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By: Diana Hurwitz,
on 1/15/2016
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Game On! Creating Character Conflict
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16 Characters
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Each mannequin could be male or female. I had to choose pronouns, so I went with the pronoun that matched the greater percentage of gender in each category. He and she can easily translate into masculine, feminine, or androgenous. Sex and sexual orientation do not directly affect personality type, except when it comes to social expectations and how those expectations shape the character.
Everyone has deep-seated needs that serve as currency: the thing that defines their personal carrot and stick. Dangle the right morsel in front of them and they will do anything to get it. Threaten to take it away and they will do anything to keep it.
1. Wynn’s currency is appreciation. She is the worker bee, never the queen. She needs to be needed, to hear “well done” often, and to be thanked for the everyday things she does to keep a life, a workplace, or a planet running smoothly. Telling her that her help isn’t needed or wanted is her trigger.
2. Francis is more interested in being right than being happy. He sees himself as the herd dog keeping everyone in line. He needs people to respect his authority and opinions. All is well, as long as people accede to his point of view and decisions. Call him wrong or question his authority and the fight is on.
3. Nevada hates conflict. He sees himself as the shepherd who guides the flock. His currency is appreciation for his dedication to others. He craves loving affirmations for working hard and providing for other people. Calling him selfish or telling him his efforts are misguided starts a fire.
4. Arden’s currency is gratitude and appreciation for his integrity. As long as people respect him and appreciate his hard work, things go smoothly. Tell him his assistance isn’t needed or question his intentions and the game is on.
5. Blair’s currency is affection and admiration. If she isn’t consistently praised, she deflates. Telling her she is anything but perfection or that she hasn't done anything to earn praise makes her an enemy.
6. Dallas wants to be adored for being the life of the party. She values her sense of fun and adventure. Telling her the party is over or to get serious and she will make your life hell.
7. Hadley wants to be adored for breathing. She wants everyone to be happy. Since she is generally agreeable and good-natured, people usually comply. If the adoration fades, trouble sets in.
8. Shelby wants to be honored and respected. She is a team player. As long as people treat her like a valued member of the team, family, or planet, things are fine. Questioning her character is a call to war.
9. Joss craves recognition for his intelligence and skill. He's the typical silent maverick. He is usually admired in the short-term. His derring-do draws people in, but eventually drives them off. Question his competence and you’ll like find yourself in the crosshairs of his sniper scope.
10. To Kelly, all the world is a stage and he is the main attraction. He is the ultimate game player and always wins. Never accuse him of being a loser or make him sit on the sidelines.
11. Greer is the ultimate reclusive genius. He wants recognition for his competence. Since he is usually competent, he receives it. When he forgets to take care of things he does not consider important or his efforts are misdirected, his competence might be questioned and the fight is on.
12. Taylor is the ultimate organizer or volunteer. She wants to be appreciated for her goodness and service. She usually is, unless her efforts become toxic.
13. Cam wants to be admired for his intelligence and competence. He is the deep thinker of the group. People usually admire that about him. Question his competence or his research and the fight is on.
14. Morgan also wants to be admired for his intelligence and competence. He is the ultimate thrill-seeking gambler. When his sometimes reckless behavior makes those traits questionable, the game is afoot.
15. Lee is the take control steamroller of the group. Lee wants to be top dog. Things are fine as long as her rules are obeyed. When she steamrolls the wrong person or is demoted, she turns lethal.
16. River is the most spiritual and likely to believe in the paranormal. She wants to be admired for her wisdom and desire for harmony. She is usually admired, unless her desire to be worshipped becomes obsessive or her belief system is too bizarre.
To learn more about the mannequins and how personality types create conflict for your characters, pick up a copy of Story Building Blocks II: Crafting Believable Conflict, available in paperback and E-book, and Story Building Blocks: Build A Cast Workbook available in paperback and E-book.
By: Diana Hurwitz,
on 12/30/2015
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Dennis Brown in his book Rule of Life 101 defines the difference between bad choice and a mistake thusly:
“A mistake is innocent, a bad choice is not. A mistake is being completely oblivious to the error being made. An example would be telling someone your name and them pronouncing or spelling it wrong. Or giving someone the wrong phone number because you just got a new number and it slipped your mind. These are examples of mistakes. A bad choice is being totally aware of the error being made and choosing to do it anyway. Say for instance your boyfriend or girlfriend was sleeping with your best friend. A bad choice is knowing something is wrong or hurtful and doing it anyway.”
In any story, the critical turning points are either actions or decisions. Bad choices or actions result in goal failure. Mistakes cause conflict along the way. Take a look at your work-in-progress. Have your characters made bad choices or mistakes? How did they complicate the overall story problem?
If the inciting incident is a bad choice, Dick is forced to take steps to repair it. The key turning points will show the progress toward and steps away from repairing his life, relationship, or situation to the status quo.
If the inciting incident is a mistake, Jane will have to make amends. In the first turning point whatever she has tried doesn’t work. She will have to approach the problem from a new angle. At turning point two, that angle didn’t work either. In fact, Jane compounded the mistake, perhaps by making a second mistake. In the third turning point Jane will realize the right course of action that will restore the story balance. In the climax, she makes amends and all ends happily, usually.
The caution I want to offer is this: it is hard to root for a character that continually makes bad choices and mistakes. One or two sprinkled throughout a story can drive it. However, if the story is riddled with them, it becomes abusive.
I’m reminded of a recent television series I watched. After two seasons with a main character who continually made mistakes and bad choices, there was no growth. He never caught on that he was the problem. It made sense that the series was cancelled.
Make sure your characters are not continually making mistakes and bad choices. People who don’t change make poor protagonists, friends, and lovers. It’s okay for the reader to shout “you idiot” once or twice in a story. However, they are likely to burn the book if it happens in every chapter.
As Dennis Brown concludes: “People’s mistakes should be forgiven, and even some bad choices are forgivable, but consistent bad choices should never be overlooked. Know when enough is enough; if you have no boundaries, people have no reason to respect them. A person can’t respect what’s not there to respect. Whether it’s in a friendship, marriage or business relationship, bad choices that lead to adverse circumstances for you should never be tolerated.”
Even if the characters are fictional.
For more information on using conflict to drive plot, pick up a copy of Story Building Blocks: The Four Layers of Conflict, available in paperback and E-book.
By: Diana Hurwitz,
on 11/25/2015
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I have to thank Simon and Garfunkel for this post which was inspired by their song Homeward Bound.
The lyrics go: “I wish I was homeward bound. Home, where my thought's escaping. Home, where my music's playing. Home, where my love lies waiting silently for me.”
Hopefully, his love isn’t lying there silently because she is dead. If so, it would place the story in the mystery or horror category.
For most, the word “home” conjures warmth and belonging, especially during the American holiday of Thanksgiving. Home can be a place where Dick finds nurturance and love. It can be the place where he feels safe in a world gone mad.
Home can be a place that he longs to return to, a situation he longs to build for himself, or a place he needs to run from instead of to.
What kind of place do your characters call home? What lies in wait for Dick when he gets there? Home can remind Dick of all the things he lost or never had. Family get-togethers may be bitter rather than sweet. If a story problem forces Dick to go home, the game begins.
What if home is full of ghosts, personal demons and the walking dead, either literally or figuratively? Home can be full of mildly or severely dysfunctional people. If Dick’s family home or hometown is filled with addicts and felons, then it isn’t the cheery Hallmark scenario everyone imagines.
Going home can be psychologically or physically damaging. Can he tell anyone what home is truly like for him? Not necessarily. Shame is a huge motivating factor. It may keep Dick from telling anyone just how bad home really is. Even if Dick tells, he might be mildly rebuked for being so hard on his nearest and dearest. Surely it can’t be that bad? Except, it is. When his coworkers are rushing home, eager for the weekend or his schoolmates returning home at the end of school term, it can fill Dick with dread.
Coming from a family with something to hide places Dick in a precarious position. Even if he is brilliant and has a laudable talent or amazing skills, he has to be careful to not allow the spotlight to veer in his direction. It might startle the cockroaches from his past and make them frightened, which can make them dangerous.
Home can be a trigger for a recovering Sally. Most characters long for home. If going home puts Sally at risk for a relapse, it may not be the best place to visit. If the dysfunction that exists there is the thing that made her get high or drunk in the first place, the trigger will always be there, waiting like a land mine to blow up in her face. Sally may have to avoid home as much as she craves it. She will have to find a way to build her own home and that is not an easy thing to do. What if Sally feels more at home somewhere else? As much as her friends or other family members may like her, she isn’t really part of their home. Will they make room for her? Can they? Should they? To what extent?
Home can be full of actual ghosts or zombies. That places the story in the paranormal realm. Can Jane tell anyone? Maybe not. If she has to deal with the paranormal element at home while trying to live a normal life outside of it, Jane has serious conflict. Keeping a secret becomes a prison whether Jane is hiding that her Dad is a serial killer or a faerie King. How far is she pushed? Who could she tell? Who would believe her? How could she prove it? Her life is in danger either way.
What if Dick returns home and finds it markedly changed? He can return from college, a trip abroad, or from living on another coast or planet. What if it isn’t what he remembered? Dick may have a hard time reconciling the idealized version of home with the reality. How do the changes make him feel? Have things improved or gotten much worse. Has the town been invaded by trolls? Maybe Sally and Jane don’t remember things in quite the same way. Maybe Dick is forced to face a completely different “truth” about the way things were. The story can review all the things he thought he remembered and offer a completely different twist.
A fully drawn hero has both a home life and a work life. It’s important to give your reader a glimpse into both. It is unbalanced when we are presented with characters that are never at home or never at work. We don’t need to see every little thing they do at either location, but it helps to understand them if we see how the character operates in both worlds. They are defined by how they navigate the tricky waters both inside and outside the family.
For more on crafting conflict to create tension, pick up a copy of Story Building Blocks II: Crafting Believable Conflict available in paperback and E-book.
Most stories hinge on the question of attraction versus repulsion. A protagonist is either kept from achieving something he really wants to achieve or works to prevent something he can’t allow.
There are many motivators both tangible and intangible. They can be a desired object, a position, a return favor, praise, time spent together, a puppy, or promise of a leisure activity.
The reward can be immediate or in the future. Too far in the future and both reward and punishment lose their impact. That is why the story and scene stakes should be more immediate.
The reward must also be meaningful to a character. We are all motivated by different things. We all like and need different things.
If you promise an introvert a party or a starring role in a play, she will most likely walk away.
If you promise an extrovert a week alone on a tropical island, he will likely decline unless the island has buried treasure.
Most of your characters, at some point, will do something either out of hope of reward or fear of punishment.
Dick might work toward solving the story problem out of hope of reward. He will gain something he very much wants: the girl, the job, the presidency or world peace.
Sally might work toward the story or scene goal out of fear of punishment or retaliation by an angry parent, aliens or an evil mob boss.
There are many types of rewards: self esteem, the esteem of others, connection, friendship, money, position, power, fame, or an adrenaline rush.
The most powerful is financial gain. Characters are willing to dress up in costumes and act silly to gain money. They are willing to stand out in the rain with a sign and beg for it.
If Dick is in debt, he may be willing to lie, cheat, steal and kill to get money. Money encourages characters to gamble, to invest in risky stocks, to commit murder in a Mystery. It can also motivate a child to do his chores or a worker to try harder to get a raise.
If Dick values esteem over money and offering to pay him doesn’t work, offering to publically praise him will.
Jane may resist the goal because she does not want the reward, strange as that may sound. Offer Jane the carrot of something she does not want, and you have the opposite effect than the one you desired. Offer Jane a punishment she’d enjoy and you’ve failed again.
If Jane hates being the center of attention, offering her the spotlight will send her running in the opposite direction.
If Sally prefers vanilla over chocolate, Dick giving her a Whitman’s Sampler for Valentine’s Day won’t earn him brownie points. Baking her chocolate chip cookies instead of sugar cookies won't convince her to do her homework.
Telling Dick he’ll have to stay home with Grandma while his parents go on vacation to Amish Country to shop for antiques won’t exactly break his heart, especially if Grandma is the cookie baking, curfew-ignoring type.
If Dick offers Jane a reward that she considers a punishment, they have conflict. Lets say, Dick suggests they go a Bed & Breakfast for the weekend. Jane might say yes or she might say no. Jane may love B&Bs, but she isn’t feeling particularly fond of Dick at the moment, so she refuses. Going might heal their relationship, but Jane meets internal resistance at the idea of being alone with Dick, so she declines the offer. She will come up with justifications as to why: too much work, conflicting meeting, too exhausted and wants to stay home in her jammies. Jane might agree to go but the confinement of the B&B causes them to fight rather than make up and Dick gets the opposite of what he hoped for. Jane can give in and go and end up having a good time, thus getting the result Dick hoped for but Jane didn't think possible.
If Dick and Jane are forced to work together to solve a mystery, Dick might agree because he loves a good puzzle. Jane might hate puzzle solving but agree because Dick appeals to her sense of justice or fair play. She might be secretly in love with Dick and covet time with him.
If Sally is secretly hoping for an engagement ring for Christmas and Dick buys her a diamond watch, she still received diamonds, just not the diamonds she was hoping for. Dick's next request will most likely be met with resistance if not refusal.
This type of conflict can play out among any set of characters be they friends, relatives, lovers, coworkers, etc. Characters tend to buy gifts, plan vacations, throw parties, arrange date activities and select movies for the weekend based on their wants, needs and personal preferences. This almost always causes conflict unless the two people are entirely in sync with each other in that regard.
Dick may plan a day at the football game, while Sally would rather stay home and watch a Jane Austen marathon. Okay, maybe that's just me, but the point is made.
Jane may plan a surprise party for Dick at work. If Dick hates being the center of attention or if he is trying to pull off a covert action, he will not be happily surprised by the party. It may make his scene goal much harder than he ever thought possible.
If a group of friends decides to go scuba diving in the Florida Keys for the weekend and Jane is either afraid of water or afraid of sharks, she'll refuse to go. No matter how many rewards Sally offers her (free margaritas all weekend, Jimmy Buffett playing at a local bar, lots of hot guys in skimpy bathing suits), none of that will matter to Jane. She could agree to go to the Keys but not scuba dive. The rest of the pack will consider her a wet blanket and refuse to pay for the drinks or refuse to go to the Buffett Concert in retaliation. Or they could enjoy her company so much that they don't care if she joins them in the ocean, as long as she goes along for the trip. If the reward of her company is alluring enough, they might offer to pay for the trip if Jane can't afford it.
Place characters with opposing ideas of reward in a relationship or in a scene and you have conflict.
Next week, we will explore the conflict of repulsion.
For more on using obstacles to create tension in your fiction, pick up a copy of Story Building Blocks II: Crafting Believable Conflict in paperback or E-book.
When someone we care about goes missing, there is conflict. It could be a mysterious disappearance, a runaway, a kidnapping, or a death.
Abandonment wounds can lower Jane's self-esteem. It can color how she interacts with the world. It can make her more sensitive to someone’s absence. A child whose parent is absent or abandons them can become clingy. It can make Jane a suffocating friend or lover. It can make Sally an overprotective parent. It could make Dick assume that everyone leaves so why try to connect? On the flip side, it can inspire Jane to be a better parent, friend, or lover to compensate for what she didn't have.
Abandonment strikes a person all the way to the core. It is a trigger that, even if dealt with, remains. It doesn't take much to set it off. If Jane's father abandoned her, she won't be able to view fathers and daughters on television or out in the park without feeling a twinge of loss. Jane might be jealous of a step-sibling who has a father but doesn't appreciate it. She might be jealous of a friend's relationship with their father. In a thriller or paranormal tale, it can inspire Jane to usurp the friend's place. Jane may avoid relationships because she can't handle the possibility of being left again. She may avoid having children. Her husband or boyfriend might not understand. Mother hunger works the same way.
