Monday, June 13, 2011

Conflicting conflicts?

Happy Monday, everyone!

If you haven't already heard about The Wild Grass and my giveaway for a Literary Lab Critique (and you want to), go here. Also, there's a news story about pink dolphins like the ones on the cover of my book here.

I'm a lover of epic stories and often try to create epics of my own by setting up multiple storylines with multiple characters and conflicts. In the beginning of these stories, I usually don't encounter any problems as I jump from one scene to the next, slowly developing each subplot. But, nearer to the end--like where I am now with my current WIP, Cyberlama--the different storylines have a way of suddenly hitting their climaxes at the same time, or at least close enough to each other where one tends to mute another and vice versa.

I try to downplay one in order to make another one shine, but, honestly, I've never been able to figure out exactly how to accomplish this with any sort of grace or self-satisfaction.

One solution I see is to simply have each subplot reach its climax at different times in the story. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer does this, but I found myself being a bit bored near the end of the book because some of the storylines had already played themselves out (at least in my mind). When I think about how Tolstoy handled it in Anna Karenina, I think instead of having each storyline reach a climax, he basically just stuck to one, that of the title character, making it outshine the others.

Does some sacrifice have to be made?

Maybe I'm just being greedy when I try to have all of my subplots build up to climaxes at the end. I want to have it all. But maybe the end result of such greed is just a tacky book that's dressed for too many parties on the same night. I don't know.

Do you think a book can trample on itself in an attempt to have too many conflicting conflicts? Have you dealt with this before, and, if so, what was your solution?

37 comments:

  1. I think the trick is emotional variety. I think you're right that the climaxes should fall close together, near the end, or else some of them just peter out early and lose the reader's interest.

    I've noticed this in books, movies, TV shows, and even musical compositions with multiple conflicts (or melody lines, I guess). One climax might be funny; another is heartbreaking; another is joyous. If you try to make every climax feel the same, it risks feeling repetitive. I think that emotional contrast can work well and the element of surprise when the various conflicts don't all climax in the same way. Also, when you have a reader emotionally aroused, it's easy to switch among feelings of happiness, sadness, awe, etc.

    I think there's some emotional algebra that goes into how a cluster of climaxes work together.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Revise the hell out of it until you are absolutely confident it works. Then have someone critique it (again) and give it another round of polish.

    My book THE MAN IN THE CINDER CLOUDS, which I am self-publishing (release date TBD, but soon), is a story-within-a-story (within a story). Each of the three layers has its own story arc and climax. At the end they hit sequentially, and they lead into each other...The first climax is a catalyst for the second, which in turn sets the stage for the third.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sub-plots are just that - sub.

    It is the main plot that must get the attention and "shine" the brightest. If your main plot cannot carry the story effectively, you will probably have to revise it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. ...I think keeping it simple is usually best. But for complicated stories where the writer can't keep much simple, I know of no carved-on-Mount-Sinai rule that stories MUST increase in climacticness (what a word!). Some stories are evenly climactic throughout. Other stories aren't but need a denouement, and, actually, for novels, I like experiencing a brief softer lead out of a world. I hate at-the-end feeling like I've been dropped off a book's cliff.

    But, definitely, if a writer intends the main character to be the main, that climax should be the strongest. Otherwise, the main might not read like the main, which can actually be okay too if intended. I've often blended main characters--like I'll have two and whether the story's primarily about one or the other isn't clear. But I do that intentionally.

    Actually, I vaguely remember a movie recently--cannot remember which specifically!--where midway the protagonist switched to being another character, and I remarked on this out loud then. Especially if a protagonist dies and the overall story hasn't "died"--then someone else kind of must take over. In recent years I've grown leery of too much conventional storytelling--that can make stories too predictable.

    Finally, IMO FWIW, not everyone's storyline must--or maybe should be resolved--by the end. Heresy, I know, but not resolving certain storylines can leave the reader with a sad longing. If that's what the writer wants, then everything shouldn't be tied up too neatly. That's hard to balance though--I mean, you probably don't want to leave the reader pissed off!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Genie, That's an excellent idea. Thank you! I've noticed that sort of emotional switching in some movies, and I think it works really well. It also creates a sort of new emotional experience when you juxtapose individual emotions together like that.

