Inner Conflicts

I’m sure everyone is going to be sick of the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass by the time I’m done, but I’m finding it useful to think about these topics from outside the point of view of thinking only about my characters and I hope it provides someone else some insight along the way. So, thanks for putting up with it.

Looking back through some of my previous posts here, I think this is one of the areas where I need work. The idea seems simple enough: find a goal for the character and find something diametrically opposed or at least mutually exclusive to it and make the character want to strive for both equally. For romance novels, this seems to work best when both the hero and the heroine’s goals are mutually exclusive as well. Finding this sweet spot is proving elusive for me.

I went back and reread parts of On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells by Leigh Michaels mostly just to remind myself about how the hero and heroine need to be forced together into the same problem and writing this post led me back to the post I wrote reading this book the first time: Ker-Snap!

Now, it’s annoying to realize that I wrote that post last March and that I still haven’t managed to pound these ideas into my head, let alone make it work in my manuscripts.

So what’s this have to do with “inner conflicts” and my current manuscript? Both my characters have inner conflicts. Check. Do they have a problem that they’re trying to solve that threatens to keep them apart? Not particularly. The problem is the hero currently is just along for the ride. He’s very reactive, not proactively seeking anything at all.

So… back to digging deeper and figuring out not only what makes this guy tick, but also how what he wants creates conflict between him and the heroine that needs to be overcome. It’s not simply the fact that they like to inhabit very different social roles, but what exactly that is, I need to work out.