Dina Fleet Berry

I’ve been in my critique group for a little over a year. Every month, these two wonderful, insightful women have the same comments about my writing. Why? Cause I’m lazy in the same way with every bit of writing. If you must know – I don’t place the reader firmly in the physical scene.

I have the same comments every time about one of the ladies in the group.  She doesn’t have much conflict. I read 24 pages tonight for this month’s critique group. I circled the page number of any page I found conflict on: just one – page 11.

I wondered why this lady doesn’t have any conflict in her scenes. I can think of two reasons: either she subconsciously ignores it or she doesn’t think it is required. So I wondered if conflict (as in Goal, Motivation, Conflict) is on the major scene checklists I could find on the Internet. Go ahead and search google for scene checklist.

Each of these checklists says tension or some other word but not conflict. It’s almost as if writers (even of checklists) don’t want to use that word: conflict.

I’ve been there myself. I’m writing a scene and I quickly and easily slip by the conflict because I don’t like conflict. This however makes a scene boring. You might say your scene doesn’t need conflict because your writing a literary story. I just finished Empire Falls and was blown away with how much conflict was on every page. Every page.

So I’m going to write my own scene checklist of one item:

Conflict

Without conflict, there is no point for the scene to be in the story. The goal and motivation of the characters of the scene are necessary ingredients to develop the conflict so don’t leave those out. A fight in a bar nearby when the librarian just wants to cross the street is not the type of conflict the scene needs unless the fight is keeping her from achieving her goal of crossing the street so she can rescue the book from the gutter before it is ruined.

Tags: Scene, Writing