The Trendsetter

Conflict in fiction propels your plot forward. Without conflict - faced by the characters - your fiction is nothing but a summary about life amongst your characters. With conflict you make them come alive striving for what they yearn for and will do anything to achieve their goals. In order to make it interesting to the reader, your characters must face conflicts and the ending is either they get what they are looking for or they fail.

In my previous blog How to build conflict for your main characters, I gave an example about Anita, the main character in my short story, Antara Dua Kota (Between Two Cities) facing a conflict over whether to stay for the Summer in Paris or return to her home country. What type of conflict do you think she is facing?
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Other than a great plot, the characters are the ones who are responsible to move the plot forward. In my previous entry Where do you get ideas for your characters, I suggested to looks at your friends and list them down to find out if they can become potential characters. They’re one of the best sources as characters. Now, that you have your characters ready to get into action, you need to create them in such away that they are credible or believable.

The question is how do you make your characters believable? When I started writing fiction, I asked myself the same question. Since one of my primary interests when majoring in psychology is personality, I had learned how personality develops from birth to adulthood. Armed with this knowledge, I used Personality Psychology to guide me to create credible and believable characters.
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I have previously discussed how coincidence can be used to make or break your plot. Now, I will continue to write about developing your plot by having your characters face conflict. Conflict is the center of the plot that moves the main characters forward in the story.

I define conflict in fiction as problem(s) faced by the main characters (or other significant characters) that forces them to seek solutions. As a writer, how do you build conflict for your main characters? One way is through adversarial dialogue. Sol Stein in his best seller, How to Grow a Novel: The Most Common Mistakes Writers Make and How to Overcome Them states:

The conflict is often verbal, not high drama, sometimes even mundane.

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If you are just starting to write your first fictional piece, you know your story requires a plot in order for your characters to move forward. The plot is a story with all the challenges and difficulties faced by your main characters and how they overcome them.

I remember my journalist friend, who is also a poet, had criticized the plot in one of my young adult novels titled “Jejaka Idaman” (Idol Man). He said there were too many coincidences in it and he didn’t like it for this reason. The plot begins with the main character, Angie, who is challenged by her three closest friends to find the man of her dreams - the type of man she used to read in novels to be tall, dark and handsome. Angie tried to be realistic about it and told her friends she will never find such a man as described as tall, dark and handsome in their country since those descriptions only fit the Western man. Her friends still challenged her to find him.
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