Another Way To Think About "Conflict" and "Stakes" In Your Fiction
Last week, I was an instructor at the Lambda Literary Workshop, and it was an utter privilege to get to work with some brilliant writers whose bravely inventive writing gave me a new faith in the future of queer speculative fiction.
While I was at the workshop, I gave a craft talk about "queering conflict and stakes" in fiction-writing. And since I'm still in the middle of traveling, on my way to Worldcon in Glasgow, I'm turning that talk into this week's newsletter.
First of all, I have to start off by saying what I always say about writing advice: there are no rules. You can do whatever you want, and nobody else gets to say you're doing it wrong. If anybody tries to tell you "the rules," you have my permission to throw them into the sun.
So. Science fiction and fantasy, the genres I write most often, have been shaped by colonialism, two world wars, and a healthy dose of white supremacy on the part of folks like John W. Campbell and H.P. Lovecraft. But certain assumptions about the shape of storytelling rattle around Western fiction generally, including literary fiction. (See a previous newsletter for my thoughts on whether characters need to have "agency.")
So when we queer our storytelling, we have to peel away that legacy of countless stories about white saviors and heroic explorers, which feature a very specific notion of conflct and stakes. So let's take them one by one...
1) Conflict
Here is a story that contains plenty of conflict: "I was hungry. I really wanted a sandwich. So I got up and went to the fridge and made a sandwich. The End." A situation is introduced, the protagonist has a need. They need a sandwich! What are they going to do? They're going to make a sandwich. The conflict is resolved -- we can all relax now.
Here's another story that has a lot of conflict: "My friend and I were both hungry and there was only one sandwich. So we each had half a sandwich and it tasted really good, and I was happy to be eating a sandwich with my friend." OH MY GOD. There was only one sandwich. But we figured it out.
What I'm trying to say is that conflict doesn't mean antagonism. Nobody has to be baring their teeth or vowing bloody murder. Nor does conflict have to be massive and dramatic, with bodily fluids going everywhere and people snarling angrily. In fact, much of the time in real life, "conflict" is just people dealing with the challenges and frictions of being in the world.
And of course, stories don't need to have any conflict in them at all. You can have a story where it's literally just like, "My friend and I hung out and watched the sunset, and it was nice." That's a story with a beginning, middle and an end. That's very satisfying.
But even if you want to have some conflict in your story, conflict does not have to mean a certain level of drama or horribleness. A conflict doesn't have to be intransigent or insurmountable, or involve anyone chopping off anyone else's limbs.
So for me, when I think about "queering" conflict, I think in terms of being more collaborative. Smaller, friendlier. Conflict can be something that's more kind of internal and just personal.
And a lot of conflict is really about people dealing with all the weird programming that was crammed into their brains when they were younger, because most people have been indoctrinated with a ton of bad ideas about how the world works. I'm really interested in writing about the conflicts that take place within people. (In fact, one of the most interesting conflicts a character can have is the struggle to see past the toxic notion that life is about being aggressive, fighting, taking what you want, and so on.)
What characters want
Another way to think about conflict is in terms of what your characters want to achieve or prevent -- and for sure, a lot of people want power and wealth and domination over others. And also, people also want to put a stop to injustice and exploitation and fight back against oppressive ideologies. But people can also want other things, like comfort, love or community. People can want something from their community that their community isn't giving them right now, and they have to find a way to ask for what they want.
Here's another story with a ton of conflict: "My community found out that I needed something. They found a way to give it to me."
As anyone who's read Never Say You Can't Survive will know, community is important to me, and it's only getting more important all the time as the world embraces the ugliest aspects of individualism and leans into hatred. A lot of queering narrative, for me, is about getting away from the "rugged individualism" narrative about one person blazing a trail, and growing instead toward a story about people working together.
I've seen so many literary short stories in the past decade that use "we" as a narrator, instead of "I", "you" or "he/she/they." And many of my favorite recent SF books are about gathering a community together or a community taking care of its own -- I think that's the best thing, for me, about the "cozy SF" boom right now.
What stands in your way
The next thing about conflict that we can rethink is the notion of obstacles. What stands in the way of your characters getting what they want? Sometimes it's a big scary monster that needs to be defeated (or befriended), or an evil warlock who has to be war-unlocked. But obstacles can be pretty mild: see the earlier example about wanting a sandwich, where the "obstacle" is that you have to get up and go to the fridge.
But to return to the notion of conflict being internal, a lot of the most interesting obstacles to a character doing what they want are also internal. Society has told them that they can't be themselves or do what they want, and they need to grow past society's bullshit. Which can be super hard. (At this point, someone in the audience of the talk mentioned ADHD, and I acknowledged that yes, obstacles can also come from a character's own neurodivergence or mental-health issues.)
At times -- times like right now! -- your internal hangups are reflected back at you by a homophobic, transphobic, racist, ableist world. (My novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster, out next year, has some of this in it, to go with a lot of more internalized conflict.)
But even so, oftentimes the most interesting challenges are the ones that people impose on themselves. This doesn't even need to involve internalized queerphobia -- a character could have a conflict because they don't want to hurt their friend's feelings, and they worry that following their own dreams will cause harm to their friend. (And maybe the friend turns out to be totally fine and supportive of what the protagonist wants to do, and nobody's feelings need to get hurt.)
My final thought about conflict is that most queer people I know have experienced some trauma as a result of living in such a hateful world. And when I think about conventional kicky-punchy-screamy-snarly notions of conflict, there's a lot of trauma embedded in it. A lot of my storytelling, especially recently, has been about exploring trauma -- but I'd also like to imagine a world where we don't have to experience trauma to be ourselves. And a lot of my favorite queer storytelling lately is doing that, which is awesome.