    Rick, I think having the climaxes interact with one another is also a smart way to go. I'd like to think that in my own stories the intertwined subplots affect one another enough to create this sort of unified effect, but sometimes I'm not so sure!

    S.M., It would be hard for me to lose my subplots, I admit! But maybe it's all relative.

    Miscellaneous, you bring up a lot of excellent points! I think when I was writing Rooster I wrestled with myself because I didn't want the character that ended up being the main character to be the main character. I wanted more of an ensemble piece, but I don't think I was able to pull that off then. (I still don't know if I could pull it off now.) I've also played with the switching idea twice now with a long short story and with a novella. I'm not sure if it works with the long short story. (It's called "Rivers" and is in the collection, if anyone is curious.) I feel more successful with the novella. But what was fun for me about that was that it felt like I was pushing two separate stories together and creating something newly beautiful, like some fish that is half one color and half another color.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Stephen King is good at this. The Stand and Under the Dome are good examples of it. Instead of having all the subplots get to the climax around the same point in the story, an epic novel works best when the subplots and characters intersect at the climax of the story.

    ReplyDelete
  7. (A bit of spoiling follows for Davin's Rivers story!)
    .
    .
    .
    .
    Actually, I really liked Rivers, but I'm not sure what you mean about the protagonist switching there--I think Nam seems like the protagonist throughout. Maybe you tried making the mother the protagonist? But I think Nam is present the most throughout--or maybe she has too strong a presence to insert anyone else in her seeming-dominant place. Nam's life and the events of the story's affect on her life--that life is in the very beginning, the very middle and the very ending.

    But I don't think you should worry about that at all: a short story is short. Probably no one would expect a main character switch there, unless the beginning was set up that way, which your story isn't, IMO at least. Sometimes a writer can intend something--but meeting those intentions would make the story unsuccessful. And failing to meet those intentions would make the story successful (e.g., happy accidents). Always remember to never fix what ain't broken--if something works, it works! While revising, try hard to recognize when you've succeeded on the page; the failures are usually more glaringly obvious at that writing stage.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Great post. I blogged a little about it and linked over here, hope that's ok.

    I was wondering if I could ask for a little clarification on one point you made. You said "instead of having each storyline reach a climax, he basically just stuck to one, that of the title character, making it outshine the others." Are you saying that Anna's plot was the only one that climaxed and that you believe it was the main plot? Just trying to understand.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Aimee, thanks for the recommendations. I started The Stand, but I admit I never finished it. I wanted to check out Under The Dome because I like that the back cover is so bare. :P

    ReplyDelete
  10. Miscellaneous, first, thank you for reading the story! That means a lot to me. I'm glad you liked it. In this collection, I probably revised Rivers more than any other story because I had more trouble with it than any other story. It took me a long time to get it to the point where it held together, and I probably made it more uniform in the process because I wasn't sure a more dramatic shift was working. The shift was my original intent, but I think you're right that it's not as present there now.

    ReplyDelete
  11. My books have one major internal conflict and one major external conflict, and those always reach the climactic point together since they are closely tied together. Then I have several subplots which I tie up prior to the big stuff except for one, which I leave open just enough to develop into something bigger in a possible sequel.

    That sounds as if it were carefully planned out, though the truth is, my outlines are a big mess and it just took revision after revision after revision to make things work out right. At one point for my first book, I remember writing out all of the subplot resolutions on index cards along with all of the actual scenes from the last third of the novel and shuffling them around until the placement of the resolutions made the most sense.

    -Alex MacKenzie

    ReplyDelete
  12. S.P., I see that I was unclear in what I wrote. Sorry. I do think the other storylines reached climaxes in the book, but Tolstoy managed (in my opinion) to make Anna's storyline climax more dramatic than the others. But all of the pieces did feel like complete arcs to me.

    ReplyDelete
  13. I think there's a slight shift, I can see you tried that, I felt it, but you pulled right back to Nam, and her presence is the more dominant. And the story's probably better for not having a total switch (I mean, I'm implied-remarking on a hypothetical, which is just not accurate... I can only know the story sitting in front of me). Had you gone to the other person and stayed there, Nam's character would have seemed like she'd dropped out into The Great Big Ether somewhere!

