 Drama: June 18, 2008 Issue [#2426] |
  Drama
This week: Edited by: Joy  
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"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
Alfred Hitchcock
Hello, this is Joy , this week's drama editor.
Drama exists everywhere,and its existence often fills us with tension and excitement. Drama can be tragedy or comedy, and it can come in the shape of a play, movie, fiction, real life story, and poetry.
Since conflict is the true drama-maker, today we are going to talk about conflict.
"Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy."
Luigi Pirandello
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
This week we will discuss the role of conflict in drama.
Conflict is at the core of any work of fiction, be it a story, a novel, a stageplay or a screenplay. Without conflict, there is no tension or drama. Writers may create as elaborate settings and characters as they possibly can, but if characters find no conflict to work with, the story will not go beyond character portrayals or setting descriptions.
For conflict to exist, action is essential, and every action results from another action before it.
If conflict is put under a microscope, its basic structure would be like a compound biological cell made up of action and its opposing action. Thinking toward the origin of the action and the origin of the opposing action is important, because this examination results in a strong backstory; however, the writer must remember that going too far back into the origin may bore the reader.
Since the opposing action is especially the instigator of a conflict, the easiest way to create conflict is to think of opposites, because serious conflict springs from characters as in: messy vs. clean or tidy; moral vs. immoral; faithful vs. fickle; kind vs. cruel. This playout of the opposites is evident in most successful stories.
In Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, a gentle medical student falls in love with a cruel waitress who mocks him. In Euripides's Medea, when Jason, who lacks backbone, deserts Medea, who is decisive, passionate, and strong, love turns to hate, and this leads to vengeance.
Good conflict rises from the two equally strong opposites, both aiming for the same or similar thing. Even in the more complex conflicts, the basis is more or less the same, because the conflict always depends on offense and counter-offense.
Although many variations of conflict may exist, conflict is usually applied to fiction in four standard ways: static, rising, jumping, and moving with the character.
When characters stay the same at the end of the story, even if the conflict exists in the action around them, this conflict is considered static. In the classic mystery genre, the character of the private eye does not change much, although there may be enough conflict inside the episodes.
The rising conflict is when conflict increases in degrees. A story with rising conflict usually has three-dimensional characters, a clear-cut premise, and unity at the end. Most successful stage plays use rising conflict. Hamlet and Othello are excellent examples to rising conflict. In these plays, each action or feeling triggers another stronger action or feeling in a chain.
Jumping conflict is when conflict suddenly jumps with the abrupt change in the story or in the character. An example to this would be a docile character when he sees his wife talking to a man and imagines it as adultery; his hidden jealousy suddenly surfaces and he turns into a violent character and kills the wife on the spot.
In the moving conflict, conflict advances at the pace of the characters and according to their traits. Although this may be more or less visible in all stories, this type of conflict usually happens more strongly in psychological fiction. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky studies the criminal mind in the character of the student Raskolnikov who murders an aged pawnbroker. At first, Raskolnikov believes the killing to be justified, but as the novel progresses, he is tortured by guilt and questions all his beliefs.
Aside from the ways of using conflict, four essential kinds of conflict exist as:
1. Man against man:
One person or group is pitted against another usually in a physical way. In The Last of the Mohicans Indians and the white men fight against each other. The same pattern happens in a race between two athletes in Chariots of Fire. In The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, man's inhumanity to man leads to rage and then to self-respect.
2. Man against himself:
In Jane Austen's Emma, Emma constantly deceives herself. Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina also work against themselves while they are rebelling against the social norms.
3. Man against society:
In The Wall by Jean Paul Sartre, Pablo Ibbieta attends his own trial after being captured by the Falangists. In Silas Marner by George Eliot, Silas has to deal with the society of Raveloe. In the movie Star Wars, a young man rebels against tyranny. In Meridian by Alice Walker, young activists try to bring an end to racism and segregation.
4. Man against fate, nature, or circumstances of life
In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, when her husband flees to Africa, his wife Ryna who is left behind has to deal with slavery, racism, and the care of her children. In Handmaid's Tale using Offred, Margaret Atwood tells the story of the subjugation and the dehumanizing of women.
Inside a story, one principal conflict or one principal conflict with several minor ones can exist. Whichever way a writer decides to use conflict, he needs to remember that the conflict he creates can be as unique as who he is.
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Here are some examples of dramatic fiction from Writing.com authors:
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A few contests you might like to enter:
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For those of us drama queens and kings, a forum to swap writing ideas and post questions
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StephBee  :
Joy, excellent newsletter on dialogue in playwriting. It's so important that the characters speak words that are true to them as characters. Two  .
Thank you very much, Steph. 
Yes, dialogue is important in every type of writing, but where playwriting is concerned, my hope is to evoke some interest in our wonderfully talented writers toward writing for stage, film, and TV. This seems to be a writer's destiny in the future whether we like it or not, because an immense market exists there. Just remember what happened during the writers' strike and the way Broadway rehashes old plays possibly because new good ones are hard to come by.  
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