Tool 6: Revealing character through inner struggle

- Typically when writers talk about conflict they're referring to something happening in the plot of the story, like an old nemesis, moving to town at the diagnosis of an illness and enemy spaceship landing. These are all external plot points that might add conflict or tension to a story. But conflict generally comes in two flavors, external, which has plot as its source and internal, which often sees the character battling against something within themselves. The latter is the focus of this lecture. Although external plot based conflict is important, it's essential to also bring conflict into character. We can't just leave conflict to the plot. Character must come with its own healthy serving of tension and internal conflict which are the essential gas in any story engine because characters are never perfect people or they shouldn't be, if you want to make them interesting they come with all sorts of deep seated damage, wounds that have injured them long ago and now act as very painful pebbles in your character shoe limiting their forward progress and cutting them down to size when they feel their best. We'll talk much more deeply about wounds in the next section of the course but it's this deep seated damage, this imperfection of character that makes them interesting to read about because it's what creates conflict inside of them or what we're going to call inner struggle. In all of my conversations with writers, one common idea has stuck out, Gail Carson Levine, the prolific fantasy and historical children's writer, who I interviewed for the Good Story podcast, phrased it best. "I don't make things easy for my characters." This can be accomplished through plot, of course but it can also come from the character themselves. In fact, when there's not a lot of action going on in your story, you can use inner struggle to keep the tension fires burning hot. When we start to dissect what inner struggle means in character terms, we will see that inner struggles fall into four categories. I'll introduce them here. And then we'll look at each in more detail. There's struggle against situation. Struggle against objective and motivation. Struggle against self and struggle against others. This list might sound like some of the external struggles I mentioned before but with a crucial difference here the character confronts how these elements, some of which are indeed external, make them feel internally. And that confrontation is what's going to pull in your reader and make them an active part of the story. As your reader watches these inner struggles unfold they learn a lot of important information about the character without you ever having to tell them. Let's take a look at the first category, struggle against situation. This is the most straightforward type of struggle because it's simply represents the action and reaction relationship of plot and character. Something happens in the plot, which is the action and the character reacts to it, which is the reaction. This takes the same principles we learned in our lecture on revealing character through reaction and goes even further with them. A character can have a straightforward one-off reaction on the inside to something that happens on the outside like shock and disappointment about a bad test grade frustration about a crashed computer hard drive embarrassment about a leaked picture online but some exterior situations present opportunities to go even deeper into a characters interiority to show not just the reaction in the moment but in ongoing inner struggle that reveals deep rooted conflicts, uncertainties or insecurities. As the writer it's our job to introduce the right exterior elements that will trigger these inner struggles and let them show through so that we're giving our reader detectives something to investigate such as why is Queen having such a hard time accepting that bad test grade? Obviously this goes deeper than just this one test or why is that crash computer hard drive drudging up so much angst. Could it tie back to something else in the story? There's that favorite reader question again? Why? And every time you can prompt a reader to ask it and try to answer it using your cleverly placed writer clues you are automatically engaging them. So whenever you give your character a new obstacle or development in their outside world remember to take a moment to consider how this reflects on their inner world. Let's move on to our second category struggle against objective and motivation. A character in a story is often driven by their objective which is more simply defined as what they want and their motivation, why they want it. These are crucial elements to have in place for your characterization because readers love to know what makes the character tick and why they do the things they do and pursue the things they pursue. We'll dive even further into motivations and objectives in the next section when we started developing our own dynamic characters. But for now it's important to note that sometimes a character will personally struggle with their objective. Like for example let's say you have a character who has been saving up for months to buy a designer handbag, but then learns that the company who makes the handbag exploit's its workers or a character who has always wanted to get into a certain college but then visits the college only to find that it's not as perfect of a fit as they imagined or a character who wants to sell a novel to a publisher but keeps getting rejection letter after rejection letter. Not that I know anyone like that these are all inner struggles relating to a character objective whether that be the objective itself, a change in the objective or the questioning of why an objective hasn't been reached and all of these scenarios present an opportunity for the character to struggle on the inside, no matter what is happening externally. A note about objective. Ideally your character will know what they want from the very beginning of any story and it will be a strong and clear want this want, however can change based on plot events or how the character is developing. If this happens, it is usually best accompanied by some tension or inner struggle as are all moments of big change in life. Struggles against motivation go hand in hand with struggles against objective because motivation is simply the character conscious reasoning for wanting that objective. Like for example, the character who's always dreamed of attending a certain college, which is their objective. All because their mother went there and graduated top of her class and became a huge success in her field which is the motivation. But perhaps as the story goes on the character starts to realize that they have completely different interests than their mother and that they don't want to follow in their mother's footsteps but instead want to blaze their own trail. These kinds of realizations would all start as inner struggles against objective and motivation. Now let's look at our third category, struggle against self. No character starts a story as a blank slate unless maybe you're starting the story at birth. Every time you write a story or even a single scene in a writing prompt, regardless of length the character is entering that story or scene as a fully fleshed out person with beliefs, worldviews and identity, and a past that shaped that identity. But how do we creatively reveal these kinds of elements to a reader without outright saying something like Kelly believed that there was a silver lining to every situation. Easy, we challenge Kelly's belief. We