thoughts, words, deeds

conflict and story

“Anytime you get two people in a room, who disagree about anything, the time the day, there is a scene to be written. That’s what I look for.”
Aaron Sorkin
Does a situation like what Aaron Sorkin describes upset you or do you take it as a chance to write it in a scene or a story? For that matter, can you think of similar negative situations you have used or plan to use in your writing?

I agree with this one—it’s not upsetting, it’s a truth. In order to have a scene, what you need is two people (at least) in a room, having a disagreement about anything. Scenes are made out of conflict—not necessarily a knock down, yelling argument, but differences in opinion about life, parenting, what to have for breakfast, who left the toilet seat down, politics, religion . . . as long as there are two people who have a difference of opinion, there is the potential for a scene, and scenes added upon each other make story.

Now, I personally don’t like conflict or confrontation in my own life. But when it comes to writing, I want my characters to live in more interesting ways than I do. They have strong opinions. For example, in a story I wrote for my thesis, I brought two characters into a room together—a woman and her biological son who had been given up at birth and raised as her nephew. He was dying of cancer. He didn’t want his children to know because he wanted to die without causing them bad memories. She thought he was cheating them out of the chance to say goodbye.

So, difference of opinion. Tons of back story. And emotional relevance to turn into story.

In another story, I had a young girl who lived with her parents and an unrelated male on a rock in the middle of the ocean because her father and the man kept a lighthouse. During the story, the mother gave birth, with her young daughter as the primary midwife while the father stayed in the tower because it was his shift and he was afraid to come down and help. Disagreements. Conflict. Story.

I don’t think of it as negative situations. I think of it as the friction that makes story worth reading.