WRITE YOUR NOVEL: Tips from a NYT Bestseller

Lesson 5: Ancient Secrets of Storytellers

Lesson Five: Ancient Secrets of Storytelling

Here's where universal truths will be the same for both pantsers and plotters, but how you each get to them differs.

Ever since the first stories were recorded, storytellers have learned simple rules that keep readers involved and satisfied. In short, rules that make both telling a story and hearing it a rewarding experience.

First: Conflict on every page.

This doesn't mean an endless string of explosions, car chases, and murders. Often times "quiet" conflict is much more engrossing to the reader, although more of a challenge to the writer.

When you truly understand conflict, you can have two characters making a salad together generate more emotional intensity than many special effects laden action movies.

Note that it takes TWO characters to generate true conflict—unless you're Shakespeare and can write a character like Hamlet. But even then, the most emotionally engaging parts are when Hamlet is arguing with himself. He is literally of "two minds," thus generating conflict.

How to generate conflict during a scene? Simple. Every character in every scene should want something.

Now put the other character in opposition to that goal. Voila! Instant conflict.

That opposition can be a physical one: a light saber duel in Star Wars.

One person wants one thing, the other wants something different and they'll both fight to stop each other from accomplishing their goals.

In the end, the one who wins MAY achieve his goal (only temporarily AND at great cost so that it comes back to haunt him later) and the one who loses must devise a new plan.

Both outcomes further the plot in some way while revealing some aspect of each character—how they win or how they lose.

OR the opposition can be an emotional one, something carried out in the subtext of the action and dialogue.

Think any Tennessee Williams play. Or the famous play and movie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe—if you haven't read it lately, take another look.

Novels that rely on psychological conflict to further the story can be unforgettable. Think Ordinary People, One True Thing, many novels written by Alice Hoffman, Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Safran Foer, Luanne Rice, Michael Chabon, Susan Wiggs, etc.

What about scenes where both people want the SAME thing? Like sex scenes?

This is where it gets tricky. If you allow both people to achieve their goals, then everyone's conflict is erased and the reader feels a lag in tension.

Think about where you stop reading in a book, where it's easy for you to put down.

It's not during the light-saber battle, is it? And it's also not during the conversation between the two women making a salad when we know that one wants to steal the other's husband and the first (the one mincing those onions into really, really small bits with a very sharp knife) wants the second dead.

Conflict raises questions in the reader's mind. And they want to keep reading to find out what happens next.

Which is why some people don't use explicit sex scenes and the sex happens off page, behind closed doors. Not because there's anything wrong with sex, but because we already know what happens next.

To use sex scenes as a way to enhance plot and reveal character, the scene can't be only about sex or characters wanting to have sex, it has to be about more. In other words, there has to be conflict.