Dear Victoria: I have questions about two things in Art & Craft of Writing Stories. I’m going to meet with my longtime crit partner Bonnie on Saturday to toss around some ideas for my next book and wanted to talk about your book. We do that a lot; I bring a writing book I’ve just read and we try to figure it out. 🙂 Now I can tell her you answered my questions!—Diana Rubino
Thank you for writing, Diana! I’ll answer your first question here and your second question in a separate column.
1) “The protagonist must have two needs that are mutually exclusive.” I’ve never heard that before, and find it very interesting. I’ve learned that the protag must have a need, a goal, and that has to be thwarted, over and over. Does having two needs give the story or the protag more depth? In saying she needs to have two goals or needs, is that an external one and an internal one? To parallel the ext. and int. conflicts?—Diana
You haven’t heard it before because I developed this idea myself, through my work with editing clients and study of fiction. 🙂
Exactly—it gives the story more depth, but more than that it gives the writer greater clarity about what they’re doing and therefore greater control over the story.
Very often I see manuscripts in which the writer has followed normal writing advice to give their protagonist a need and then thwart it, but they do this by imposing on the protagonist some outside force that simply makes the protagonist a victim. This creates weak storytelling and undermines the reader’s investment, because we’re not interested in reading about victims. We’re interested in reading about fighters. We need to know what to do when life knocks us down, and we can’t learn that from victims.
This is all internal conflict. An external conflict can be associated with one need for contrast between the two needs—need for a difficult loved one, or a challenging job, or actual survival—but this has no power unless the protagonist is personally invested in both needs, deep down inside. (Otherwise, they’d just walk away.)
Power is derived by showing your protagonist as both a sufferer and a fighter. Root both extremes of the conflict in their own character. Each time the protagonist meets one need—the one that creates their suffering—they create the other need—the need to fight suffering.
This focus upon the internal allows you to show through myriad aspects exactly how our strengths become our weaknesses and our weaknesses our strengths. And this keeps the reader intrigued page after page throughout an entire novel, because the reader is learning that there is no enemy so great as ourselves, there is no success so powerful as triumph over our own failings. Paradox is the key to all epiphany.
As Bryan Ferry says, “When you love someone, you get to know how the strong get weak and the rich get poor.”