recommend the book "HOW CAN I GET THROUGH TO YOU?" by D. Glenn Foster and Mary Marshall for vastly more information on how these personality types work. Their interest is in helping people understand their own type and the types of others, so they can learn to get along.

Our interest, as novelists, is in learning how to understand our characters so we can pick a fight. Fiction is about characters in conflict. The more you know about what causes conflict, the more realistic your fiction will be.

I thank my friend, Mark Mynheir, a working cop and novelist, for alerting me to the Foster Method.

This article is reprinted by permission of the author.

---

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

More Advanced Fiction Writing

Writing Craft: Backstory and Front-Story | Advanced Fiction Writing

Craft: Backstory and Front-Story

by Randy Ingermanson

Advanced Fiction Writing

Every character in your novel has a past, a present, and a future.

The future is fuzzy and out of focus, but your characters think they know what they want their future to be. 

The future that your protagonist wants is called the “story goal” for your novel, and it drives your story forward.

Your front-story is whatever is happening right now as your protagonist tries desperately to reach his or her story goal. 

The front-story is the reason your reader reads. Without a front-story, your novel is dead in the swamp. As much as possible, you need to always keep your front-story on center stage in your novel.

But your character has a past also—all the things that happened in their life that made them the person they are today. That past is called “backstory.”  

Backstory Matters

Backstory matters a lot. Nobody just walks onto the stage of your story without a past. Everybody carries baggage. The older you get, the more baggage you carry, unless you learn to let go. And nobody ever lets go of it all.

But backstory can be a story-killer. Reading a novel that begins with a huge lump of backstory is like going out on a first date and spending the whole time hearing about the other person’s miserable, horrible, no-good, very bad childhood. 

There’s a place for backstory. That place is not at the beginning of the story. At the beginning of the story, you want to be focusing on the front-story. The stuff that’s happening right now.

In Star Wars, we spend quite a lot of time getting to know Darth Vader before we ever learn that he’s Luke’s daddy. If we found that out in the first ten minutes, we wouldn’t care. Because we wouldn’t know Vader and we wouldn’t know Luke enough to care yet. But at the right place in the story, that little bit of backstory carries the force of a proton torpedo.

The Cardinal Rules of Backstory

So how do you know when to bring in backstory?

Here’s are two simple rules I use that guide me well most of the time:

• Bring in the backstory at exactly the point when the reader must know it in order to make sense of the scene I’m writing right now. 
• Tell only as much backstory as the reader needs to understand just this one scene.

These are not iron-clad rules. They’re useful rules of thumb. Use them when they improve your story. Ignore them when they don’t.

The TV series Lost used backstory heavily. Lost had a very large cast of characters, and it took many episodes to get to know them all. 

Typically, each episode highlighted just a few characters, and one or two of those would have a flashback that showed off some essential piece of backstory in their lives.

When I say “some essential piece of backstory,” I mean that piece is essential to understand the episode in which it appears.

Over the course of six seasons, we saw more and more backstory about each character, and understood them better and better.  

If you liked Lost, I suspect that part of the reason you liked it was that the backstory was strong. The backstory served the front-story.

Developing Your Backstory

There are two basic ways that novelists use to create their backstory:

• Figure it out before you need it
• Make it up as you need it

People who like to plan their novel before writing it (such as outliners or Snowflakers) usually figure out most of their backstory before they write their novel. Of course, during the process of writing the story, they’ll think up new bits of backstory and add that to whatever they started with.

People who like to write their novel without preplanning it (such as seat-of-the-pantsers and edit-as-you-go writers) usually make up backstory as they’re writing scenes. Then when the story is finished, they may need to do some work to make it all consistent and fill in any gaps. 

It really doesn’t matter which way you do things. Your brain is wired to favor one method over another, and I don’t recommend fighting the wiring in your brain. Work with your brain, not against it.

But however you prefer to work, I strongly recommend that you spend some time making sure your backstory is strong. It should be a reasonable explanation of how your character came to be the person they are. It should increase the conflict your character feels during the front-story.

Editing for Backstory

I also strongly recommend that when you edit the second draft of your novel, you should fire-test each chunk of backstory as it comes up in the story. Could you delay telling this bit of backstory until later in the story? Would that improve things? If the backstory is essential right now, could you tell less of it? Would that improve things?

The goal here is not “to get rid of all the backstory.” That would be like cutting off your nose to improve your smile.

The goal here is “to use the backstory to make the front-story as good as possible.”

This article is reprinted by permission of the author.

---

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

More Advanced Fiction Writing

Writing Craft: Newthreading | Advanced Fiction Writing

 

Craft: Newthreading

by Randy Ingermanson

Sometimes you write a novel and it turns out just the way you planned.

