Plot & Conflict, Part 3
Mother Conflicts
Mother Conflicts
When you sit down to write, ask why you are writing. Where is your conflict? Is it interesting to other people? Often, we see manuscripts where angst or depression are transferred from writer to character, with the assumption that this is conflict. Really, it is a form of narcissism. It is using words to craft a mirror of oneself. A dismal, downcast, downtrodden, or dark attitude toward events or people does not result automatically in a compelling internal conflict. A conflict requires at least two competing forces; our intensely personal attitudes, on the other hand, are often unbridled, and are not very interesting to others. Your job as a writer is to cast your net wider, seeking a conflict that is both true to the story you have conceived of, and something that matters to other people. These could be called universal conflicts, or mother conflicts—struggles most every can understand, or at least appreciate.
The list of mother conflicts is long. Trying to comprehensively outline them would be foolish. We’ll use examples to demonstrate a few. We are not suggesting what you should write about, simply showing how other writers have used commonplace conflicts to drive specific stories.
As you consider these stories, think about how your own story employs a mother conflict that will make your book as compelling to readers as these. Also, note the title of each book before you read our analysis, as some paragraphs contain spoilers.
Since October is Halloween, we are going to keep this list spooky.
Kicking off with a non-Inkshares book, Julia by the late Peter Straub is the story of a woman who has lost a child, moves with her abusive husband into a new house, and is haunted by a woman who has also lost a child. In the course of the story, the external conflict comes from Julia’s relationship with her husband and hauntings she experiences in the house. The internal conflict arises from her fear and her grief over the loss of her daughter. The plot is everything that happens: the hauntings, the gaslighting, her investigation into her husband's past. How is this an example of a mother conflict? Grief born from loss is a universal emotion. The conflict is between the crushing gravity of such grief and our desire to face loss and overcome it. Thus, the engine of conflict drives the drama of this story. Plus, it’s an exciting ghost story!
Turning to some titles of ours:
Violet by Scott Thomas can lay claim to much the same in terms of mother conflict. Kris Barlow journey’s with her daughter to her childhood summer home after the death of her husband. Grief from the present trauma awakens older sorrows that lead to a haunting. Violet is a contained story about the corrosive power of grief and loss, yet is very different from Julia, while sharing the mother conflict of overcoming grief.
Kill Creek by Scott Thomas also deals with overcoming trauma. Each character paints a different hue of how we are traumatized by our childhood, elements of our identity, and the relationships we forge in adulthood. On top of all this, we have a conflict shared by each as writers, and by the house known as Kill Creek: fear of being forgotten. The house itself has suffered a trauma! This is really a story of whether we can purge the trauma from ourselves. What is the external conflict? It comes in Wainwright’s offer to spend the night at Kill Creek; in the house’s reaching into their minds; and it’s ability to stay with them after they leave.The events that tempt them to the house, the things that happen in the night, the things they experience after they leave, and how they are forced together and back to the house, and how they go about stopping it—that is the plot.
Devil’s Call by J. Danielle Dorn finds Li Lian Callahan seething with anger after the murder of her husband. She is broken by grief, but also driven by a bitter sense of ostracization. As a biracial woman and a witch in the old west, she faces stigma upon stigma. These internal frictions drive the external conflicts, as she endangers her child in the pursuit of vengeance. The mother conflicts (perhaps especially potent since Li Lian is pregnant) are some of the oldest in storytelling—the quest for revenge, the compulsion to protect one’s child, and the peril of an outsider in a brutal society.
The House of Dust by Noah Broyles follows two characters with intertwined but distinct inner conflicts. Each of the characters are stained by guilt. The reasons are distinct and easiest to find out in the pages of the novel. They are made the same by the core conflict of the story: the question of whether or not we can ever be absolved of sin. This is a question at the core of Christianity and the notion of salvation. It is also at the core of Southern gothic, which separates it from gothic generally: the original sin of America, slavery. This is not a story about slavery. It is a story about whether the legacy of sin locks us into ever retreating cycles, or whether we can, as a society and individuals, make progress. These notions: sin, salvation, transgression, progression, regression, aggression—this is what fires the engine of this story and the many great Southern gothic works that have come forward, from A Rose for Emily, to Beloved, to The Beguiled, to Cold Moon over Babylon, to The Fall of The House of Usher.
The Ghost Tracks by Celso Hurtado follows seventeen-year-old Erasmo Cruz, a San Antonio boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Erasmo does not know his parents, who abandoned him to his grandparents as a child. His grandfather now passed, and his grandmother now fighting cancer, Erasmo starts a supernatural detective agency to help pay her medical bills. The supernatural—and the potentially supernatural—are something that Erasmo is no stranger to, but it really isn’t the mother conflict of the story; it’s a plot which effectuates the mother conflict. The core conflict which Celso uses to breathe life into Erasmo is about what it means to be family, and what happens when your family—or at least part of it—leaves you behind. It’s a meditation on those who should love you but leave you, those who should love you and stay, and those who take care of you when it wasn’t even their obligation to stay. Simply, what and who is family is at the core of the novel and its sequel. Yes, Erasmo does want to know if the otherwordly does exist in this world, but the answer he truly seeks is to the question of whether he is alone in this world.
A God in the Shed by J-F Dubeau follows a cast both young and old in the small Canadian village of Saint-Ferdinand. Detective Stephen Crowley works to solve a bizarre and gruesome set of killings, haunted by the memory of a wife who left him alone to raise their son. Meanwhile, teenage Venus McKenzie finds herself the surprised warden of an interdimensional god, trapped inexplicably in her backyard shed. This is the plot, but the core of the conflict is about man’s relationship with power. If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then supernatural power corrupts to its own otherworldly exponent. What would you do if the most powerful creature in the universe was yours to command? What would you ask for, and what would you be willing to sacrifice to control it?
A final post (for this round) on plot & conflict coming up next week!
—The Inkshares Team.