Fictional Engineering, Part 1

No One Builds A Story Like a Crazy Scot

This is part one of a multi-part series I'm calling fictional engineering.  I'm an engineer by trade and a science fiction writer by delusion, so it made sense to me to characterize narrative composition as an engineering design process.  It isn't always that way, of course.  I tend to lose discipline with this technique a lot and that's okay.  However, I have found a few of these ideas helpful.  You'll probably find that they aren't exceptionally groundbreaking.  What I've done is synthesize some concepts I've encountered over the years from other writers.  In way it's a manifesto: out of all the ways I've seen fiction constructed, these are the ways that work for me.

Introduction

Every story is centered around conflict.  A single sentence summarizes the central conflict.  This sentence invokes at least one character and the situation the story puts them in.  Beyond that, every character, scene and theme can be defined in terms of conflict at some level.  Conflict is the energy that makes the story go.

Conflicts can come in three primary varieties: between a character and him/her/itself, between two characters and between a character and his/her/its situation.  These conflicts are analogous to the cliche (stated in masculine terms of course): man vs himself, man vs man and man vs the world.  

The “world” represents anything that is impersonal, be it an animal, a bureaucracy or a machine.  This is why I use the term “situation” instead, because the defining characteristic of this type of conflict is that one half of it is an object, not a subject, in the relationship.  A situation is anything that cannot reciprocate the character’s feelings of conflict.  If an animal, bureaucracy or machine obtains enough autonomy and personality in the story to reciprocate, then it becomes a character and should be classified in a character vs character conflict.  On the other hand, a person may be handled as a situation if he or she doesn’t have sufficient personality or autonomy to warrant full character status (e.g. the anonymous store clerk who is “just doing his job” and is more the face of a bureaucracy than a character with individual motivations).  Clearly real people can’t be categorized this way, but a story may have dozens of people like this.    

The difference between a character vs character and character vs himself type of conflict is less straightforward.  Can’t the latter be reduced to a special case of the former, in which both ends of the conflict are the same person?  In many cases this may be true, providing us with two simple types of conflict: character vs personal entity and character vs impersonal entity.  However, there is often at least one important difference.  A character cannot typically change his orientation to himself over the course of a story.  Conflict may bring characters together or split them apart, but a person must always live with himself.  This changes the way conflicts may be resolved, or not.  People usually find a resolution to their conflicts with other people, whether it is coming to a common understanding, finding an outlet that is external to the relationship, or ending the relationship.  The last option is a last resort.  If nothing else, one can resolve tension by severing the rope all together.  Outside of suicide, this option is closed to inner conflict.  That crucial difference (and there may be others) can be put to good use.  More on this later.

Premise

As stated above, a story starts with a premise.  This is a single sentence stating the central conflict.  The premise may be thematic or non-thematic.  A non-thematic premise has no “point”.  This is the sort of thing we might associate with escapist entertainment.  For example, “James Bond must stop a terrorist attack”.  A thematic premise states a conflict which is indicative of one or more abstract themes.  For example, “Hamlet plots to kill his uncle, whom he suspects of murdering his father to seize the throne.”  This premise is central to the story’s themes of revenge, treachery and corruption.  Clearly, the theme is not always obvious from the premise.  Indeed, it may be possible to swap my categorization of these two premises.  We may find that James Bond (however unlikely) has conflicted feelings about his job and starts to wonder what separates him from a terrorist, making the premise indicative of themes on just versus unjust causes.  On the other hand, maybe we could write Hamlet as an Elizabethan version of “Kill Bill”, in which Hamlet spends all of his time knocking off all of Claudius’ associates before slaying the man himself and riding off into the sunset.  We get a lot of blood and action scenes, much like the original Hamlet, but without the introspective monologues.

So what’s the difference?  This difference is in your mind.  You obviously know whether you want your story to be about some philosophical theme or not.  You don’t need to spell this out to yourself.  However, when we go that route we can find ourselves struggling to make the theme concrete.  A theme may be stated as a conflict: “is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them?” Stating the theme in terms of conflict is a good start, but it doesn’t make a premise.  A story has characters, and as the impetus for story, so should the premise.  Thinking in these terms forces a writer to restate the theme in terms of a specific personal story that illustrates that theme.  This is probably obvious, but it is important throughout the writing process to always be looking for the concrete.  If an abstract theme cannot play a role in a character’s concrete problems and pursuits, then why is it worth writing about?  Writing the thematic premise is the first step to bridging the gap between thought and reality.

Character

Every major character must have at least one internal and one external conflict.  There are exceptions, such as James Bond, who is usually portrayed as a sort of stone faced superhero with no history and no inner life, but even the most escapist stories typically have characters with internal conflicts.  And these conflicts need not be deep.  One of the easiest ways to make a character sympathetic is to create a space for contradiction.  For example, what if the Queen of England happened to be an excellent poker player?  What if this reserved grandmother sometimes took on a secret identity so that she could collect from hardened cockney gamblers?  Such a character is instantly likable and that humorous affability is based on inner conflict.  It’s not of the soul searching Hamlet kind, but it is conflict nonetheless and may result in both comedy and suspense.

Whether they be light or heavy, conflicts may be categorized as potential and kinetic.  A potential conflict is what we start a scene with and a kinetic conflict is the action that plays out the consequence of that potential during the course of the scene.  For example, two characters may start a scene with a personal history, such as divorce.  The potential conflict is that character A does not trust character B to avoid interfering with A’s relationship with their child.  That is a character vs character potential conflict.  On B’s side, the potential conflict is a desire to win A’s trust along with a desire for personal advancement.  That is an internal potential conflict.  The kinetic conflict occurs during the action of the scene, which in this case is a fight during which A says something that convinces B that preserving trust is less important than advancing career.  So B takes a job offer in another city and takes the child along - thus realizing A’s fears.

Every conflict has a resolution.  This is true even of potential conflicts.   Something has prevented a potential conflict from becoming kinetic up until the scene where the tension breaks.  In the above example, perhaps B has slowly been taking steps to earn A’s trust.  A is still suspicious, but is willing to be patient.  The kinetic conflict must overwhelm the potential resolution and result in a kinetic resolution.  The difference between a potential and kinetic resolution is that the potential resolution is a counter force against tension that maintains the status quo, while a kinetic resolution changes the game.  The potential conflict no longer exists once this resolution has come to a fore.  Sometimes, it ends there, because that is what the whole story was about.  Sometimes, it spawns new internal and external potential conflicts in its wake.

A Simple Story Foundation

In my next post, I'll put these things in motion and discuss story foundations.

In The Meantime, There's More To See