Only it’s still not right. Maybe your macro editor gave you a great idea that would make the whole story stronger. Maybe one of your beta readers pointed out some inconvenient truth. Maybe your production editor insisted the book needs to have a lot higher word-count.

Bottom line, your story is good, but now you need to weave in a whole new storyline. And the new part needs to work seamlessly with the existing story. And you’re terrified you’re going to mess up a good thing. Because your existing story is fine, right now, just as it stands. But now you’re required to try to make it better by working in one new plot thread.

What’s a Thread?

Now is a good time to discuss what I mean by a “thread.”

A thread is a part of the story that would make sense as its own story, if the reader had enough context. A thread has a beginning, middle, and end. A thread is a story-within-a-story.

Typically, I think of every major character in a novel as having their own thread. Each of them thinks that they’re the protagonist of the story. Each of them is living their life, and to them, it’s a complete story.

So in The Hunger Games, our viewpoint character is Katniss Everdeen, and her survival storyline is the main thread. But Peeta Mellark has his own thread, a romantic storyline, which intersects with Katniss’s at many points. Rue has her own thread, a tragic storyline. Haymitch has a thread as a clever, scheming coach, manipulating his players to go beyond what they think possible. Cato has his own thread as the unstoppable foe. We don’t see all of these people’s threads, but we see enough to be able to imagine a complete story for each of them.

And it’s also possible to have an object in your story that’s significant enough to have its own thread. In The Lord of The Rings, the Ring of Power has its own storyline as it changes hands from Sauron to Isildur to Deagol to Smeagol to Bilbo to Frodo and briefly to Sam and Gollum.

As we saw above, sometimes you write a story that seems complete, but then you decide to add one extra thread to the story.

Let’s call that process “newthreading,” since there doesn’t seem to be any standard term for it.

So how do you do that?

Here’s my recommendation.

9 Steps For Painless Newthreading

1. Make a fresh copy of the file containing your story. Save the old one with a clear label on it, so you can get back to it in case you don’t like the newthreaded story.
2. Read the full story, as quickly as possible, inserting comments wherever you think the new thread will intersect with the story that’s already written. These comments should be in the margin. Both Microsoft Word and Scrivener make it easy to save marginal comments.
3. Scan through your manuscript, reading only the marginal comments.
4. Make a decision. Do the marginal comments sketch out a complete story thread? Will the new thread work? Will it require you to write some extra scenes? Will it make the original story better? If it makes the story worse, then go back to your original. Newthreading is a bad idea if it doesn’t improve your story.
5. Write a short summary document that puts together all the ideas for the new story thread, based on all the marginal comments you made. Try to give the new thread a clear beginning, middle, and end.
6. Make revisions to your manuscript. Wherever you find a marginal comment, revise the scene. Reread the scene to make sure it still works. If you had to insert a whole new scene, read the scenes before and after it, to make sure the story is still flowing. But leave all your marginal comments in place.
7. Do a final read of the entire manuscript, starting at the very beginning. Read every word, even in the scenes you didn’t revise. There may be minor issues you need to weave in to make the new thread consistent. Fix every problem. As you work your way through the manuscript, delete every marginal comment if you approve of the way you wrote the scene it’s in.
8. When you get to the end of the manuscript, scan the margins one last time to make sure you’ve deleted all your comments.
9. You’re done.

Final Thoughts

In my opinion, newthreading is a last resort. It’s hard work, and many things can go wrong. I believe it’s better to put enough planning into your story so all the threads are in place from the start.

But that’s not always possible. If you have to add a new thread, then you have to do it. And now you know how.

---

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

More Advanced Fiction Writing

Writing Craft: Ad Hominem Attacks on Your Protagonist (Advanced Fiction Writing)

 

Craft: Ad Hominem Attacks on Your Protagonist

by Randy Ingermanson

Advanced Fiction Writing 

The protagonist of your novel is going to face obstacles. A lot of obstacles. Of all different types. 

The exact kinds of obstacles will depend on what kind of novel you’re writing. This month, we’ll talk about one particular kind of obstacle that most of us face often in real life. But I can’t recall ever seeing it discussed before in a book on fiction writing.

This particular obstacle is called an “ad hominem” attack.

What’s an Ad Hominem Attack?

Rather than tell you, I’ll show you by giving an example. If you took geometry in high school, then you learned something called the “Pythagorean theorem.” This is a theorem about triangles that is said to have been first proved by Pythagoras, a Greek mathematician who lived in the sixth century BC. 

We don’t know who actually discovered this theorem, but let’s pretend it really was Pythagoras, as the legends say. Let’s imagine that he wanted to tell his friends about it. And let’s pretend that his friends threw up all sorts of objections to his new theorem. Here’s how the dialogue might have gone:

Pythagoras: “I’ve discovered this amazing theorem. Take any right triangle on a plane. If you add up the squares of the lengths of the two short sides, you get the same number as the square of the length of the long side.”