What if Jane found the parent that gave her away only to learn the parent was a serial killer? It would make a terrific suspense thriller. Jane could find out that the parent was simply an ordinary broken person who lacked the ability to love another in a healthy way and she was better off without the parent. This would make a touching literary tale with a down ending.
If Jane disappears, Dick will take steps to find her and won’t keep hoping or trying until he is successful. Dick will go to any lengths to regain someone he has lost. It can be a friend, lover, child or parent. The more personal the connection, the higher the stakes become. Each layer of separation from the protagonist and the stakes become diluted, unless the person they have to find can save the world. Add a ticking clock and you are at thriller level. The obstacles are in trying to get them back.
Getting them back can create new conflicts. Dick can get Jane back and it all ends happily. He can get Jane back and find she has changed. Dick can find out Jane didn’t want to be found. You can twist this plot in many ways in every genre.
Attempting to locate someone who has died makes a great overall story problem in a Horror or Paranormal Fantasy novel. It can also be used at scene level. If Jane needs to talk to someone and can’t find them, she will be unable to achieve her scene goal. If someone disappears in the middle of a scene, she has conflict. She is either forced to give up the scene goal to look for them or muddle on without them.
If a Jane takes her child into a store and the child decides to play hide and seek, Jane has conflict. If she is trying to overcome a scene obstacle, little Sally's stunt will make Jane's goal that much harder to overcome. If little Sally has been snatched by kidnappers, Jane has an overall story problem.
You could argue the thematic statement that absence makes the heart grow fonder. The flip side is to argue that it doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes you realize you don’t really need or want the person after all.
What if Dick chased the one that got away only to find out he didn't like them? That would make a fun romantic plot, providing the right girl was there all along. Dick could pine for an old girlfriend, see her in passing and realize she isn’t as attractive as he remembered, or that she is now a centerfold model. This could be used in a literary tale about a marriage gone stale.
At scene level, an inspector can locate a suspect and realize the suspect is innocent. He must abandon theory one and investigate theory two. The inspector can be haunted by a partner that left without explanation. He can be haunted by a missing person case he did not solve.
In any genre, Dick can be abandoned by someone in a crowded park or building or left on planet Zircon to solve the situation by himself. It will frustrate, if not panic, him.
You can play abandonment in a different way. If extroverted Dick takes introverted Jane to a party and goes off to talk to other people all night, Jane will feel abandoned. She might get mad. She might leave. She might hold it against him for a really long time. The next time he asks her for something, she will refuse. She might deliver verbal zingers until he finally asks why she is being so mean.
If Dick and Jane fly to Africa for a safari and Dick disappears, Jane has a massive problem. She has to find Dick or face the possibility of returning to America without him. Finding someone in a foreign country is a difficult thing to do, particularly when their laws, society, and language are foreign to you.
Abandonment is a terrific theme and overall story problem. It adds poignancy to a love story or motivates a character at scene level. Being alone, even in a crowd, is a universal fear that everyone can tap into.
For more about using obstacles to create tension in your fiction, pick up a copy of Story Building Blocks II: Crafting Believable Conflict in print or E-book.
Personal physical boundaries vary from person to person and culture to culture. Some cultures hug, air-kiss, or shake hands and others bow politely.
We’ve all had conversations with people who stand uncomfortably close or those who stand so far away we don’t think they are participating in the exchange. When someone infringes on Dick’s “personal” space, he is forced to back off, push them away or tolerate it until he gets what he needs.
If Dick lays hands on people who don’t like to be touched, he has offended them. If they don’t outwardly respond, they may make an effort to avoid Dick in the future and are unlikely to do what Dick wants them to. If Dick needs to whisper something but the other person stands too far away, they make the exchange of information very difficult to achieve.
