I’ve been writing some short stories lately. They take a lot less time to write than novellas and novels, and I get to gleefully skip from one genre to another. I recently finished a gentle, somewhat biographical, tale of a young girl who wants to be the best: the best underwater breath holder, the best pretend mermaid, the best liar.
The other day I presented the story to my online critique group. It confused them. They told me they couldn’t get into the tale because there was no conflict. Of course the story has conflict, I thought (but didn’t say). This particular group writes fiction where the conflict is easy to spot: heroes and heroines fight vampires or Russian agents.
The group’s response forced me to analyze my position.
What is story conflict? And does it require a fight between good and evil? Nope. Conflict is generated when the central characters encounter obstacles that prevent them getting what they want. Overcoming the barriers can mean the difference between life or death, or happiness and misery, or a good day versus a bad day. The drama can be subtle or outsize.
What the character wants, is, I suppose, often the essence of genre. Desiring love is romance. Figuring out who committed a crime is mystery. Winning the bloody battle is war porn. In the best fiction, the writer must understand the character well enough to provide worthy roadblocks.
The critique group response to this story made me sad, especially because I like these people. Though I’ve tried, I can't present my romance stories for critique. The group is convinced that there's hierarchy in genre fiction. What they write is the pinnacle, and romance is at the very bottom. In fact, romance is worthy of ridicule. It’s tough to take.
I believe such rigid, dogmatic attitudes, including primitive ideas on what constitutes conflict, are a consequence of inadequate breadth of reading and a deficiency of imagination.
Why should it be so hard to understand that a story is a story?
