Monday Writing Motivation: Keeping a close eye on literary conflict
I’ve been puzzling over a small challenge I’ve given myself: to turn a recent experience I’ve had into a short story.
The nature of the experience is not in itself very important – although to me it was of vital interest! – but the challenge of turning fact into fiction, or of finding the key that enables you to effect that transformation, is something every writer faces, whether they’re writing fiction or fact.
Let me tell you, in brief, what my experience was: I’ve been diagnosed with a melanoma in my left eye. That sounds a little ominous, I know, but the truth is that the prognosis for those patients given the treatment I received is so positive that I am genuinely not particularly worried about my future – or my eye.
The treatment involved going to a hospital in Greater Liverpool and having proton beam therapy. This is in itself a hugely interesting subject – one that meshes with my life-long fascination with the physics of the very small. For proton beam therapy, atoms of hydrogen – the simplest atom of all – have their electrons stripped away from the proton at their heart. Protons have a positive electrical charge, and so can be shaped and directed by strong magnets after they’ve been whirled round and round in a cyclotron, and then, like a billion small slingshots, directed with extraordinary accuracy at the tumorous target.
The patient – dear reader, indulge me while I turn myself into the third-person protagonist of this tale – is seated in a metal chair with a customised mask over his face which leaves only the left eye exposed. The chair is then turned to face what appears to be a muzzle of a large-bore shotgun emerging from the cyclotron in an adjoining room. The patient is instructed to keep his eye very firmly on a little red light. The radiographers and physicists in charge then seek shelter behind leaded glass and press a button that shoots a stream of highly-energised protons at his eye.
The protons ionise the air around them, creating an entirely enchanting pale violet cloud that wafts gently around the patient’s field of vision.
That lasts for just thirty seconds.
Then one of the radiographers, helping him from the chair, says: “Thank you, Richard, we’ll see you tomorrow.”
Rinse and repeat three more times. On each occasion, that same film of pale violet, punctuated by the small red light throbbing like a smouldering sun, consumes the patient. It is all he knows for that brief slice of time: a universe of sensation contained within just a few cubic centimetres.
That was the experience. But how to turn it into a compelling story?
Of course, the first requirement is a little conflict. Literary conflict, we all know, is what drives drama. The protagonist’s desire for something or other is thwarted by any number of antagonists: other people, fate, the weather, a competitor, etc etc.* Now, you could say there is already considerable literary conflict in the situation. The patient, after all, has cancer of the eye.
But the patient – let’s be clear: me – does not immediately have any particular desire. Of course, you could say that he wants to be healthy. That’s true. But it’s not the sort of burning desire that could drive story, it’s a little generic, and in any event he, that is to say, I, believe that the treatment is overwhelmingly likely to restore the health of his, sorry, my eye. (And the science supports that belief. Thank goodness.)
So what could it be? Well, the fact is that I’ve had a few ideas which I am currently playing with. But to make them work I’ve had to exaggerate some features of my protagonist’s character. I’ve had to make him a little curmudgeonly, a little nasty, irritatingly negative about the world and the people in it.
And that, let me point out, is frequently what happens when you set out to turn what’s real into story. You have to adjust characters, or, to put that another way, you have to turn human beings into characters.
And this character in the story that might be called The Eye, also has to be given a desire that consumes him.
I’ll see how the story turns out and then perhaps, if you like, share it on this platform in a few weeks.
In the meantime, however, remember that, in the words of one of those sites exploring literary conflict, “to understand what’s interesting about a story… you only have to keep an eye out for what the characters want, and then what gets in the way of it.”
Happy writing,
Richard
P.S. We could turn this into a collaboration. What do you imagine might be my protagonist’s burning desire? And what might stand in the way of his satisfying that desire?
P.P.S. By the way, in the interests of biographical accuracy, I had the treatment at Clatterbridge Hospital while I was testing positive for Covid. The cyclotron team were unfazed.
* Google literary conflict and you’ll find lists of potential conflict: “Six types of literary conflict,” reads one headline only to be outdone by the next: “Seven types of literary conflict.” I’m sure with a little effort you could come up with ten or a dozen types.
