When you think about your next novel, you start with a hazy picture in your mind. In fact, the conflict may be the first thing you see: a couple loses their only child because of a doctor’s (perceived) incompetence. With that you can construct characters. Clearly you need a man and a woman. And maybe a boy or girl. Oh, the doctor. Maybe a lawyer or two. Throw in a judge. Starting with the conflict opens up whole new vistas.

Ah, but perhaps you’re writing your next romance novel. The characters are standard: a (few) women and an irresistible man (or two). But hasn’t every possible romance novel been written? Hmph. You’re stumped for an appropriate conflict. After all, the whole point of a novel is to watch your characters interact as they deal with (and hopefully resolve) the conflict. Sometimes there are multiple levels of conflict. Perhaps the background setting is World War II—a gigantic conflict. Inside that might be a conflict between resistance groups in Vichy France. And so on. You can’t solve the WWII conundrum, but you can focus on your resistance fighters and (perhaps) keep them from killing each other (or worse, ratting them out to the Vichy government).

Here are a few ideas. As you read through these, think of more (and put them in a comment).

Between your character and him- or herself:

• Cancer
• A miscarriage
• Overcoming debilitating shyness
• …or a stutter
• A deep look into the character’s past
• Man vs Nature—plane crash or car wreck or sudden snowstorm while hiking, etc.
• Sudden change in circumstances (house burns down, husband dies, swindled)
• Finding religion
• Losing religion
• Mental illness (I know about this one: I’m bipolar)

Between two people:

• Two decent, honorable people who misunderstand each other’s intentions (crotchety old farmer vs up and coming real estate agent)
• Evading an assassin
• Being the assassin
• Stingy father vs vagrant son
• The usual marital problems, although this has probably been worked over pretty thoroughly
• Two middle-aged spinster sisters at each other because one thinks the other destroyed an opportunity for marriage
• All sorts of gay and lesbian stuff, although this is perhaps a little too politically correct these days. You need a twist. Instead of a college student coming home and outing himself to his parents, have the father out himself to the children while his wife struggles to keep the love they’ve developed during 25 years of marriage
• People operating on different information (the old proverbial blind men describing the elephant). Naturally, they have to work at cross purposes.
• Busybodies and gossips
• Ah, the root of all evil: the love of money! So wonderfully corrosive. Follow the relationship between a high-achieving father and his studious, contemplative son (or daughter).
• Here’s a topical one: an honest mutual fund manager finds himself inexorably drawn into creating a Ponzi scheme. (Madoff, move over!)
• A desperate government employee is driven to accept a bribe and someone blows the whistle

Mysteries (not my forte, but some possibilities):

• Four rather nasty kids stand to inherit millions. Which one killed Dad?
• An art theft (you’d better know your stuff for this one!)
• Police procedural: finding a gang member’s killer when your hero cop thinks the killer did the world a favor
• An old widow vs an identity thief

Now those above all deal pretty much with novels set in our time and day, but you can easily adapt them to fantasy:

• The starship discovers a new planet full of hostile and well-armed crazies
• The old witch casts an evil spell on the young prince
• A mystery disease slowly turns people green
• Suddenly no one on the planet can have a child and everyone grows too old to care for themselves
• White supremacists succeed in taking over Idaho and keep the Federal forces at bay
• A woman that our hero killed comes back as a ghost and taunts him into madness
• War in the heavens: the angels revolt! (Check Revelations 12:7 for this one).
• A child leads armored knights into battle and outwits the evil King Gruesome
• The King wants his second son to have the throne and tries to kill his firstborn (and the firstborn is already scheming to off his brother and his old man)

It goes on, doesn’t it! Pick a few and jot down what characters you might need to make the conflict really sizzle.

Many scenes in my novels are set locally. Locally means Ouray County in the Colorado Rockies. And, yes, I take a bunch of photographs. In fact, I’ll stand on the spot and take enough pictures that I have an entire 360-degree view! With digital cameras, there’s no limit. In fact, a scene in the second Flying Broomstick book is set in Mesa Verde National Park, not terribly far from here. So, I hopped on my motorcycle and made the trip. On the way I made note of the terrain over which my characters would fly, picking up such details as numerous trees killed by beetle infestation, the recovery of some land from a fire, the tunnel, etc. I took dozens of photos. But remember: use these photos as reminders, not as a complete record of your visit.

Now here’s the rub. Photos only record what you can see. No one has (yet) invented a photo that can convey a smell. You could take some video so you get the sounds, but a microphone picks up everything whereas when you are in situ, your ears can tune out irrelevant sounds.

So, as you’re taking your reminder pictures, take some time to record the things a camera cannot. Record your reaction to the scene—you can put this reaction into one of your characters.

What about scenes that you can’t visit? Hopefully, you can substitute. Keep a scene journal. The next time you’re in a busy airport waiting area, write down your impressions, using all five senses.

Sometimes you can’t substitute. You just have to imagine it. I have a hyperactive imagination, which probably comes from being bipolar. But I can follow a scene in my mind’s eye. For example, in the first Flying Broomstick book, I get stuck above some clouds at night. Now I’ve seen what cloud tops look like in moonlight from the safety of an airline seat, but in this case I was at 15,000 feet on a broomstick. Key items in the scene:

• Moonlight. Bright but colorless.
• Cold. Stinking, freezing, cold. Ice forming on my broomstick. Fingers going numb. Goggles fogging up.
• Altitude. 15,000 feet. Well, I’ve been above 14,000 feet and one does not move quickly with that little air around. So I have to add in some mental confusion.
• The quiet. I’m floating with the wind, so no wind noise. But the storm makes noise—distant thunder which lights the insides of some of the clouds
• The loneliness. Absolutely no one is around to help. There’s a strong fear factor here, too.
• Dislocation. The GPS has failed. I have no clue where I am and if I don’t get to the ground quickly, I’ll freeze to death. But where is the ground? If I drop altitude, I might just ram a mountain.
• Oh, yeah, I’m upside down when I come out of the clouds. With no horizon reference until I get up through the cloud and into the moonlight, I can’t stay upright.

Do you get the idea? Have a pen and paper (or your computer) handy as you carefully imagine the scene. Feel it! Shiver with the cold. Pant in the heat. Hunger for relief. Thirst in the desert. And write it all down!

Now how much of this do you convey to your reader? The answer is, well, just enough. You’re not writing a travelogue, so careful description is not what you’re after. You use enough of the scene to round out your character or show a flaw, or to create tension or a mood, or whatever you need at the moment.

Also, and this is important, if you’re writing in the first person, the scene is filtered through your narrator. Use this: Instead of “she handed me a lovely, hand-wrapped piece of premium chocolate,” you can say “I saw my diet going out the window. I’m not really a chocolate person, but I didn’t want to offend her, so I pretended to be grateful. I took a small bite, wrapped up the rest, and put it in my pocket, to be dumped at the earliest convenience.” You see what I mean.

So, even if you only convey the essence of a scene, you need to have lived it with all five senses. Then you can write your scene with confidence.

How boring. So what?

It’s human nature that we don’t learn from good times. We learn from the bad. If you have bad times as a youth, you’re irresponsible. If you have bad times as an adult, you are “down on your luck.”

Today the Montrose County School Board announced that on average, the pupils in their charge are average. The dropout rate was exactly as expected. The Wilson brat, Johnny, whom nobody has ever liked and who has been arrested 15 times for everything from drug dealing to car theft, turned himself around in his senior year with straight A’s, 95-th percentile on his SAT, voted the “Friendliest Senior,” and is headed to Harvard on a full scholarship.

Now how much of that last paragraph do you really want to hear about? You want to hear about the exceptions to the norm. The norm is the old, boring norm and is the same every day. No news there. But what about that Wilson kid? Johnny??? Everyone knew he was a loser. How did he turn himself around? What dragged him out of the gutter and made him stand tall? Y’know, there might be a story in that, because a very flawed young man changed unexpectedly. What, you ask, led to the change?

If everyone did what they were supposed to do, we’d have no news. No car crashes. No unemployment. Zero crime. And technology would grind to a halt because no one would invent anything new. Yes, by definition, those who change things are non-conformists. They’re weird. They think differently. And they create conflict. Conflict between their ideas for change and everyone else who is quite happy doing things the same old way.

So, here’s my thesis: there is no progress without conflict. So, if you’re going to write a novel, it has to be about something newsworthy. Further, something has to change. Got it? Two ingredients: conflict and change. Conflict without change is stasis: the conflict remains forever. (How sad, but no news there.) So the change in your novel must (at least partially) resolve the conflict. Something changes: the situation or the people, usually the latter.

There are multiple types of conflict. Here are some ideas:

• Person against person. (Man vs woman. Man vs man. Crusading District Attorney against organized crime. A woman escaping the white slave trade.)
• Person against nature. (Lost in the woods. Overcoming a handicap. Scientific breakthrough.)
• Person against him- or herself. (Conflicting loyalties. Overcoming alcoholism. Rooting out the evil demons that keeps her from accepting love. Overcoming post-traumatic stress syndrome. Living with bipolar illness. (That last one is me.))

Now we’re all acquainted with those series novels in which the key actor never changes. Hercule Poirot. Perry Mason. Nancy Drew. But if you look more carefully, there’s a character or two (or many) who are in dire conflict and who will change as the conflict is resolved.

My Broomstick books have a narrator (me) who ostensibly never changes. Yet if you look one level deeper, you’ll see that the narrator changes without admitting to it. And, especially in Broom 2 and Broom 3, what appear to be secondary characters end up being the real focus in the conflict and are the ones who change.

So your characters have to change for the better, right? It is true that Americans like happy endings. Bill overcomes his alcoholism and discovers what it means to be a dad. Joyce and Larry finally get married after working through some difficult economic times.

But do all your characters have to change for the better? I experiment with one character in Broom 3, to be released in 2009, who changes for the worse.

What makes conflict? Like I said earlier, if everyone were perfect, there’d be no conflict. So conflict arises when people are not perfect. In other words, your characters, whatever their other redeeming qualities, must have flaws. Jimmy wants to marry Betty but he’s such a tightwad he won’t buy her a ring. Tim wants to run for public office, but there’s that drunk driving conviction in his past he hopes no one will uncover. Mary and John are headed for divorce because both are stuck in a power struggle. So, look to the seven deadly sins and assign at least some to each of your characters. Jim fights to save his marriage but his wife learns of an affair he had ten years prior. Johnny’s father is abusive and Johnny thinks the conflict all his own fault, not his father’s.

Now, think about conflict resolution. Again, we just aren’t interested in flawed people who don’t change. They may not be perfect at the end of the story, but a flaw needs to be fixed. Using the examples from the paragraph above, Jimmy learns that his miserly ways are hurting others. Tim confesses his past deeds at a meeting of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and points to five years of freedom from alcohol. Mary and John learn that humility and respect travel far. (Or perhaps John realizes he’s dying emotionally and gets a divorce, finds himself to be a good man, and courts someone very different from Mary.) Jim carefully confesses his past adultery and his wife learns to forgive. (Or maybe she murders him and escapes to the Amazon jungle.) Johnny comes to realize he’s a pretty good kid and finds ways to get help for his father. (Or he runs away. Or he learns to stand up to his father. Or he kills him.) The possibilities are endless.

So, if you want conflict, create flawed characters, then put them in a situation that creates conflict. Characters: three greedy siblings. Situation: Mom dies, leaving a $10M estate (sadly worth about half that in 2009) without clear instructions in her will. Character: Jimmy, a city kid hooked on the Internet and fast food. Situation: Jimmy is orphaned, sent to live with distant relatives who live on the most remote farm in the entire state of Wyoming. Character: Sgt Bill Mulligan. Situation: After weeks of daily gunfights in Iraq, he loses a leg and a hand.

The possibilities are endless. But before you start your novel, know who your characters are (after all, you can design them to be anything) and know the situation that will cause conflict. Then sit back and watch them duke it out!

