Here we are with another excerpt from the book. Today's little teaser comes from Chapter 3 - Planning and we'll be talking about the importance of conflict in a good narrative memoir.
Any story has to have a conflict. I don’t mean that you actually have to go to war (though that could be a pretty incredible Adventure Book) but you have to have one person, the protagonist, who wants to achieve something and someone or something, a nemesis if you will, who is trying to stop them for whatever reason.
The protagonist is probably YOU by the way.
Incidentally, the protagonist and the nemesis could very easily be the same person. Imagine a story about someone doing a skydive. Part of their brain is telling them that throwing themselves out of a perfectly serviceable airplane at 40,000ft is a bonza idea. Another part of their brain is telling them that it’s plainly suicide. Conflict.
Also, the nemesis doesn’t have to be one solitary person. Reading a story about someone breaking past their cultural barriers to go on an adventure is fascinating. That’s not one person the protagonist is fighting against. The nemesis is a whole society.
The nemesis doesn’t even have to be a person. In my first chapter of my book, Jon and Harry’s Year of Microadventure, Harry and I slept out on a January night. The nemesis could have been society with their straight-laced view of sleeping outside during the coldest night of the year. It could’ve been my wife, or the girl at the till in Sainsbury’s who thought we were a bit weird. It could have been our own minds where we dithered about the reasonableness of sleeping under the stars.
But it wasn’t. Our conflict was with the cold of the night.
And a bottle of sloe gin.
You have to have conflict for your story to be of any interest at all. If your adventure was well within your comfort zones, there were no hiccups or problems whatsoever and you achieved your goal without breaking a sweat, it’s hardly going to be the most engaging of stories.
Remember, it’s not necessarily the content of the story that makes it incredible. It’s the conflict.
Imagine you wrote about going down the shops to get a pint of milk. Not too much conflict there.
Now imagine you’ve got to go and buy that pint of milk despite being recently made blind in a freak welding accident. Conflict – your internal fear of going outside alone. Conflict – the actual danger of getting run over on the way to the shops. Conflict – your pent up rage as other people are treating you differently because of your disability.
Immediately your trip to the shops for a pint of milk is an incredible psychological and emotional drama.
So what is your conflict going to be? Is it someone who told you it couldn’t be done? Is it that tiny part of your brain that questions the sanity of your adventure? Is it you against the elements?
If you are the protagonist, who is your nemesis?