Weekend Update -- Opposition, Adhesive

This info is a continuance of week 5 of our Focus on Fiction workshop. No more exercises but a bit more good info.

This comes from Scott Bell's Plot and Structure, published by Reader's Digest Books. Only parts of the book are being shared in this workshop. It's a good one to purchase for your own writer's bookshelf.

Saturday Update

The Opposition

How do you know what obstacles to throw in the path of your Lead? The first step is to achieve the opposition character. Scott Bell prefers this term to “villain” because the opposition does not have to be evil. The opposition merely has to have a compelling reason to stop the Lead.


Three keys will help you come up with good opposition:

• Make the opposition a person. (A master like Stephen King can make the opposition nonpersonal, as in Tom Gordon where it’s Trisha against the woods. But don’t try this at home until you’ve had lots of practice.)

• If it is a group, like the law firm in The Rainmaker, select one person in that group to take the lead role for the opposition.

• Make the opposition stronger than the Lead. If the opposition can be easily matched, why should the reader be worried?

Then ask yourself, “Why do I love my opposition character? Climbing into the opposition’s skin will give you an empathetic view, and a better character as a result.



Adhesive

Your confrontation still needs one more crucial ingredient: adhesive. Because if your Lead can simply walk away from the opponent and still be able to realize her objective, the reader will be asking, “Well, why doesn’t she?”

An adhesive is any strong relationship or circumstance that holds people together.

If the Lead can solve his problem simply by resigning from the action, the reader will wonder why he doesn’t do so. Or, if there is not a strong enough reason for the Lead to continue, the reader won’t be all that worried about him.

There needs to be a strong reason for the Lead to stick around, to keep the characters together throughout that long muddle

If you have carefully accepted an objective that is essential to the well-being of the Lead and an opposition with an equally valid reason to stop the Lead, your adhesive will usually be self-evident.

You must figure out a reason why the Lead and opposition can’t withdraw from the action.

Writing your novel will then be a matter of recording various scenes of confrontation, most ending with some sort of setback for your Lead, forcing her to analyze her situation and take some other action toward her objective.

Think of the long middle of your book as a series of increasingly intense battles. Sometimes your Lead will be out of action to regroup, but most of the time she’ll be fighting toward her ultimate goal.

Bell describes this part of the novel like a fencing game. Parry and thrust, back and forth. That’s the heart of your novel. Here are a few tips to make that adhesive strong:

• Life and death. If the opposition has a strong enough reason to kill the Lead, that’s an automatic adhesive. Staying alive is essential to one’s well-being.

• There is a professional duty involved, that’s adhesive. The readers understand why a lawyer who takes a case cannot just walk away. The same applies to a cop on a case.

• Moral Duty is also a strong adhesive. If a mother’s child is kidnapped, for example, we understand why she doesn’t walk away from the action. She will do whatever it takes to get the child back.

• Obsession is another strong adhesive. In }i{Rose Madder, the psycho husband is simply not going to stop hunting down his wife. He’s obsessed with seeing her dead.

• Sometimes the physical location can operate to keep the opponents bonded. The Shining, by Stephen King, is an example. A husband, a wife, and a child live and work at a mountain hotel that gets snowed in every winter. They physically can’t walk away. Casablanca is another such story. No one can get out of Casablanca without permission or “Letter of Transit.”

As an example of the crucial importance of adhesive, consider the Neil Simon play The Odd Couple. Oscar Madison is a happy slob. He lives in a bachelor pad where he and his friends can be sloppy as they want. They can smoke cigars, play cards, and make a mess.

Felix Unger. Oscar’s friend, is a neat freak. When he moves into Oscar’s apartment, sparks fly. The two cannot get along. This is the engine of the conflict.

The obvious question, however, is why doesn’t Oscar just kick Felix out?

Simon, recognizing the need for adhesive, cleverly sets it up from the start. Felix’s wife has left him, and he is suicidal. Oscar and the others are worried about Felix being left alone. Thus, Oscar, Felix’s friend, undertakes an understandable moral task—watching out for Felix.

Of course, the humor of the play occurs as Oscar reaches the point where he really feels like killing Felix himself.

In literary fiction, the adhesive will sometimes be self-generating. A Lead must change on the inside or suffer psychological loss. Or she must get away from an influence (the opposition) that threatens to squelch her growth. In White Oleander, for example, Astrid struggles throughout the book to find her own identity, apart from a domineering mother.

Some other examples:

• In Jaws, Brody has a professional duty to protect the residents of his town.

• In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden is dying insdie in the world he inhabits and must find another reason to live.

• In Dean Koontz’s Intensity Chyna spends much of the book trapped in the back of a killer’s van (a physical location). Later, she tries to save a tortured hostage (a moral duty).

• In the movie The Fugitive the adhesive is the law. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) is innocent of his wife’s murder. It’s not only self-interest that keeps him on the run; He also has a moral duty to find the man who killed his wife. On the other side, Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) is a US Marshal, and thus has a professional duty to catch the fugitive. We well understand why neither can walk away.

Hope this inspires you to get some adhesive in your plot. Work on your narrative this week.

Your facilitator, Patrice


The first part of this article is located at

Week 5 -- Focus on Fiction  (13+) Some good pointers on structuring your story. #1794299 by a Sunflower in Texas

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