I'm not sure if I'm remembering this exactly correct. But I think what happened once is, I showed my friend my sypnosis for my novel The Dead are Online. She told me she liked it but that she'd actually be okay without the conflict I described. Or maybe she said she'd actually prefer it without the conflict.
I'm pretty sure I added the big conflict out of obligation.
I came up with the idea for the novel when vacuuming one day. I started wondering what would society be like if the afterlife was an accepted as fact and not a maybe or belief.
No, I don't mean a society where everyone believes in something that could very well be imaginary. Like some people would claim that God and Satan are "facts".
I mean, what if there definitely IS an afterlife and most everyone knew and accepted that. And what if it was super easy to talk to our dead friends and relatives? What if we could chat with them through Twitter and Skype?
How would that change us? Would there be more suicides? Would we try less? Would we take life much less seriously? Would we more easily take people for granted, because we know we're never going to lose them?
Anyway, I liked thinking about this stuff, and I thought it would be really great if someone wrote a novel about it or made a TV show.
I then realized that this wasn't going to happen just because I wanted it to happen. If I wanted a story about it, fast, I'd probably have to write it myself.
At the time, I was yet again dealing with father-daughter issues. So, I decided, that while exploring my after-life idea, I'd also use the novel as a sort of therapy. In that sense, the novel had some built in conflict. And there are other relationship issues that just flowed naturally out of my fingertips as I typed.
The conflict that was probably less natural, and one that I put in out of obligation, was the supernatural conflict.
I think I put that in because I felt I had to. It's a fiction-writing rule. You have to have conflict. Major conflict. The conflict has to get worse and worse. It has to make the reader and viewer feel very tense. There has to be the idea that there's no way out. It has to seem like there's no solution.
I think the conflict I added out of obligation is pretty okay. I don't think it ruined the novel.
I'm wondering, though, if the novel could have been okay without it.
There would still be conflict. There's the relationship stuff between the living folks. And there would actually be supernatural conflict in the sense that the dead people would have some relationship conflicts as well.
I think there's this idea, though, that if you have a story about a major change in society, the story has to be dystopian rather than utopian. The writer has to show that although the change might look good, it's actually going to end up fucking us all up. Or if it doesn't fuck us all up, it's not going to stay good. Something is going to mess it up. Nothing gold can stay.
Is this all necessary?
Could we start having more stories about major changes in society where life isn't perfect, but the big change has actually improved things for most people?
I think we could because I think there ARE people who prefer stories with less conflict. I don't think my friend is the only one. I think I probably prefer less conflict as well. AND when I look at the comments on Coronation Street's Instagram, there are usually quite a few comments complaining that the show is too depressing. There are too many problems. They want more comedy.
I feel the same way! I kind of dread watching Coronation Street lately. It is REALLY depressing.
We were supposed to get a lovely lesbian wedding and instead we got a incredibly sad and traumatic death scene of Rana (Bhavna Limbachia) one of the brides.
She died on her wedding day!
If that's not bad enough, the drama is dragging on because the dead bride's sister-in-law is the one that's to blame for her death. Carla (Alison King) was told she needed to get her factory's roof fixed and she ignored the advice. Then it collapsed.
A death and someone is to blame. I think that in itself is very much enough conflict. But no. It doesn't stop there. While Carla wants to deal with her guilt by confessing her wrongs and taking the punishment she deserves, she's being pressured by her not-quite boyfriend Peter (Chris Gascoyne) to keep it all secret. And he's resorting to bribing Gary (Mikey North), the builder, in keeping quiet about the fact that he warned Carla about the roof.
It's all very stressful and not very enjoyable to watch.
Now I'm not sure it would be enjoyable to watch a wedding where everything goes perfectly followed by a perfectly happy honeymoon.
But maybe less extreme conflicts would be enough.
Rana's mother (Kim Vithana) is anti-homosexuality. She didn't accept her daughter's relationship with Kate (Faye Brookes). BUT she was slowly starting to come around. Though she wasn't planning on coming to the wedding, she did give her daughter an important family heirloom bracelet to wear at the wedding. This made Rana feel all sad and conflicted.
I think this conflict would be totally enough. And it's not actually a small problem. These types of things are quite big. But it's something most of us can relate to. It's the kind of struggle we all deal with on a daily basis and not the type that's going to get covered on the local news.
OR...it's not the kind of thing that is going to be shown on TV show promos with an overdramatic narrator describing the promised trauma.
We might not all have had a gay wedding with a parent that doesn't approve. But if we had any wedding, there was probably SOMETHING that diminished some of the happiness. A beloved relative no longer among the living. A good friend who is there but dying of cancer. A so-called best friend who decided she'd rather go on a cruise with her other friends than be at our wedding. Guilt because we didn't invite one of our friends to be a bridesmaid, and we're worried she's mad at us. Our future spouse doesn't actually seem to be that into us. Our sister is mad, because we made the wrong comment about her hair.
Note: These examples, for the most part, are NOT coming from my own wedding.
Okay. But to be fair. Rana died, because Bhavna Limbachia wanted to leave the show. She couldn't think of a reason for Rana to dump Kate, Limbachia believed in their love. It had to be death that tears them apart.
That makes sense to me.
So fine, Rana needed to die.
I can accept that.
But couldn't we just stop at the very sad death scene?
Why can't it be enough for Rana to die in an accidental death that makes everyone very sad? Do we need her sister-in-law to be the one that's to blame? Do we need the bribing?
Oh! And I should mention that Peter doesn't even actually have the money that he's promised Gary! So there's even more promised super-stress down the line.
Do we need all this stress in all our fiction?
Would shows, books, and movies fail if there was a bit less trauma and stress?
I watched The Good Doctor recently, and I think, in almost every episode, something shocking happens during surgery, and the patient almost dies.
Could a medical show work if, in most episodes, the surgery goes as planned? What if the biggest conflict during a surgery is that one of the doctors has an embarrassing itch and he can't get to it until after the surgery is over, and he leaves the room.
Or if we want something more serious....
How about one of the doctors has a crush on her supervisor. And then the supervisor says something that could be seen as romantic but could also be seen as very inappropriate. It's pretty much sexual harassment. The doctor doesn't know whether to feel excited and happy or to feel angry and violated. Because of all this, she's very stressed during the surgery.
And The Good Doctor, like most medical shows, HAS these types of relationship issues. I'm just saying, what if we had a medical drama where the conflict primarily comes from relationship issues, and super intense medical moments happen only occasionally? What if most of the patients did NOT have a reaction to the anesthesia? What if most surgeries went by without a doctor making a major error?
Would a show like this be interesting enough?
Would people get bored?
And.....
Would my novel be even less popular if I had left out the major supernatural conflict?
Would Coronation Street lose viewers if they had less fires, murders, falsely-accused people in prison, etc?
Do people like me, my friend, and the commenters on Instagram only imagine we'd prefer less conflict?
And if it's not in our imagination....if we actually WOULD enjoy less conflict in our fiction, are we rare? Or are there many people like us?
Do we have these rules and traditions in our fiction because they're actually needed or wanted? Or it simply about tradition, expectations, and habit?