One of the many problems I have understanding how fiction works on the page/screen is this false idea that a character always needs to be in conflict in a story.
This is not true.
You need depth to establish character. Depth is a character in a setting. You achieve depth by letting your character experience your setting through sensory detail. It also helps if you give your character an opinion of the setting.
There are 3 dimensions of conflict in a scene.
I got these from Dave Razowsky. He’s an actor, improv teacher, and all around great human being.
The three dimensions are:
1.Pressure
Trigger your character to react to something. Put them under pressure to do something. Give their failure some stakes.
2.Tension.
Tension is hope vs fear. My favorite example of this is the story Ordeal in Space by Robert Heinlein.
In the story Bill Saunders rescues a cat from the ledge of a high rise and gets over his fear of falling so he can return to space.
The scene where he rescues the cat is intense. The reader hopes the cat will be rescued and fears that Bill will fall to his death.
3.Dynamic
My favorite example of this comes from a Dortmunder story, Ask a Silly Question by Donald E. Westlake.
In this story the first scene goes to great lengths to establish the contrast between Dortmunder a pessimistic mastermind of crime and The Elegant Man. A rich Blueblood who has Dortmunder kidnapped to consult on a crime to rescue a Rodin statue from his ex-wife.
Give your POV character a foil to contrast against.
Writing Update
I’m setting a new start date for my writing of July 1st. But I’m going to keep this blog going because I like it. It’s building muscle memory of writing my own words regularly.