{"id":6014,"date":"2019-07-26T10:24:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-26T09:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/the-internal-and-the-external\/"},"modified":"2019-07-26T10:24:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-26T09:24:00","slug":"the-internal-and-the-external","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/the-internal-and-the-external\/","title":{"rendered":"The internal and the external"},"content":{"rendered":"

You all know about outer jeopardy and inner conflict, right? So if you have a protagonist with some great fear of spiders, you sort of know the climatic scenes are going to involve a spider farm, or a genetically modified giant spider, or something of that sort.<\/p>\n

To take a slightly more grownup example, the climax of Pride and Prejudice<\/em> deals in the same themes that have seeded the entire book (love and marriage; maturity and immaturity; sober judgement and impulsive decisions.) The inner stuff and the outer stuff all run in parallel.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s all good. That\u2019s all part of good writing.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a more interesting way to join inner and outer. It won\u2019t work for every book, or not in its more dramatic manifestations. But it\u2019s still interesting enough that I want to put the thought in front of you, anyway. Oh yes, and this is the kind of thought that you can use at a really early stage in your plotting if you need to. If you use the snowflake method<\/a>, for example, you can use what follows as one of the very first thoughts you commit to paper.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how it works.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You identify a deep conflict you want to explore.<\/p>\n

Ideally, that conflict should exist at a personal level, as well as a bigger, social, level. So you might think about power struggles between a man and a woman within a marriage, but you might also think about those things more broadly within society. We\u2019re still talking about an essentially inner conflict, however.<\/p>\n

Then, you externalise that conflict, but on a massive scale. You don\u2019t just write a portrait of a marriage, for example, you imagine a future where women are owned for their reproductive capacity. Boom: you\u2019ve got Margaret Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Or you imagine a world where humans are hermaphrodite and just have seasonal biological changes that flip them into (temporary) men or (temporary) women. And boom: you\u2019ve got Ursula K Le Guin\u2019s classic novel, The Left Hand of Darkness<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Another example.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You know that thing you get in a large city \u2013 London or New York, let\u2019s say, where rich and poor inhabit the same physical city, yet live completely separate lives. Or you could think about a city like Belfast, where separation is effected via religion, not wealth or race.<\/p>\n

And, yes, you could write an interesting, carefully observed, realist novel about those things \u2013 or you could do what China Mieville did in The City, The City<\/em>, and just create a world where almost literally the people of one world couldn\u2019t \u2018see\u2019 the people of the other, and vice versa.<\/p>\n

In all these cases \u2013 Mieville, Le Guin, Atwood \u2013 the power of their stories came from the way they took an interesting personal \/ psychological \/ social issue and externalised it on a massive scale \u2013 citywide, countrywide, planetary.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s not surprising that the examples I\u2019ve drawn are from speculative fiction. This particular trick is quite close to defining what speculative fiction actually is. It\u2019s the thing that lies right at the core of the art form.<\/p>\n

But \u2026 you don\u2019t have to write speculative fiction to use the same basic ploy. This kind of structural plotting approach can be used much more widely (and subtly) than that.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, the Cold War novels of John Le Carre.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Le Carre wanted to write about love and betrayal, and in particular the idea that all human loving relationships would end up in betrayal. (That\u2019s a very bleak view and not actually true to life. But you can write great fiction while not being true to life.)<\/p>\n

Now, again, he could just have written a stony cold love story, in which everyone betrays everyone. But what would have been the resonance of that? Not a lot, one would guess.<\/p>\n

His flash of genius was to set that basic story in the world of Cold War espionage, where everyone really did betray everyone, and where nuclear weapons were pointing at major world capitals, and things (from a certain plausible perspective) really did seem unutterably bleak.<\/p>\n

And boom: that combination of inner and outer conflicts mirroring each other produced some of the greatest novels of post-war British fiction:\u00a0The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy<\/em>, and the others in that sequence.<\/p>\n

To jump from some of the greatest ever works of literature to, ahem, my own work: I do the same thing. I don\u2019t do it on the Atwood \/ Le Guin scale by any means, but:<\/p>\n