    ReplyDelete
  14. Alex, I did the index card exercise for Rooster too. It helped me some, but it also just got me really intimidated. Ha! I don't remember how I finally resolved the end of Rooster. Oh yeah, I didn't.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Miscellaneous, as I'm thinking back about the process, the original way the story was constructed was that the first half revolved around Nam and her mother. Then, in the second half, the mother became non-existent and the story was about Nam and the widower. So, I see now it wasn't even a shift in main characters but the storyline for the same main character. It's been so long since I thought about that story's development.

    ReplyDelete
  16. As you know, Davin, Monarch has three separate stories, and this was a problem for me for me trying to figure out how to line it all up just right. I love the way it is now, but I do know Scott said he got a bit bored at the end as I was wrapping up all the story lines (after the climax had taken place). That was on an earlier draft, though.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Michelle, I was never very good about wrapping up all of my storylines, so I appreciate it when a writer can do it well and in a way that doesn't feel slow. I'm curious to see how your final draft of Monarch ends!

    ReplyDelete
  18. I think your instinct to have all the storylines climax near the end is spot on. Nonetheless, even if they are all as near to the end as possible, some still have to be resolved before others.

    The rule of thumb I use is to go by, ahem, genre considerations. The story elements are stacked like Russian dolls.

    What I mean is that if one were writing a philosophical detective story like Scott, you introduce philosophical bits first, then a dead body, then at the end, resolve the mystery, then at the VERY end, resolve (or fail to resolve, possibly) the philosophical bits. But if you were writing a genre detective story, rather than a literary one, you'd introduce dead body first, dabble in philosophy only after the action was going, resolve philosophy at the end and at the VERY end, reveal the killer.

    Likewise, if you were doing a romantic suspense, you ask yourself, "Is this a mystery story with a romance subplot, or a romance with a mystery subplot?" If it's primarily a romance, then resolve the mystery first and the romance last. If it's primarily a mystery, bring the couple together first, then find the killer.

    This may seem to formula for you, but the important point is that you hold off on the element that is most important to you and your novel. If you find yourself getting bored before the end of the novel, you may have resolved the part of the book that is actually most important to you before the subplots. Try it the other way around.

    Tara Maya
    The Unfinished Song: Initiate Nook, Kindle UK, Kindle US , FREE

    ReplyDelete
  19. I think you should save the most critical climax for the last. Otherwise it does seem like you're just sweeping up after a long night of fun.

    Alex has good points about making sure the resolutions all come in the right order. I think balance and a building up of emotion are important more than actual resolutions of subplots, especially if it's clear enough what's going to happen to some of the support characters that you don't actually have to dramatize it all. I think this ordering of emotions, so to speak, is what I was complaining about to Michelle in her early version of Monarch. I'm sort of beginning to think about resolutions of subplots for the detective novel. I think most of them won't be resolved at all, just like in real life!

    ReplyDelete
  20. What Tara Maya said: "the important point is that you hold off on the element that is most important to you and your novel. If you find yourself getting bored before the end of the novel, you may have resolved the part of the book that is actually most important to you before the subplots."

    ReplyDelete
  21. Tara Maya, I think what you say makes a lot of sense. It's sort of an exercise in tension, and you want to draw out that tension using the strongest tool (storyline) you have.

    This is a great way of putting it: "This may seem to formula for you, but the important point is that you hold off on the element that is most important to you and your novel."

    Like what Miscellaneous is doing, I've also been playing around with this a bit to switch things up, so I guess the underlying principle is somehow intuitive if it inspires me to deviate from it.