throw no circumstances at her that forced her to struggle against the belief. Maybe we throw a situation at Kelly in which she can't find a silver lining or struggles to find one. This confrontation with herself will reveal everything the reader needs to know about Kelly and what she believes. A characters struggle with themselves and/or parts of their identity are where we really learn who they are or who they believe they are. This is important. We all carry around with a sense of our own identity whether it's correct, helpful to our goals the same thing the world sees in us or not. What we think about ourselves informs how we behave in the world. We will often see struggle against self play out in thoughts and feelings. Like I don't like myself. I'm not sure of myself. Other people don't like me. How can I be braver, happier, more confident, stronger. I feel guilty about something I know I did wrong. What if everything I've ever thought to be true is wrong, et cetera. Again, the strategic writer who wants to reveal something key about their characters belief system or worldview will find that perfect exterior stimulus to trigger the inner struggle against self. And finally, let's look at struggle against others which can also be called inner struggles in relationships. Other people are wonderful additions to our lives most of the time, but sometimes we get into conflicts with our nearest and dearest or there's a person who just makes life worse, either way pitting your character against others even if that struggle is only happening on the inside is another wonderful tool we can use to reveal character to the reader. For example, let's say we have a character who craves a parent's approval. Obviously we don't just want to spell that out for the reader because that gives the reader nothing to do. So we create inner struggle for the character by putting them in a situation where they're doing something to gain their parents approval, like getting the lead in the school play, making the team a test, et cetera and then drilling into the aftermath of that attempt to reveal what happens when the parent doesn't show up to see them in the school play or at the big game, or barely acknowledges the ACE test pinned to the refrigerator door. This kind of inner struggle works so well because the results the character is seeking matters so much to them. The more a character cares about a conflict or relationship with another person, the more it hurts. And the more inner struggle is generated when we put them in the right situation. Or let's say you have a character who has always played by the rules. Again, we're not going to tell the reader that we're going to reveal it to them strategically by perhaps introducing a new friend who pressures the character to shoplift or introducing a rival at work who breaks all the rules and gets the promotion the character was after. You'll probably notice in both of these examples even though we were talking about struggle against others, the inner conflict the character was experiencing also closely touched upon or mirrored other types of struggles, like struggle against self the character who plays by the rules and loses and struggle against objective wanting the promotion or the lead in the school play. And that's an important thing to notice. A lot of these inner struggles overlap because they're all tying back to the same thing. The four categories of inner struggle are just four roads that lead you to the same place. You're a character's interiority, who your character is on the inside and why they do the things they do. We'll be going much deeper into this topic of who your character is and what shapes and molds their behavior in the next section. But for now just take note that everything we've been doing all of these tools we've been employing and all of the skills we've been layering are all designed with the same purpose in mind to reveal a dynamic character who has depth, complexity, objectives motivations, wounds, backstory, beliefs, worldviews and everything else that character should have because it's everything a human being has. That's what crafting dynamic characters is all about. We're going to continue our discussion on other characters and how they can be used to strategically reveal character in the next and final tool. For now, however, take a look at some examples from popular fiction and how authors have successfully managed to use this tool of revealing character through inner struggle in their work. First, let's take a look at an example of struggle against situations. In this passage from "Sing Unburied Sing." We see the character Jojo trying and failing to find humor in the situation of his mother being unable to get the proper birthday cake for him. Grandma always baked a beautiful cake for birthdays and she has kept the family together. Now that she's dying, Jojo can't help but worry how his clueless and neglectful mother who couldn't even pick up a proper cake for her own son can be trusted to hold down the Fort. Unfortunately, grandma doesn't have a lot of time left and Jojo has no choice in the matter. The ultimate struggle against situation. Next here's an example of struggle against objective from "Nothing to See Here" by Kevin Wilson. In this scene, Lillian and Madison have had a conflict. Lillian wants resolution, but she also wants something more from her friend, something that heals Madison's betrayal. She thinks Madison should do more to repair the rift but that is something she doesn't get. Meanwhile, she doesn't quite know how to advocate for herself. And this is also frustrating but very revealing about her character. Here's a powerful example of struggle against self from page 122 of "The Science of Breakable Things." Natalie in this example, is very clearly revealed. She wants to keep life in an analytical, scientific remove but she also seems to be by her deeper inability to feel when she needs to by pitting her against herself. We get a very telling glimpse into who she is as a character. And finally, let's look at struggle against others. Here's another passage from "Manhattan Beach" by Jennifer Egan. In this scene, we see Anna and Rose disagree about a woman's reputation. Not only is there conflict between the women about a sensitive topic which illuminates key information about both characters but this also illuminates larger struggles against a society and time period that holds women to an unfair standard. And as Anna is maybe starting to wonder about this conflict we learn important details about her character. As you saw from these examples, revealing character through inner struggle is another tool that requires us to layer other tools to effectively render it on the page. These examples feature delicately, layered thought reaction, dialogue, voice emotion, and physical showing. And you will need to do the same. If you, for example wanted to write a scene of your protagonist, struggling with a decision that goes against their core belief system which is struggle against self you'll probably find yourself reaching for thought, reaction, physical showing, and maybe dialogue and voice depending on how the scene plays out. Combining all of these tools together with the impetus of the struggle, which is the decision the character is facing will reveal a ton of useful information about the character to your reader. Okay, it's time to put our new tool to the test in the next exercise lecture we've got some fun writing prompts to help you practice the various types of inner struggle and how to use them to reveal useful information about a character to your reader.