Where's The Heat in Your Story?

5 SUBTLE ways to ignite a narrative flame with Literary Friction instead of Goonda Conflict

Photo by Ethan Hu on Unsplash

"The writer's job is to create productive friction. Too much concordance and the narrative feels flat; too much discordance and it feels chaotic. The art lies in finding that perfect abrasion that generates heat without consuming the work entirely." — David Mitchell, in a 2014 interview with The Paris Review

Happy 50501, Loreates,

I hope you’re staying sane, safe, and as active in defending your rights as time and strength allow. The story of our society right now is so hot that almost anything I write seems to pale by comparison. Even the manuscript I just finished ghostwriting (yay, we beat our deadline!), which indirectly is about the soul of the nation, may turn out to be far too timid by the time it’s published next year — because who can dare or bear to imagine the civil conflagration that might be underway by then? I sure can’t (this is where editors earn their stripes— we hope).

But as a writing lesson, there’s something else to learn here. What we’re living through is CONFLICT writ large, and if there’s one overused mantra in writing it’s that every story needs conflict. The current occupant of the White House is the embodiment of overt, obvious, obnoxious conflict — lives for it, instigates it, demands and thrives on it. But this kind of conflict, which I hereby dub Goonda Conflict, is like an endless fist fight; it’s tedious, repetitive, exhausting, and ultimately numbing. That may be the true intention of political Goonda Conflict: to so numb the public that everyone just tunes out and turns away. But if this were a story you were writing, that would be a very bad game plan indeed. As a writer, the last thing you want is to beat your reader senseless.

That’s why I recommend channeling conflict instead through more subtle Literary Friction. Even if you’re writing an action movie packed with car chases and shootouts, you’ll still need to generate enough emotional heat to make your audience care which character wins or loses. And more of that heat typically rises through interpersonal friction in between showdowns than during the staged fights.

This post, then, is dedicated to the art of raising narrative temperature through the subtler forms of friction that animate most literary stories. I share it with the wistful but determined hope that we will all be able to focus full time on this kind of writing— and living— again in the not too distant future.

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Two Quick Announcements!

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Also,

Darien Gee

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Katie Gee Salisbury

to discuss The Writer’s Journey, Unfiltered [working title!]. This will probably happen early in May. I’ll give you a heads up as soon as we set the date and time!

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Raising the narrative temperature with Literary Friction instead of Goonda Conflict

Writing teachers tend to have personal refrains. My colleague Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s was, “Where’s the heat?” Micheline’s novels revolve around sex, genocide, and desperate flights of emigration. She knows what ignites fire in the heart, but she often found this friction absent in her students’ work. So, alas, did I. Instead, we found a lot of exposition, mundane conversation, characters thinking alone in their rooms, and, in service of the almighty need for “conflict,” shouting matches and flying fists that often served no emotional purpose.

One problem was that the authors tended to forget my mantra: “All writing is relationship.”

All Writing Is Relationship!

But even when they were writing through relationship, they often neglected to generate enough friction for those connections to produce heat. And even the quietest story needs to regularly raise the reader’s temperature to keep them turning pages!

"Literary conflict is the friction that keeps readers turning pages. It's not merely about opposition, but about the energy created when values, desires, and worldviews scrape against each other." — Lisa Cron, "Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence" (2012)

So I turned to the novels and memoirs I was assigning my students to read, and came up with a list of five alternative sources of Literary Friction that can generate heat without drawing blood. To understand why these catalysts ignite a story, think about the moments when your own heart quickens, raising your temperature. If you’re like me, you feel flushed when you get angry, feel ashamed or frustrated, become aroused, or fall into a spell of curiosity or passionate engagement. Well, guess what? Those same experiences generate heat on the page, and that heat is transmitted to your readers.

So, here goes. Some examples of Literary Friction in fiction and memoir, generated without Goonda Conflict: