Essays and Assays

Is Conflict Necessary In Fiction? by Christopher Mahon copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved

About the author
Christopher Mahon has been a Californian since graduating from the University of Notre Dame in 1978. He has recently published an excerpt from his memoir-in-progress at www.toasted-cheese.com. Christopher has also published fiction in The Jessamyn West Review, poetry in the anthology What Have You Lost? and numerous articles in San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California newspapers. He has worked in the publishing industry, and currently supports his writing as a freelance editor and substitute teacher. Christopher lives in northern San Diego County with his wife and their two Jack Russell terriers.

As 9-11 became an irrevocable part of American history, and as it became horrifically evident that we had to reduce the amount of conflict in the world—conflict that, ironically, has only since increased—I began to wonder what we writers do, if anything, to contribute to the conflict in the world.

Do we fuel the conflict in society when we portray it in our novels and stories?

It's a question often asked of violent television programs but rarely asked of writers. Certain books, like Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, may strike a nerve in the reading public and raise questions about the use of violence in a novel. But, generally, conflict and violence are accepted in the realm of fiction.

In fact, it's assumed that conflict is one of the primary tools of the trade. If you take a writing course, or buy a how-to-write-a-novel book, often you'll find that one of the cardinal rules of writing a novel is: You' ve got to have conflict. A character must run into obstacles.

I wonder if it's necessary.

Couldn't we write stories that develop the way a photograph develops? Couldn 't a story grow in the way a flower blooms rather than in the way a battle is fought?

If we ever hope to achieve a world without conflict, or, at least, with less conflict, shouldn't we writers try to write stories with no conflict whatsoever, and develop plots that portray the kind of world we all hope to live in? I'm not referring to fairy tales (which, now that I think of it, are often very violent) or utopias. I'm talking about fictional worlds in which people cooperate harmoniously to improve their lives. Isn't that the kind of personal, social and artistic wavelength we should strive for? After all, if you can't imagine it, how can you create it in reality?

These questions do not come to me out of the blue.

In recent years, like so many other people in this country, I have had a spiritual reawakening. The culture - or at least one big part of it - is changing, and certain high-profile spokespersons have appeared to usher in the change. Doctors like Andrew Weil and others like Carolyn Myss have brought spiritual principles into healing practices. New Age gurus like Marianne Williamson have updated ancient spiritual practices to the lives of people who must shop at Lucky's and Safeway. Buddhist masters like Thich Nhat Hanh have brought meditation principles to the West. And people like Deepak Chopra, who understand the body and the nature of time through the precepts of ancient Indian philosophy, have become best selling authors in Peoria, IL.

The message is this: change the way we think; change the way we practice our lives.

Maybe the message even applies to storytellers: change the way we tell stories; change the stories themselves.

A few years ago, I began to write a novel that aimed to dramatize the changes that I saw in the culture all around me. I wanted to write a story in which certain spiritual principles were operating, one in which people are fulfilling their dreams in life by tuning into the divine energies that spiritual leaders—from prominent New Age spokesperson to the most modest of Buddhists—say we all have access to.

And, in many ways, I wanted to write a book with as little conflict as possible.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but I'll tell you this: A fellow moves to a new town. He gets a new job. He finds a new girlfriend. He develops spiritually. Things go wonderfully because one of my main characters—however invisible—is God Herself. The divine presence. She's moving things along quite nicely for my characters.

And yet what I also wanted to convey was the aching feeling I have that no matter how hard we try on this earth to align ourselves with a spiritual
power (you may call it the divine), there is always a gap between the spirit
and the flesh. And into that gap falls sorrow and pain and death. Into that
gap may fall the longing for the Divine itself.

I was quite proud of the book, and submitted pages of it to editors and agents at last January's San Diego Writers Conference.

"Where's the tension?" an editor asked me there, after she had read the opening pages to the novel and while we were talking about the book. She's a well-known editor. She has her own imprint.

"The tension is between the divine promise and the human experience," I
said.

"That could be big," she said, "if you do it well. I mean, it speaks to what everyone is searching for."

It's been eight months since the conference and I still know I haven't fully dramatized the tension. The book has gone through four drafts. It awaits another.

Maybe it needs more conflict.

A couple weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night. I had set my novel in the year 1999 and 2000. What woke me up was the idea of setting the book in 2001 and 2002. The events of the book occur roughly in the space of the year. From May of one year to June of the next. I thought if I set the book in 2001, those four airplanes would fly into the book on September 11th just as they flew into our lives. That would create a lot of tension between the divine promise and the human experience.

The idea blew me away because I wasn't quite sure if it was even sensible to approach such a delicate and difficult subject in my book. I decided the only one I could talk to about it was the well-known editor in New York, the one I had spoke to at the San Diego Writers Conference.

I called her and was surprised when she called back two days later.

I told her about my idea.

"That could work," she said.

I talked to her about a number of other things, too in the passionate, effusive manner I can sometimes click into. Perhaps I shouldn't have called
at all. But I'm glad I did. It's one of those things I probably wouldn't do again but was glad I did it this time.

I asked her how she thought writers would treat "the event" (9-11).

She said she thought that writers were going to be writing about "the event" for a long time to come in a lot of different ways.

That makes sense. Not only has the event had a profound effect on our individual minds and souls, it has now framed the moral and spiritual questions of our time.

I may be one of those writers. I may revise my novel to include the events of 9-11. I may emphasize the tension—the conflict—between the divine and the human a little more forcefully.

But still, my questions linger.

Maybe we can't avoid conflict, but how should we approach it? Are the laws of the imagination and the laws of conflict one and the same? Is there a difference? Can you even say that the imagination follows laws, or has a nature that, ultimately, defies conflict?

And what about art? I search in my mind through the other arts—painting,
sculpture, music, photography, film—and ask myself where conflict is found
in them.

I see little conflict in a Georgia O'Keefe painting of a flower. Can a novel without conflict be any less artistic?

Yet it seems to me now, especially in light of 9-11, that conflict is something we'll never avoid in the world and we writers have to find ways to write about it. Peaceful ways, I think.

We just can't duplicate conflict. We just can't replicate it and take it a step further, into fiction. We have to transform it. Perhaps we as writers have to battle conflict ourselves—with the peaceful tools of art—and win. Defeat conflict.

Language has always been the tool for peace. After all the bombs have been dropped and the bullets shot and the lives destroyed, others have come to a conference table and talked. They've used language, finally, to resolve the conflicts that were waged with bombs and bullets.

We writers begin with language, with the tools for peace. And perhaps we
should always emphasize that.

The very beauty of language and the peaceful sensibility of the writer behind it can transform conflict even as it appears in a story.

But I would still like to write a story that has no conflict whatsoever, that develops the way a photograph develops, or the way a flower blooms.

Someday.

>>Back to top<<

From San Diego Writers Monthly publishes California Writers, California authors, new writers, offering readers info on how to get published, from literary agents, writing coaches, San Diego editors on editing, self-publishing how-to, publishing chap books and short-run books, book doctors, ghost writers, San Diego authors events, interviews of writers, book reviews, free readings, book signings, free stories, online fiction, poetry workshops, free novels, free essays, free ideas, science fiction, humorous stories, rants, funny essays, copywriting, freelancing info, and musings about living on this lonely planet circling a lonely star.