    Scott, I'm not understanding this: "I think balance and a building up of emotion are important more than actual resolutions of subplots, especially if it's clear enough what's going to happen to some of the support characters that you don't actually have to dramatize it all." but I really want to. The way you end your stories has always been interesting to me and it's made me work harder on how I end my own stories.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Davin: What I mean is that some subplots don’t need to be resolved at all. You can leave the reader curious. Some others, you can make it clear what is going to happen without showing that ending. Woolf does that a lot in “Mrs Dalloway.” One character has come to London to get help from his rich/powerful friends and they’ve all decided that they won’t help him. The confrontation/disappointment comes after the end of the book, but the reader knows it’s coming so we don’t need to see it. We can imagine it so that storyline’s all wrapped up. So part of what I mean is that you can raise the tension of a subplot as much as possible and then not give an explicit climax if it’s clear what that climax would be. You just have to point to it. That raises the tension of the entire narrative. Which is the thing for me: I think of the narrative as a single thing, like a long tapestry that’s viewed from one end to the other, say from right to left. Lots of strands going, lots of patterns moving across the tapestry on the same direction, but all the patterns don’t need to go from end-to-end. They are there to support the whole of the tapestry, to work in conjunction with all the other strands and patterns, but you don’t have to treat each of them individually as if they’re separate, stand-alone stories. Think of the artistic unity of the entire narrative, not of a bunch of chunks of stuff all wrapped together. Create One Thing, not a bundle of things. As for my own endings, in both the novels you’ve read, the idea is to give the reader the feeling that they’ve just jumped into space while holding their breaths.

    ReplyDelete
  23. A potential big problem with always leaving the main climax till near the very end (at least IMO): if it doesn't seem like THE BEST CLIMAX EVER WRITTEN, and the work is long and complex, the end climax will tend to fall flat, will tend to feel...not worth the long hard read. Or, e.g., in a romance, if the two characters don't have sex for the first time till the book's very end, and the sex isn't the BEST SEX EVER-EVER-EVER OVER HUMANITY'S HISTORY, the sex will tend to seem flat. Too much building towards climaxes often demands the end-climaxes be superstrong. But not all stories have NATURAL superstrong end-climaxes. I don't believe in pasting on endings that don't grow from the actual stories. I think that if a story stays quieter all along, with a sort of background noise of miniclimaxes and lots of tensions that keep readerly interest, the ending doesn't have to be so loud. Superloud endings usually seem obnoxious and showy to me. I'm growing tired of all the envelope pushing I see going on today. Sometimes it feels like I'm being force-fed. Just be natural and I'll listen and like.

    With my own writing, one of my books resolves what-has-seemed-to-be-the-main-conflict-all-along before the very end, but that resolution actually generates ANOTHER problem-conflict from something only hinted at all along, and that second problem winds up the real end-(semi)-climax, which problem became obvious quite late in the work. There IS a subliminal cascading in this story, so that final resolution should seem inevitable--there are hints from the get-go.

    Does what I did work? I don't know. No one's ever discussed it with me. For me, it's what I wanted. And I'm the boss of my books lol.

    Also, always remember: each story is probably unique, has specific constraints, a specific set up, etc. Follow the story's lead....

    ReplyDelete
  24. Scott, thank you for expanding. I do understand this more, and I also think it's the first time I've understand and agreed with your narrative argument. I think this is sort of a more naturalistic approach, for lack of a better word, and it's something I dabble in too. I'll sometimes drop storylines or hint at them without getting into them to try and create a sense of a bigger world. Sometimes I can leave these things that way, sometimes I feel the need to tie them up more neatly.

    Miscellaneous, you bring up a really good point, and it was something I noticed while was reading through entries for our anthologies and also when I was an editor for SmokeLong. Sometimes I story becomes all about the build up, and almost always the build up is a let down. For a long time I gave myself permission to basically ignore the idea of beginnings and endings, trying to maximize the middle of my stories and make them the most interesting part. And, I do think that with a lot of stories, people loves them for their middles and can forget the ends. It's unconventional, but I like the idea of being able to pick up a book and just falling into the story at any point on any page without need to approach it linearly from page 1 to the end. It's often tough for me to start books because I don't have an emotional attachment to anything in them yet, and the experience is cold. I sometimes try to skip that by reading in the middle first and then coming back to the beginning later. I also like what you say about each story being unique. That's one of the most exciting things to me about a reader looking at a writer's body of work instead of an individual story. It allows the writer to play more and be more creative.

    ReplyDelete
  25. Also, I hate denouements, so I like to go out with the story still in full motion. And I like formal balance, which you can see if you look at how the beginnings and endings of my novels share subject matter and specific imagery (stars/star charts/telescopes in one and hangings in the other).

