Jeanne: Teaching Conflict

Hi everyone, I’m taking a much-needed post-conference-and-contest break with the family this week, so Jeanne Estridge has graciously agreed to take over today’s post. Thank you Jeanne! I’ll be back next week. –Justine

I recently started teaching a class on Plot and Structure at Words Worth Writing. The first week dealt with the basics:

Who is your protagonist? What is her goal?
Who is your antagonist? What is his goal?

How do their goals set them at odds with each other? How do the actions each takes in pursuit of her goal block the other from obtaining hers?

As an example, I used a movie, The Wizard of Oz.

Protagonist: Dorothy Gale
Goal: To get back to Kansas
Antagonist: The Wicked Witch of the West
Goal: To get her sister’s ruby slippers back.

On the surface, these goals may not appear to be mutually exclusive, but if you dig deeper, they are. The Witch knows she’ll never get the slippers if Dorothy returns to Kansas with them on her feet. And Dorothy quickly realizes the slippers are all that stand between her and death-by-witch.

At McDaniel, Jenny had us create conflict boxes for our novels. If you’re a regular reader of Jenny’s Argh blog, you may already be familiar with conflict boxes. They help writers line up the actions of the protagonist and antagonist so that they block each other, creating that nice crunchy conflict that draws your reader forward.

For my class, we did a three-action box:

You can see that for each move Dorothy makes, the Witch makes a counter-move, right up until the moment she melts.

As I start over on my work-in-progress, I’m keeping in mind that the actions my protagonist and her antagonist take need to counter each other in just this way.

How about you? Have you ever tried using a conflict box?

12 thoughts on “Jeanne: Teaching Conflict”

Have a great time teaching the class, Jeanne! One thing I’ve always found is that when you teach something, you learn it really well. You’ll probably be doing those conflict boxes in your sleep!

Jeanne | April 22, 2014 at 9:52 pm

I’m starting to, Kay. I’ve done The Fugitive, Pretty Woman and Toy Story so far, and of course The Wizard of Oz. Those are all pretty simple, straightforward stories, but they took me a couple of hours apiece. This stuff isn’t easy!

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I really hated our McD conflict assignment, Jeanne, because it highlighted the problems with my story – the protagonist and antagonist’s goals did not block one another, which is why my WIP was a flat mess instead of a rising tide of excitement. I’d read plenty about conflict on Jenny’s blog and other places online, but I didn’t really understand how it worked until I tried to wrestle my story into that conflict box. Next time, I swear I’m going to figure it out before I put finger to keyboard 🙂

Jeanne | April 22, 2014 at 9:53 pm

I never did get mine to where Jenny or I was satisfied with it. I’ve decided to pants this draft. The girls seem to be chatty and I don’t want to get in their way. Once it’s done, I’ll use my McDaniel tools.

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The conflict box is a great tool, but I think timing is essential. IDK, maybe for some writers and some books, it’s a good thing to work out this conflict before putting a word on the page. But it’s also limiting (unless you are really the type of person who can ignore the map if the Girls suddenly say, “Hey, this alley looks exciting!”

I am having a terrible time putting the conflict box away and listening to what my characters want to do.

But, having done the conflict box, I do know that if I get stuck in writing, I can run a conflict box on The Scene So Far, and maybe get some ideas for where the next sentence needs to head.

That’s another thing about conflict boxes — they can act as a machete, or as a laser surgical tool — the conflict is on so many levels.

Jeanne | April 24, 2014 at 7:23 pm

I tried to restrict the class to people with a finished draft. Worked about as well for me as it did for Jenny.

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- Michaeline Duskova | April 25, 2014 at 5:45 am
  
  LOL! I tell you, it was the shock of my life when I discovered I did NOT have a finished draft. No, I guess I had a finished draft. It’s just that as soon as I figured out what my conflict was really about, I had to rewrite 90 percent of it. And instead of NaNoing through it, I just fluffed around.
  
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