Conflict Exercise

“Paranormals are great to study, because they make all the metaphors real.  Do you feel like you might die, you love him so much?  Well, in a paranormal, you very well might, as it’s likely he’s some kind of scary thing with fangs who might chomp on you.  Paranormal characters have the advantage on non-paranormal ones in this sense, because when they get angry, they can literally let out the beast within in the middle of a fight.  You want to do the same in your writing, which may or may not feature supernatural creatures.” (Read the entire transcript of this amazing speech here)

This fabulous quote from Megan Crane during her panel at the Romantic Times Con was very impacting for me. It really got me thinking. And reading some paranormal. (Nalini Singh, in fact, who I was lucky enough to meet at RT and who is a very lovely Kiwi!)

So, I’m reading all this paranormal (The Psy-Changeling series, go buy them all. Now. Do it.) and I started thinking about how much Presents IS very like a paranormal. I’ve often described Presents as a Contemporary Historical, and I think in many ways that description holds.

Still, I’ve been struck recently by how many key points Paranormals and Presents often have in common. And taking paranormal themes and applying them to Presents is helping me find my way with conflict. (If you don’t write Presents, this exercise might still be helpful for you…and if you write paranormal, you can do this in reverse!)

Here are some commonalities I’ve been noticing between Paranormal and Presents:

1. Very often one of the characters (usually the heroine) is pulled out of her comfort zone, her world, and taken into the hero’s world.

2. Alpha heroes. Alpha heroes who play by their own rules!

3. Heroes with a lot of power. In Presents it’s the kind of power brought on by money and status, in Paranormals…it can be Telekinesis. 😉

4. “Fated Mates” This is often done in a literal way in paranormal, but in Presents you often have that concept. The woman he can’t get out of his mind, the only man to awaken her desires…

5. Tortured characters with big traumas in their pasts. Again, in paranormal, this torture is often literal. In Presents…it sometimes is. But it’s usually emotional.

I’ve also really been thinking about things the way Megan said…the literal vs the figurative version of a conflict. In a Paranormal, you might have a hero who fears that his power might actually kill the heroine. While in a Presents you might have a hero who fears his power (status?) might destroy the heroine in that it will stifle her. Or in a Paranormal you may have a hero who cannot love because he’s been programmed not to, and the heroine deserves more…while in a Presents you have the hero who can’t love because of pain in his past, and he knows he can’t give the heroine all she deserves. (See where I’m going with this?)

I find it a really fun exercise to analyze the conflict in a book that’s in a different sub-genre and try to see how it might fit in a different sub-genre. It helps you figure out what the CORE of the conflict is, I think, and helps you get a firm handle on the what the internal conflict between the characters really is.

So really, you can use the concept of this no matter WHAT you write.

I’m going to give an example of how you can play with this. If I take Nalini Singh’s Caressed by Ice (which you must read NOW BTW, I read it on Friday. In one day. It was that good.) and translate the heroes conflict (he’s afraid he can’t feel, can’t give the heroine what she needs, and that if he ever did, he might hurt her in a physical way as he can’t control his power) to a Presents I might end up with a hero very like Mak in A Royal World Apart, a man who’s shut off his ability to love because of a loss in his past, who is afraid to release his control and act based on emotion because when he did so in the past, his impulsive actions caused a terrible accident.

In the reverse, if I took my hero Stavros from At His Majesty’s Request and made his conflict literal, what might we get? Well, Stavros is bound by duty. He has to do the right thing for his country, marry the right woman. As it’s mentioned several times in the book, the world rests on his shoulders. If we made his conflict literal, perhaps he has to marry a certain woman, create an alliance or, literally, the world, civilization might crumble around him. Or something. But you get the idea. It’s playing with concepts of conflict and I think what sticks is revealing, and it can help you get a handle on what it all means. And maybe on playing with writing some things you might not have tried!

Because often, something might seem completely different from what you do, but the core remains the same: Character, emotion and conflict.

Thanks for bearing with me. 😉 I’ve been playing the conflict reversal game for a couple weeks now and had to share it!