    ReplyDelete
  26. I used to not be into denouements, but I'm okay with them now with certain stories. Prologues are sometimes okay too.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Ok...so this might be irrelevant to the conflict question, but since you mentioned Cyberllama, I thought I'd tell you about a little anecdote from my classroom. I teach 10th grade literature, and a couple of months ago, I was reading the post that you made about expressing time to my class. You used the Cyberllama as your mode of delivery. Since then, my students have embraced the idea of the Cyberllama, and he keeps reappearing in simple things like journals that they write down to a random vocab sentence. I thought it might warm your heart.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Stephanie, That is so awesome! Thank you so much for telling me about this! It is definitely heartwarming. I'd love to learn more about your class. Maybe I could send them a surprise or something.

    ReplyDelete
  29. @ Rick Daley. The story-within-a-story structure of The Man in the Cinder Clouds sounds really intriguing.

    Tara Maya
    The Unfinished Song: Initiate Nook, Kindle UK, Kindle US , FREE

    ReplyDelete
  30. Entangle the conclusions. That's your best bet. It doesn't even have to be direct, even just a scene with two of the characters meeting and talking about what has happened usually works. Barbara Kingsolver does it well in The Bean Trees.

    ReplyDelete
  31. No dude; not selfish to want that ultimate climax,where all the subplots coincide.

    When I read a complex novel with multiple subplots, I want all of them to tie in to the overall plot. I need that tidy explanation of why all the distractions are worth my time in reading.

    I don't like skipping sections of writing, not matter how irrelevant the content, b/c I'm sure the author will show the relevance in the wrapup of the novel plot. When sections are not explained adequately, I get frustrated, thinking I wasted my time reading passages that had no relevance to the story plot - no matter how intriguing the distraction.

    I want to "see" how it all ties, not just be "told" it was relevant in a summary epilogue. I've read bits of your writing process, and I know nothing in your novels happens without a viable cause-and-effect explanation. This intrigues me as a reader. I'm fascinated by sequence-of-events processes.

    Thank you for leaving a comment on my blog post today. I hope you can take a few minutes (about 20?) to write a post about how you "wake up your writing monster". The topic discussion here could be expanded upon; and if Wednesday 6/15 is not your post date, you could ask B. Nagle to post on his blog for you.

    Domey, I'd love to hear how you developed the idea of The Wild Grass, and your own writing/research processes. If not on the "Writing Monster" event, would you consider an interview on my blog? I'm serious here.

    If you're interested, please e-mail me, and I'll send you a list of interview questions.

    ........dhole

    ReplyDelete
  32. Oh, sorry; I was readidng though some of the comments, and I caught one from Scott that I agree with. You don't have to tie up all the loose ends or make a happy ending; you just have to tie all the subplots together. Some storylines have no resolution; but they can have a satisfactory conclusion for the novel context.

    Does that make sense?

    .......dhole

    ReplyDelete
  33. McKenzie, thanks for the tip. I have tried to entangle things because I love it when that happens in other stories and movies. High Noon and Princess Mononoke both come to mind. I've found in my own writing that I can only get that to happen sometimes, it's almost a matter of luck with my current writing approach. But hopefully I'll get better at that.

    Donna, I guess we're allowed to be selfish when it comes to our own writing, huh? When I was a year or two into my writing I had a friend tell me that my work reminded her of seeing billboards flash by during a drive along the highway. What she meant by that, I think, is that I wasn't exploring my ideas fully. The comment made a lot of sense to me, and it helped me to express myself more clearly, though I think I still struggle with that. I'm finding that the better I get at writing the more words I use to get my ideas across. Sometimes I worry that being so thorough ends up being boring though. I'm not sure. I'll definitely email you. I'd love to do an interview over at your place. :)

    ReplyDelete
  34. Davin, I must admit that this is my one HUGE problem when I'm writing. I add way too many conflicts thinking the book is made more exciting. But I end up adding so many, the writing gets hard to keep up with. Betas say that, not me. :-) Well, I agree. *sniff* I see what you're saying about each subplot reaching its climax at different times in the story, but isn't it still confusing? Or at least for middle grade?

    Oh that I could write like Tolstoy. I hope that someday I can. A middle grade Tolstoy. I will go and check out the pink dolphins and then read what Bailey says about all this.

    ReplyDelete
  35. Your book came today! I will settle in and read it tonight. It looks fabulous. Red Man, Blue Man is in it. I LOVE that story. WOOT!

    ReplyDelete
  36. That's so cool that you told me, Robyn! I really hope you like some of the stories. :)

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.