He Wrote/She Wrote. Again: Conflict

Welcome to He Wrote She Wrote Again.

The original post can be found here: He Wrote/She Wrote Again

Traditional story is a battle, a struggle that builds and ends in a climax. That struggle is called conflict, and it’s the engine for your plot, so it’s important to know what the main conflict is and how to identify or construct the one in your book.

Here’s where this conversation started:
Bob’s 2007 Protagonist/Antagonist post is here.
Jenny’s 2007 Protagonist/Antagonist post is here.
Jenny’s 2007 Central Conflict post is here.

Jenny

I’m pretty pleased with the Conflict posts we put up fourteen years ago. Turns out the basic theories of fiction don’t change that much (hello, Aristotle). So, I’d rather talk about how identifying that central conflict can be a tool to focus a story.

My novels are contracted for 100,000 words, with the understanding that I have 10% leeway either way, 90,000 to 110,000 words. The novel I’m working on now ended up being 146,000 words in the semi-final draft. That’s way too many, but they were all brilliant words, full of wit and energy.

Yeah, too damn bad, I was going to have to cut 46,000 of them.

To do that, I was going to have to focus on exactly what the book was about, find where the juice was, and ruthlessly excise all those enticing bypaths I’d wandered down…