Hi Victoria, I am a young writer, and a total newbie, but not a pantser. I spend months thinking my plot over and getting to know my characters’ inner angels and demons before I ever get to the keyboard.
In one of your posts from 2009 you mention that characters become interesting only when they have to make a difficult, conflicted choice about how to act within the novel. I was later struck by Dwight Swaine’s words that the character’s journey only starts when he stops running from problems and decides to fight them. In my novel, ALL of my main five characters are essentially struggling with a choice of being easy on themselves and running away from problems vs. solving them. Am I missing the real conflict? Are my characters stuck with a resolution that will exhaust itself by the middle of the novel? I am aware that selfishness vs. altruism IS among the essential and basic human dilemmas, but I am quite blind when it comes to seeing how viable it is in a novel plot.
Thank you in advance for reading this. I appreciate your time and I hope to hear your professional opinion that I highly respect.—Nastia Slesareva
Ah, Nastia, struggle is wonderful! And internal conflict—being torn between two fundamental, overwhelming needs—is golden.
What actually happens in a story is that the characters frequently burn up the first half trying to find a way out of their problems: they keep choosing ways to cope, and those ways keep resulting in hotter and hotter water, bigger and bigger problems, even through and past their first Plot Point, which is the climax of their first Conflict. Those are choices. They’re just choices in the wrong direction.
Then, around halfway through the story, the characters must decide to try a new way of handling their problems: instead of trying to get out of them, they must forge through them to the other side. That’s the midway, the Fulcrum, and it’s the climax of the second Conflict, upon which the entire weight of the story swings. That must be what Swaine was referring to—the first half of the story is the set-up for that point.
The significance of the Fulcrum is that, when you’re dealing with internal conflict (and all conflict, really, can be traced to internal needs, otherwise it’s meaningless), that’s the point at which the characters must stop flailing wildly toward meeting first one driving need and then the other and begin the complex task of coping with the fact that their solution, at some point, is going to be about the irreconcilable abyss between the two. This is a really hard pill to swallow. It hurts. And so the third Conflict, which eventually climaxes in the second Plot Point, is a humdinger.
That means the Faux Resolution, which comes after that second Plot Point, dupes the characters into believing they’re not going to have to choose between those two driving needs after all. Psyche! Just kidding! They think they’re going to get away with some kind of compromise that doesn’t, honestly, turn out to solve things. In fact, the effort to avoid their nightmare is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and it brings the final nightmare on.
So that your Climax is the point at which those characters face their ultimate hell: choosing between two mutually-exclusive needs, neither of which they believe they can live without. This is very often the need to hide from their problems in some way—even after they believe they’ve stopped hiding—and the need to face their demons in all honesty, their shadow sides, and grapple with the one thing in the world they most do not want to grapple with.
It is the monumental effort of that grappling that explodes your story off the end into your reader’s own epiphany.
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