A round of conflict with a side of crisis...

It’s a no brainer that any type of romantic suspense needs conflict, but as I march onward through the fot of writing towards publication, there’s a key concept that I think many of us miss from time to time.

Sure, we need strong, believeable, and well thought-out characters. We need an interesting place to mix those characters together. But above all? We need things not to go smoothly. For a while…at least 50k words or so.

One of the toughest transitions to make when wading (or cannon-balling) into romance writing is developing external conflict (between outside forces and our heroine) AND internal conflict (whatever keeps our prince charming and said heroine from living happily ever after on page three.)

Ferdinand Brunetière, some French guy who knew drama, characterized external conflict in the following way:

• the individual vs. fatality (that is, a fight for survival)
• the individual vs. social law (justice, morality, etc.)
• the individual vs. another person
• the individual vs. himself
• the individual vs. "the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the malevolence of those who surround him"

Internal? Well that seems relatively easy, doesn’t it?

• the heroine vs. the hero

I’ll just say that balancing both throughout an entire novel is a definite balancing act and a writer needs to be incredibly organized to keep track of all the nuances and struggles (internal and external) facing her characters.

The basics of it are this: your external conflict drives your story forward with action. Your internal conflict drives the character growth and the growth of the relationship (hello, Romance Writing!).

So often an editor will ask, outright, “I see you have a serial killer after your Jane, but what’s the internal conflict keeping her and Tarzan apart?”

It’s a question, I’m sure, that catches so many people off guard, and one to keep in mind constantly while writing? Why should the reader keep reading? What’s stopping the author from uniting her two favorite characters? How do we avoid a contrived reconciliation?

Another term to consider is crisis.

Keep in mind, that a car explosion or getting shot at does NOT a conflict make. What you’re brewing up, m’friend, is a crisis that usually resolves itself before scene’s end. To be certain, a boatload of crises can certainly aid or add to the external conflict, but you need a much stronger structure to your story to really get a juicy conflict going. And you do, in fact, need some ripe conflicts to catch any sort of attention in today’s ever-shrinking publishing world.

So for the heck of it, here are a couple prompts/ideas to get readers thinking about their characters and their own conflicts.

* If you’re story were stripped of all the outside “drama” that is driving it…if there were no foreclosure on the family house pending, if zombies weren’t scratching at the front door, or if the creepy guy weren’t stalking young women at night, what would stop your two characters from instantly falling in love the moment they met at a Wal-Mart? What would keep them apart long enough to realize they were “meant for each other”?

*Speaking of conflict, how do your characters resolve conflict? Could that also be a source of contention? (I know it is in my house!) Sometimes, the way we are wired to react in stressful times does not match up well with that of another…and can often create problems. Apply these thoughts to your own characters.

Side note: find a ton of interesting (quick!) prompts at the Creative Writing Prompt site. Just scroll over the numbers for your prompt. Quality stuff.