2) Stakes
At the most basic level, stakes are whatever the characters care about. Conversely, something that the characters don't care about won't really be the stakes of a story. You can have a story in which aliens have invaded and there are giant floating skulls coming out of the sky, but the story could really be about someone sheltering in a bunker or basement with their best friend, and they want to find a way to tell their best friend they love him. (Or maybe, they just really want to make their best friend a sandwich.)
Stakes are not the biggest thing in the story -- they're the most important thing in the story, from the characters' perspective. (In the example above, the protagonist can't really do anything about the giant skulls in the sky, but they can take care of their friend.)
Community matters
And this brings us back to community -- sometimes, the well-being of a community can be at the center of the stakes, whatever the community means to you. The community can be your polycule, or your two best friends. It can be your whole town, or it can be everybody around you. It can be the world -- but often your community is smaller, because it's people that you can touch.
To be sure, I love stories with high stakes. I deliberately wrote a whole young adult trilogy about saving the galaxy, because I wanted to see queer people get to be at the center of an epic narrative and get to save the galaxy instead of someone like Luke Skywalker or Captain Kirk. But at the same time, as I wrote that, I found that even though the stakes are saving the galaxy, they're also the personal issues the characters are dealing with. Take Rachael, an artist from Earth who has an artistic crisis after she comes into contact with an alien machine. Or Kez, who wants to be a peacemaker instead of helping to make war like their father.
In fact, I usually find that the higher the stakes the characters are grappling with, the more you need to have personal stakes that carry equal weight. Doctor Who does this a lot: the fate of the universe will hang in the balance, but also Ruby Sunday needs to find out who her birth mother was, or River Song has to marry the Doctor. Because saving the universe is so abstract, it can be hard to wrap your mind around.
Also, I find that queer joy is really important in making stakes matter -- both because it makes us bond with the characters, and because it's what we're fighting to preserve. Especially in a story that contains some representations of trauma, it's really important that we experience queer joy in a story as well.
Beauty is survival and survival is beauty. When beauty is part of what we care about in a story -- along with connection, love, togetherness, and all that good stuff -- that makes the stakes feel bigger, regardless of what they involve.
3) Finally, erotica.
Don't worry, this newsletter is still work safe. But I wanted to close by talking about erotica.
I wrote a ton of erotica, for about a decade. Early on, I was reading the guidelines for an erotica anthology, which said something that I think was intended to suggest that they didn't want any sex-negativity, horrible sex, or anything actually non-consensual.
But in my cluelessness, I originally read those guidelines as saying that erotic stories shouldn't have any conflict whatsoever. Or even that the characters shouldn't have any personal issues going into it -- they just have to be completely happy at the start, and stay happy until they reach a contented ending. It's actually hard to write a story in which nobody has any moments of unhappiness or even mild concern. It's definitely doable -- as I said earlier, "my friend and I hung out, and it was awesome" is a totally valid story.
But in general, I like to write stories about people who change somewhat as a result of their experiences, which implies at least a certain amount of difficulty or the need to rethink some things.
Sex is always a conversation
So as I got better at writing the genre, I kept asking myself: How do I put conflict into an erotica story, without making it awful or unpleasant? And I realized that I could write a story where people are just working something out: about themselves, about a relationship. Sex is usually about other stuff, at least in part, and people almost always are trying to fill some emotional or psychological need in a sexual encounter. Often, they're trying to figure out their own identity or where they stand in relation to someone else -- even if they've had sex with this person a hundred times before. Sex involving more than one person is a conversation, and that conversation inevitably reveals something.
Most of the erotica I wrote was queer, and it was about people finding themselves forming a new identity through sex. I think sex is very powerful for refining and reshaping an identity -- and finding your identity is a process that necessarily involves stakes and conflict, even if it's just happening inside you. Because as I said before, you are letting go of stuff that you were programmed with.
Sometimes the most intense conflict is between your old self and your new self.
Disco Nap!
I want to close by telling you about one story I wrote that I'm still pretty proud of, called "Disco Nap." I think it was published in the anthology Five Minute Erotica, edited by the wonderful Carol Queen.
"Disco Nap" is about a couple who have a conflict one evening: one of them wants to go out dancing, and the other one wants to stay in. They agree that they're gonna take a disco nap, because it's good to take a nap before you (possibly) go out dancing. The partner who wants to stay home starts doing little things to seduce the partner who wants to go out dancing -- right away, the pro-dancing partner knows exactly what's going on and is like, "This isn't going to work." But they're also enjoying their partner's attentions, and having fun going along with it. (I want to emphasize that it's very clear in the story that everything is consensual and nobody is coerced or tricked. It's very gentle and playful.)
In the end, they have sex, and the partner who doesn't want to go out dancing wins. That's the entire story. So that story that has conflict. But it's not ugly conflict, it's gentle, loving conflict, because they both end up having a really nice time.
Thank you so much!
My Stuff
I made a terrible graphic of my Worldcon schedule. I’d especially love it if people could make it to my reading, where I’m going to preview Lessons in Magic and Disaster!
My latest book review column in the Washington Post covers books by Aliette de Bodard, J.R. Creaden, Tobi Ogundiran and Miye Lee.
The latest episode of Our Opinions Are Correct features a conversation about absurdism in science fiction, plus an interview with Victor Manibo, author of Escape Velocity.
I’ve got some books you can buy. There’s my young adult Unstoppable trilogy, which has now been nominated for three Lodestar Awards and has now won two Locus Awards. Plus New Mutants Vol. 4 and New Mutants: Lethal Legion. Not to mention my writing advice book Never Say You Can't Survive and my short story collection Even Greater Mistakes!