| Creating Believable Conflict |
| Aside from the romance, conflict is the stuff our books are made of. After all, if there's nothing keeping the hero and heroine apart, why bother telling the story? It is the getting there that makes it interesting, right? So, what is conflict? In romance, it is some compelling reason, or reasons, for our hero and heroine to not be together. Combine it with why they want to be together anyway, and you hopefully have a really good story. For example, say your hero is the owner of a successful ranch that's been in his family for generations. Something has happened, however, that's forced him to take out a huge loan using the ranch as collateral, and if he can't repay this loan fast, he'll lose the family ranch. Add in a few really dry summers that have hurt the ranch's income, making it really difficult for the hero to come up with the money. In comes your heroine, who's working for a company who wants to purchase a huge lot of land in this area for an adventure camp, and her boss is pushing her to purchase his ranch. There's your external conflict. But what about the internal conflict? Because without the emotional issues, this story might work, but it isn't going to make the reader really care about these characters. So, make your hero have taken out this huge loan to pay off medical bills for a beloved family member--father? grandfather?--a person who's made him promise not to let the ranch leave the family; and give him a bad past experience with a woman he thought he loved who wanted him to give up this ranch he loves. So he'll be doubly determined to keep his home. Say your heroine was the ignored middle child in her family--until she became successful at her job, which has finally begun to garner her some notice from the father she always adored but who never paid her much attention. Now that she finally feels she has his love, she doesn't want to lose it by disappointing him and failing at her job. Okay, now you have internal conflict as well as external. Now you have to make it believable and interwoven into the rest of the story. Not too tough, right? haha And keep in mind that one or both of your characters will have to change and grow in some way by the end of the book. In this case, it might be the heroine, deciding that she'd rather have the love of the hero than the approval of her father. Or your hero might decide that if he has to lose his ranch, better that than the woman he loves. If you're still having difficulty getting the concept, go to your keeper shelves. Take a few books you absolutely loved and reread them, to study this time. See how your favorite authors manage to keep the tension high by making the hero and heroine have goals that oppose one another's. A few I'd recommend are Linda Howard's Mackenzie's Mountain, Nora Roberts's The Villa, and Barbara Freethy's Summer Secrets. Great conflict (not to mention great storytelling. What isn't a conflict? Well, anything that could be easily resolved by having your hero an heroine sit down and talk to one another is one thing--the great "misunderstanding" as it's sometimes called. A good example of this would be one of them overhearing part of a conversation the other is taking part in and then the eavesdropper jumps to a conclusion based on what they just overheard. Not a good conflict. It makes the person doing the conclusion jumping look dumb. So, have fun devising ways to keep your hero and heroine apart even though they're eventually going to want very much to be together. Nothing like a little torture to make that happy ending even sweeter. |
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