Monday Morning Musings

Drama Camp is officially over. We had our last production yesterday and the response from the audiences was great. We had over 80 in attendance Saturday night and about 70 on Sunday. It is quite a challenge to put a show together in just two weeks, but it always seems to work. The kids did a terrific job and garnered lots of laughs and applause throughout.

Now I have my routine back and when I came into my office this morning I saw a very large spider. Maybe it wasn't as big as my fear made it, but thank goodness for my cat, John. He must have thought the spider was a small rodent because he pounced on it and killed it.

In last Thursday's Dallas Morning News I read a column written by Leonard Pitts in which he took journalists to task over the lack of integrity in the profession. The article was in response to the recent debacle at News of the World.  According to a Gallup poll quoted by Pitts, the general public ranks journalists between auto mechanics and lawyers in terms of ethics.

It is apparent that that code has been severely diluted in recent history. It used to be that the tabloids were the newpapaers known for sleazy journalism and reporters who crossed every line to get a good story. More recently we have heard of reporters from major publications fabricating stories or plagiarizing in attempts to further their careers.

The code that I learned early in my career, and that Pitts reminds us in his article is that "One avoids conflicts of interest. One does not plagiarize. One does not buy information. And one does not hack the voice mail of a missing child."

Okay, that last one was not specifically in the code that I learned, but I was taught to respect the dignity of the people in the stories I was pursuing. In that way I protected my integrity, as well as the integrity of the publication for which I was working.

Drama means conflict

 If you have not been a follower of Kristen Lamb's Blog, I highly suggest you check it out when you get a chance. She recently did a couple of posts dealing with conflict, and the one that really resonated with me was "Little Darlings and why they Must Die"  In that post she makes the point that complications do not equal conflict. She wrote:

The problem is, complexity is not conflict. We can create an interstellar conspiracy, birth an entirely new underground spy network, resurrect a dead sibling who in reality was sold off at birth, or even start the Second Civil War to cover up the space alien invasion…but it ain’t conflict. Interstellar war, guerilla attacks, or evil twins coming back to life can be the BACKDROP for conflict, but alone are not conflict.

 Before I read Kristen's post, I had just finished reading a book that had been sent to me for possible review. While the writing in the book was engaging in parts and the central character was interesting, I was lost in layers of complications and kept sensing that something was missing. That something was real conflict.

Then I thought about the trouble I had in finishing Stalking Season, the second book in my mystery series, and realized that I had been struggling with this issue of conflict vs. complications. With a mystery, we want lots of suspects and false trails, but I know I have to be careful that I don't focus too much on that and forget about the basics of conflict:

                                       Character > goal > impediments

Another way to look at this is to think of drama as action and reaction. A character sets out to accomplish a goal, other characters or circumstances keep him from the goal, and he reacts. Keep in mind that reaction is emotional as well as physical. For example  in a romance the couple might have a fight and one of them storms out. That is the physical reaction. The emotional is what the character feels and thinks about the fight and what it means to the relationship.

In my case, I had been concentrating on the procdural side of the detectives finding the killer, I had missed some opportunities for real conflict. I knew something was missing, just like I knew something was missing in the book I read for review, but I  couldn't define the missing part until that aha moment when I read Kristen's blog.

Writers, how do you handle conflict in your stories?