Friend 1: “Your theorem is false because you’re an Egyptian, and all Egyptians are idiots.”

Pythagoras: “I’m not an Egyptian! But even if I was, that has nothing to do with whether my theorem is true.”

Friend 2: “Your theorem is false because you’re a Greek, and all Greeks are liars.”

Pythagoras: “Yes, I’m a Greek, but that still has nothing to do with whether my theorem is true.”

Friend 3: “Your theorem is false because you are gullible and easily fooled into believing false theorems.”

Pythagoras: “Even if I were gullible, you would still have to prove my theorem is false. Gullible people can believe true things.”

Friend 4: “Your theorem is false because you have a bad motive. You always wanted to become famous by discovering some deep mathematical theorem.”

Pythagoras: “Yes, I’ve always wanted to become famous by discovering some deep mathematical theorem, and now I will because my theorem is very deep and it’s also true. A theorem does not become false merely because I have impure motives.”

Friend 5: “Your theorem is false because you have a bad motive. You hope to use this theorem to short-weight your scales so you can cheat your customers.”

Pythagoras: “No, that’s a lie. But I won’t waste time refuting your malicious attack, because your lie is irrelevant. A theorem does not become false merely because I have impure motives. But your lie tells me something about how your mind works—your first reaction to my theorem is to tie it in to cheating people. I won’t be buying figs from you in the future.”

Friend 6: “Your theorem is false because you believe in transmigration of souls, which is a stupid idea. If you were wrong once, you are wrong every time.” 

Pythagoras: “I might be wrong on transmigration of souls and still be right about my theorem. Being wrong once does not prove I am wrong every time. Just look at the proof of my theorem and you must agree it’s true.”

Friends 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6: “We don’t have to look at your proof because we already gave good arguments that your theorem is false.”

Pythagoras: “All your arguments are arguments against ME, rather than arguments against my theorem. Your arguments are irrelevant. My theorem stands on its own, whether I’m flawed or not.”

And that’s the nature of an ad hominem attack. “Ad hominem” is Latin for “to the man” and it means that an argument is aimed at a person, rather than being aimed at what the person is saying.

Each of the friends chose a different kind of ad hominem attack on Pythagoras. Some of their attacks were actually true. Some were false. But it doesn’t matter whether an ad hominem attack is true or false, because it’s irrelevant to the question of whether the actual theorem is true or false. 

A theorem is true or false on its own merits. A person’s national origin, personality traits, motives, and past history have NOTHING to do with the theorem’s truth.

What Does This Have to Do With Fiction?

Ad hominem attacks are one way of deflecting an argument away from ideas. An ad hominem attack throws mud on a person, with the hope of also throwing mud on that person’s ideas. And fiction often involves exactly that.

Are you writing a murder mystery? There’s an objective question to be answered here—which suspect is the killer? The detective needs to answer that question. When the detective starts getting close, he or she is likely to be hit with an ad hominem attack to deflect attention from the facts.

Are you writing a legal thriller? The defendant is either guilty or innocent. That’s the objective question to be answered. The defendant’s lawyer may be getting paid lots of money to defend the client. The lawyer may be grandstanding to make a name for himself. Those aren’t great motives, but they don’t prove the defendant is guilty. If the prosecutor has a weak case, they may make an ad hominem attack to muddy the defense in the jury’s eyes.

Are you writing a spy novel or a political thriller or a military novel? Your protagonist will face hard questions. Getting the wrong answer will have huge consequences. There is a right answer and a wrong answer, even if nobody knows which is which. Your protagonist is (hopefully) trying to find the right answer. And on his way, it’s very likely that he’s going to get hit with ad hominem attacks. 

The reason ad hominem attacks are common in real life is because they’re easy. And because they work.

Dealing With an Ad Hominem Attack

How is your character supposed to deal with an ad hominem attack?

It’s very natural to get angry when somebody goes ad hominem on you. It’s natural, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

I’ve seen ad hominem attacks many times over the years, sometimes coming at me and sometimes directed at other people. There’s a wrong way and a right way to answer them.

The wrong way is to fight fire with fire. If somebody makes an ad hominem attack on you, you can’t respond with an ad hominem attack back on them. That’s lame and drags you down to their level and it confuses the issue.

The right way is to unconfuse the issue. There are three steps to this:

1. Start by saying clearly that they’ve made an ad hominem attack. You may have to define what ad hominem means, because not everybody knows this term.
2. Then point out that ad hominem attacks are just a way of deflecting the argument from logic and evidence. It’s a sign that the other guy’s case is weak. But it’s not proof the other guy is wrong. The only way to prove the other guy is wrong is to go back to logic and evidence. 
3. Then go back to logic and evidence and make your case. (If the only thing you can say is that the other guy is making an ad hominem argument, then you yourself have fallen into an ad hominem argument. But if you also have logic and evidence on your side, then pointing out that the other guy has gone ad hominem is the only practical way to get things back on track.)

This actually works in real life. And it works in fiction. It works in fiction BECAUSE it works in real life.

Fiction is all about conflict, and conflict isn’t always a fair fight. I’m hoping your protagonist fights fair, but I’m guessing your villain doesn’t. Which makes ad hominem attacks a very useful tool for adding conflict to your fiction. 

Homework

Think of a time in your own life when someone used an ad hominem attack against you. 

How did it feel? That’s how your characters should feel when they come under a personal attack.

Why was the ad hominem attack irrelevant? Were you able to explain at the time why it was irrelevant? Did you eventually bring the argument back to logic and evidence?

Think of a time in your own life when you used an ad hominem attack on someone else. (Not trying to make you feel guilty here, but the odds are good that you’ve done it. Most people have. It’s only human.)

Why did you sink to that level? Did you know at the time that your attack was irrelevant? Did it work anyway? How do you feel about it now? That’s how your villains might feel when they make a personal attack on the protagonist in your novel.

Also see:

• Ad Hominem Attacks on Your Protagonist: Crafting Conflict Through Character

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About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

More Advanced Fiction Writing

Mommy, Where Do Babies "Ideas" Come From? by Randy Ingermanson

Mommy, Where Do Babies "Ideas" Come From?

by Randy Ingermanson

Advanced Fiction Writing 

 

I used to think I wasn't very creative.  I used to even say it out loud. I have since learned that saying things like that qualifies as a Crime Against Humanity. There's probaby a Geneva Convention against it.

The reason is that this is the quintessential self-fulfilling prophecy.  Do you want to be uncreative, dull, and boring?  Then tell everyone you're uncreative, dull, and boring.  (Or tell everyone you're creative, entertaining, and fascinating.  You get the same great reaction either way.)

Frankly, if you have a pulse, you've got some level of creativity.  And if you're a novelist (or imagine you're a novelist) then you probably have a lot of creativity.

Bottom line:  Stop worrying about whether you ARE creative.  Start focusing on how to beef up what you've got.

I recently gave a talk on "Exercising Your Creativity" at a writer's conference. I based the talk on one of my favorite books on the subject, A Whack On The Side Of The Head, by Roger von Oech.  Here are three of the things I learned about being creative from this book:

A)  Sometimes there is more than one right answer.

I tried to convince my calculus teacher of this once, and didn't get very far. But real life doesn't have much to do with calculus.  In real life, there may very well be six or two hundred or a zillion right answers.

Example:  What is the "right" way to write this article?

There are plenty of right ways, and my way isn't necessarily the rightest.  It's just my way. So when you come up with a clever idea to solve a problem, don't stop! Ask yourself if you can come up with ten clever ways.  Or ten stupid ways.  But oops!  I'm infringing on the second principle I learned . . .

B)  Sometimes being "stupid" is smart.

People are so afraid of doing something stupid, they'll go along with the crowd. Even if that means getting caught up in Groupthink and doing something . . . stupid.

Guess what?  The crowd isn't always right, and sometimes what seems smart to everyone isn't smart at all.  There are any number of garage inventors who've built things that the experts said couldn't be done.  Am I right or am I right?

Kings used to have "court fools" whose job was to mock the group, including the king.  The purpose was to always have at least one voice that wasn't going with the crowd.  Do you have a devil's advocate who will argue with you about your ideas?  Maybe you should! Even if they're not very bright.  There's nothing like trying to explain physics to a barmaid to force you to use clear thinking.  And sometimes, the barmaid is right.

C)  What rule can you break?

Rules are good--usually.  But sometimes you can do something cool by breaking the rules. Ogden Nash used to do this with his poems by violating the rules of spelling to get something to rhyme.  As an example, look at the last two lines of his poem "The Panther":

     Better yet, if called by a panther . . . Don't anther!

It's a little silly, but that's the point.  As another example, look at this limerick that violates the "rules of limericks":

There was a young poet named Dan Whose poetry never would scan.

He said, "I try hard,
But I guess I'm no bard,
Because I always have to cram as many words into the last line as I possibly can."

Whoever wrote this limerick succeeded by breaking the rules in a beautiful self-referential way.

There's more, but I'd hate to steal all the thunder
from Roger von Oechs. I'll close by giving you a link to his book on Amazon.  It's a classic, and every time I read the thing, I somehow have a ton of creative ideas in the weeks that follow:
"A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative"

 

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

More Advanced Fiction Writing