If Dick takes a seat in a nearly empty movie theater (train, plane, or bus) and someone chooses the seat next to him several things could happen. The stranger can be obnoxious enough that Dick moves, he can accept the situation, or Dick could become so obnoxious he forces the other person to move. If Dick needs information from this stranger, or if the stranger is targeting Dick, you have conflict.
If Dick is lunching alone and Jane, a stranger, takes the seat across from him, she is either crazed, wants something, or has mistaken him for someone else. Either way you can have fun with it. Characters don't share tables or hotel rooms with strangers unless there is a very good reason for it.
If someone at work consistently encroaches on Sally’s personal space (or work responsibilities), Sally might dread going to work. She may ask to switch offices or even quit. She might take an aggressive approach and escalate the territory war until the other person gives in or quits. This can serve as a scene obstacle or a personal dilemma.
If Dick is an interrogator, he may encroach on a suspect or witness's personal space to intimidate them. Intruding into someone's personal "bubble" is an act of aggression. It could also be an act of intimacy. Who do you really want to have up close and personal? Whose touch is acceptable?
If a sibling encroaches on Jane’s side of the room, she might complain to mom and dad. If that doesn’t work, it can escalate into petty acts of retaliation until one or the other wins, they agree to a truce, or mom and dad step in and separate them. These kinds of disputes can happen between teachers at school, soccer moms on the field, or waiters at a restaurant.
These conflicts are often featured in comedies, but can be utilized in any genre. Two opposing gangs forced to share a hideout in dystopian story works just as well as two enemies sharing a jail cell.
Bowing, handshaking, and hand gestures are the subjects of extensive studies and say a lot about a population and an era. When you write about different cultures, be sure to investigate the ins and outs of social and physical boundaries specific to that region and time period. When you create a fantasy world, this kind of detail can add richness to it.
There are many reasons why one person's "bubble" is wider than anothers based on their past history, trauma, or training. You can use it to define character.
Boundaries can be geographical, social, psychological, or physical.
This post will address psychological boundaries: the lines that are drawn that separate one person from another. Blur these lines and things get messy fast. No one likes having their boundaries violated. Cross them and you create conflict.
Characters adopt behaviors, coping mechanisms, verbal warnings and body language to defend psychological boundaries. Psychological boundary violations are often very subtle and complicate relationships between protagonists and antagonists, siblings, lovers, parents, children, friends, coworkers, and teammates.
Relationships are supposed to bring people together. In healthy relationships, boundaries are flexible. We grow and adapt to allow the other person in, but keep the self intact. We give in only so much and will only go so far. We allow the other person into our personal space. We allow them to touch us. We give them access to our deepest thoughts and feelings. If someone uses that access to harm us, it is betrayal of the highest order.
Most of your characters would be hard-pressed to vocalize what their boundaries are, but feel violations all the way to their core. Boundary violations can inspire heated arguments, divorces, revenge plots, and serve as motive for murder.
1. A woman who tries to get too close too fast will unsettle Dick. He will either decide that she is up to something or that she is emotionally unstable. If he is at first flattered by the attention, he will soon realize that he should have been more wary. Such is the stuff of many a horror story. Romances thrive on love at first sight and sex with a stranger, but that is rushing intimacy. In real life this scenario typically does not end well. That level of intimacy implies connections that haven't been formed yet. It is forcing a character to trust someone they don't know with their health and welfare. It is a boundary violation that runs rampant throughout modern fiction. It's also a plot hole, especially when it happens because "the script calls for it."
2. A character who offers too much personal information too soon will make Dick suspicious. This is effective as a plot complication. However, if a character enters the story and shares way too much personal information for no reason apart from delivering information, it becomes a plot hole. Readers will be irritated by it, unless they relate to the situation because their own boundaries are fuzzy.
