Ever read deep into the night even though your alarm was due to go off at 6 AM? No doubt several literary techniques kept you turning pages, but I’ll bet it was mostly due to conflict. Conflict is a broad concept, however; in a riveting scene, it’s more likely confrontation that keeps you turning pages. Confrontation can be between characters (two people in an argument or potentially fatal struggle), between a character and the environment (our heroine tries to outrun a mudslide), or between a character and himself (a “reformed” alcoholic passes a bar after a hellish day).
Confrontation is more dramatic when we see it building. Escalate, escalate, advises one of the writing books on my shelf. Skilled writers don’t start a scene with the worst thing that could happen. (After all, where do you go from there?) Good writers make readers apprehensive, then ratchet up the tension. For example, our salivating, alcoholic friend almost makes it past the bar—but then his boss appears in the doorway and insists on buying him a drink. And then he has “just one.”
In Elaine Beale’s novel, Another Life Altogether, a scene involving teenagers at a school dance turns into a nail-biter. The kids are in a cloakroom, away from the eyes of adults, when an older boy begins to taunt a younger one. The older boy threatens to burn the face of the younger one with the end of the cigarette and though he doesn’t—in fact, I’d argue that because he doesn’t (our expectation of violence has been raised but not “satisfied”)—things are all the more tense when a major character, an effeminate boy our narrator cares about, enters the room. Tension amplifies when a bloodthirsty girl eggs her bully-boyfriend on and the kids pass around a bottle of whiskey. Beale knows how to escalate. I couldn’t stop turning those pages.
Conflict, Action & Suspense, by William Noble
Another Life Altogether, by Elaine Beale
