Free Immediate Fiction by Jerry Cleaver Page A

reveal character, to create identification. So, you, the author, are the ultimate cause of all the trouble in the story and all the pain suffered by the characters.
    We're capturing life on the page, but we do it in a way that could only be seen as perverse if we were doing it to real people. The more real your characters become to you, the more you must fight the urge to make life easy for them. To create compelling stories, you must develop and exercise SADISTIC LICENSE. As I said earlier, fiction is not polite society—even when you're writing about polite society. Happy lives make lousy novels. Because trouble is dramatic, fiction is the downside, the gory details, the worst-case scenario—always. The thing you must be ever wary of is your tendency to hold back, to go easy, to let up at the very moment when you should bear down. It's a great paradox that this antisocial process produces this most social and personal creation.
    OK, shying away from using conflict is one problem. The other problem is not understanding what conflict is and what it isn't. We all know what conflict is, right? Your wife calls you an insensitive slob. You get cut off on the expressway on the way to work. Your boss tells you that your work is below par. Your mother disinherits you.
    Well, guess what, not one of those is conflict, our kind of conflict— dramatic conflict. Oh, those examples are troubling, disturbing, upsetting, but not one of them is what's needed to set a story in motion. They're false conflict. Trying to create a story from false conflict is like dragging a dead horse around a racetrack: you might get to the finish line, but you'll never win the race.
    What we think of as conflict in everyday experience—disagreements, arguments, insults, shouting matches, even fistfights—are not our kind of conflict—not dramatic conflict. They can be turned into dramatic conflict—anything and everything can, once you know how—but dramatic conflict is a different creature entirely. Dramatic conflict is made up of several elements. Get one wrong, and no matter how brilliantly you write, your story falls flat.
    All right, so what exactly is dramatic conflict? In the last chapter, I defined it as want + obstacle. That's good, but not precise enough to keep you focused the way you need to be. We need to pin it down so there is no doubt you have a dramatic want and a dramatic obstacle, which are both needed to create dramatic conflict.
    Want: How do you know if you have a dramatic want—enough of a want to incite the character to propel the story forward to a dramatic finish? For a want to be dramatic the character must feel that satisfying it is a matter of life and death. That doesn't mean that it is a matter of life and death, but the character must feel that strongly, must believe that deeply that things must change, that he or she can't stand to go on with life as it is. A wife who has been browbeaten for years and taken it quietly, for example, could feel that her husband's abuse this particular morning was so vicious and demeaning that she can't take it any longer, that she can't live with herself if she puts up with another moment of it. He must stop treating her with such contempt, he must change, or she will leave him. She must be determined, driven, desperate to make things change. She will settle for nothing less. (Now, that doesn't mean that she won't be forced to compromise, but only after waging an all-out battle, after using everything she has to prevail.) There's urgency, a sense of crisis. If she can live with things the way they are, if she has a choice, you have a false want, which will make for a false conflict. The want must be overpowering and pushing the character to the limit. She has come to a point where she can't stand it any longer. Her neighbor might feel differently. "Twenty minutes of abuse a day, for all you've got. I'd trade places with you any day." But our wife can stand it no longer. If she did