3. Readers sense boundary violations in your story. They won't necessarily stop reading to shout, "Their boundaries are off!" Rather, they stop reading because they don't like the characters or think the plants and payoffs aren't realistic. I have tossed several books aside because the protagonist fell on either extreme end of the unhealthy boundary spectrum. This is often true in Thrillers where the protagonist runs around shooting people in a display of badass. Protagonists without conscience don't feel particularly heroic to the reader. They may still root for him to succeed but they don't necessarily like him. It may turn readers off so that they don't read the next book in the series. We want our heroes to care. They may have to take drastic measures to save us, but we don't want them to be the monster, even if you are writing paranormal.
4. Con men often approach and get real chummy too fast. Dick takes the stranger at face value initially. Unless Dick is professionally trained to detect liars, he won't be stop to think, "this man is being way too friendly." Instead his intuition will tell him that something doesn't quite add up. As you relate Dick's responses, your reader will feel that same tug of intuition. As the plot progresses, Dick will begin connecting the dots and the reader will too.
5. At the extreme end, characters lacking sufficient boundaries remain in toxic, even abusive situations, befriend serial killers, or allow other characters to walk all over them. Most characters fall somewhere in the middle or slightly off center on the fuzzy-rigid spectrum. Circumstances can force any of them to be slightly rigid or slightly fuzzy.
6. On the mild end, they enable their children, can’t say no to excessive overtime, think celebrities are actually friends, or insist on taking photos of their butts on the company copier during the Christmas party. They cling and make outrageous demands, manipulate through guilt, or spend their time trying to fix broken people. They expect to be admired for their sacrifices and outrageous efforts to please and repair.
7. Use characters with poor boundaries to complicate Dick's life. If Dick is the responsible hero type he will try to drag this person back to a healthy sense of self or convince them of the error of their ways. In the end, unless it's a biography or a down-ending tale, Dick should be willing and able to accept that he can’t and isn’t responsible for fixing them. Even if it means losing them or letting them self-destruct. He may get sidetracked or dragged down temporarily by the toxic character, but his boundaries should be healthy enough for him to know when to walk away.
The toxic character may make solving the overall story problem next to impossible. Your antagonist, if you have one, is often toxic or is surrounded by toxic types enabling his erroneous ways.
8. A fairly well-balanced Dick can be driven to some derivative of fuzzy or rigid behavior depending on the circumstances. He would have to tolerate incursions to work for a rigid character. He would have to become a bit rigid when solving a problem with a fuzzy character. Extreme circumstances can force him into extreme behaviors.
9. If Sally has a weak sense of self, she’ll find it difficult to distinguish herself from the characters she forms relationships with. She will use the other people to fill in her missing pieces or the emptiness she feels when she is alone. The problem is, no one can do that for her and no amount of trying will make it so. It could show growth if she starts off a little insecure and grows into confidence. However, characters with a truly weak sense of self make poor protagonists. I could list a few contemporary examples.
10. If Jane is rigid, she will find it difficult to adjust her boundaries to allow the other person in. She ends up in emotionally detached relationships and is incapable of intimacy. She will make a lousy friend and a difficult lover. Rigid characters make excellent antagonists and foes.
11. Put fuzzy Sally with rigid Jane and you have a neurotic, passive-aggressive relationship. Their opposing approaches will make anything they undertake unsuccessful. They will get frustrated with each other and constantly return to the arena to repeat their tug of war.
Pair a healthy Dick with a rigid Jane or fuzzy Sally and the game is on. They will disagree verbally, thematically, even physically.
12. Dick can fear hurting someone he cares about, so he gets a little fuzzy. It’s easy to kick out a terrible tenant. It’s harder to evict an aging father with a Vicodin habit.
If Dick has healthy boundaries in all other respects, he may get fuzzy when it comes to dealing with a wife who is emotionally abusive due to mental illness or a child who has violent outbreaks.
Boundary conflicts can be a thematic argument, an overall story problem, a disruptive factor at scene level or serve as a motive. It can complicate things for your protagonist in any story.
Next time, we will explore physical boundaries.
For more information on how to use boundaries and other obstacles to create conflict, pick up a copy of Story Building Blocks II: Crafting Believable Conflict in print or E-book version.