Of course you need a plot! The plot is the storyline that holds your novel together. Without it, your novel is just so many journal entries (and even those have a real-life plot behind them).

Here’s how I do it. Your mileage may vary. Let’s take the first book in the Broom series as an example. I was sitting in a long (three day), boring meeting in Maryland in July of 2005. I’m a Harry Potter fan. The engineer in me was daydreaming of how a broomstick might really fly. Dynamics and that sort of thing. I decided that I’d describe a broomstick’s flight capabilities entirely differently from the Harry Potter version.

Being an engineer, I thought of various backstories that might have led to a flying broomstick. Somewhere, somehow, it would have to get the power to levitate. And, of course, a real flying broomstick over the skies of Ouray County, Colorado, would create some excitement.

On the United flight from Dulles to Denver, I spent every moment scratching ideas out on a sheet of notebook paper. I didn’t use my laptop because my thoughts at this point were wildly disorganized. Many of my notes were single words. By the time I was home, I had several competing ideas banging around inside my skull.

In August, September, and October, I worked and reworked those ideas. Oh, and created characters (see my blog entry on creating characters). By the time I was ready to write, I had 26 pages of single-spaced notes in Word, organized by character bios, plot points, and more details than you would imagine about how broomsticks really fly.

For reasons I can’t fully explain, I decided to make myself the main character and treat the project as though it were my recollections of how the flying broomstick came about.

I decided that the power to levitate would come from a “good” (as opposed to “evil” or “occult”) source. Thinking back to my childhood Sunday School training, I remembered that Moses and Aaron went to see Pharaoh to demand that the Israelites be freed. At one point (Exodus 7:10), Aaron throws his rod (staff or walking stick) in front of Pharaoh and it turns into a snake. Pharaoh summoned his wise men and sorcerers and had them throw their rods down; these became snakes also, but Aaron’s snake ate the others. Well! Here I had something. For the sake of simplicity I concentrated solely on Moses. There was something special about that staff—I decided that the staff itself held at least some of the power that the Lord displayed to Pharaoh. What, I asked myself, had happened to that staff through history?

Oh, and there’s another object that still fascinates. At the Last Supper, Jesus drinks from a cup. In many interpretations, that cup is the Holy Grail, meaning something long sought after (because no one has yet found it).

So, let’s invent an organization. We’ll call it the Fraternal Order of the Grail, a small, highly-secret fraternal order that has as its purpose preserving the two artifacts just mentioned: the sole remaining remnant of Moses staff, now worn down to about 14 inches long and a half inch in diameter, carved with ancient Hebrew phrases attesting to its power. Oh, the other artifact? The Holy Grail itself. The story I thought of is that Peter, thinking the cup might have some significance, grabbed it off the table as the party left the upper room. The cup made its way to Rome and eventually to Londinium, the Roman city that would eventually become London.

So, you see how the plot begins to emerge? We can start with my stumbling into this organization while my wife and I were in London. I’m accidentally inducted. I’m given a faithful copy of the remnant of Moses’ staff and receive the Power.

Well, what comes next? Create a broomstick that flies! Then learn how to ride (tame) it.

In every good story line there’s conflict. Conflict can be between a protagonist and nature, between the protagonist and himself, between the protagonist and external forces or other people. I set myself up as protagonist in the first Broom book (we have different protagonists in the second and third books, although I continue to narrate). The conflict is this engineer who stumbles into a way to make a broomstick fly and then all the trouble he gets into because of it. There’s conflict between the protagonist and the broomstick (it does have a bit of a mind of its own), the protagonist and the news media, the FAA, etc.

Do you see how the plot develops?

But it’s not necessary to have every little step choreographed. In fact, I’d advise against it. What you might want to do is define your characters and then put them in a conflict situation and watch them behave. You’ll find that some of your original ideas won’t work, but new ones will spring to life as your story evolves.

In a future post I’ll talk about when to stop writing and assess where your characters need to go. In other words, what to do with the second half of the book.

In the meantime, happy plotting!