It’s been a hot minute since I last posted. Travel to Sweden to see family, festivals, getting married (also in Sweden) and starting to teach at university have all pushed the Substack to the backburner for a while. Settled in at university, making progress on my third novel and polishing up my second novel, I feel like I’m back in the head space where I can post here regularly. I will aim to post every Wednesday, sometimes it may be every other, but I do want to be consistent moving forward, as I’ve realised there is a quite a lot I want to say.
Impostor syndrome was another factor that kept me away from posting – what is another writer on Substack going to say about writing? isn’t that topic overly saturated now? I’m sure many of us here have had the same feeling, but what I’ve reminded myself of recently is that we all very different people, very different writers, writing for different reasons and about different things, our paths to publication all unique. Part of the reason for posting now is to reclaim that space for myself. Yes, I am another writer on Substack, but my words and thoughts do matter. They do stand out.
Today’s post is about hidden conflict. The things our characters don’t say or display outright on the page. In my meeting with my PhD supervisor yesterday he highlighted that although my new version of book 3’s opening chapters were a lot more thorough, anchoring us more firmly in the main character, the place and premiss of the novel, too much of the MC’s conflicts and the stakes were laid out in the first two chapters. Information and conflict overload. He asked me to think about what conflict is hidden. What can I withhold a bit longer from the reader?
In retrospect, it is easy to see this “fault” as a consequence of first drafts. Getting all the conflicts on the page so we know what they are, so we can pick and choose what conflicts to display when. For me personally, I think I overwrote the conflicts this time because I in previous drafts in previous projects would hide too much. I’d be worried of overwriting to the extent that I underwrote. That balance sure can be hard to find. We can only achieve it by writing more.
The conflict I chose to hide were those surrounding my MC’s old love – a love triangle that caused her to act out, with difficult consequences. Her conflict with her parents was so deep and vast and traumatic, that it deserved to take up the main “conflict” space in the first two chapters, along with her jealousy of her sister’s success. The love triangle is something she is more ashamed off, that can be teased to the surface later on by outside forces. The second conflict, which I haven’t quite figured out yet, relates to my MC’s personal and spiritual struggles, and possibly her own complicitness in her sister’s disappearances that she has suppressed.
The hidden and open conflicts, it seems to me, create strong feeling of push and pull, a magnetic force that draws the reader in, that acts as the glue to the plot. What are the hidden conflicts in your WIPS. Were they hidden from the start or out in the open?
Neil Gaiman once said, though I don’t have the direct quote, that the editing process is the writer’s way of making it seem like they knew what they were doing all along. Hiding certain conflicts for the first 10-20k words of a novel, I believe, is part of that process.