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35 2. The Fire Hose and the Nozzle History is time that won’t quit. —Suzan-Lori Parks, The Elements of Style What you truly know you can go ahead and tell, but what you don’t! Hell! You can’t even name the name of it. —Mac Wellman, The Hyacinth Macaw When writers think about conflict, they often start with two sides clashing over some prize, two people arguing, choosing what can easily become a cartoon conflict as in, “He’s bad, he’s good, bang, slam, see them fight.” Conflict without the psychological dimension used by emotional form results in varying techniques of shouting, the pushing and shoving of adversaries. Writers are lured into this choice by the ubiquitous example of sport as a paradigm of conflict in our culture. We can easily fall into the habit of seeing conflict in supposedly objective terms, as a testing ground in which sides are joined, with clear winners and losers at the end. The sport version of conflict is seductive because the act of competing and defeating another produces an emotional charge. To lose arouses feelings of weakness, humiliation, emasculation, and anger, while to win arouses feelings of power, dominance, control, and pleasure. In sport, all of these appear without narrative context or mechanism for resolution. We are familiar with sport programming that supplies narratives taken from athletes’ lives that aim to make what is essentially an arbitrary contest more like a drama. Sports drama nearly always portrays the overcoming of adversity to shine on the appointed day. It is fine if sport borrows from drama to make its repetitive conflict more interesting, but it shrinks drama to narrow the definition of its conflict from sport. Our experience tells us that we never defeat, that is, permanently remove, the conflicts of connection and action: they are always with us. At the beginning, the writer is moving around in a terrain that will lead to a road through an as-yet-unknown landscape. He is circling the character who will fashion this road and determine its destination. And the character’s experience is the writer’s way of probing into the character and scouting the material of emotional form. You can call this backstory, but what is called backstory often sounds more like sociology casework [ 36 ] The Fire Hose and the Nozzle than the makings of a dramatic narrative. As writers, we scan the world through the eyes of the character, looking for what will propel the character forward. We can imagine other characters and events; we can play what if in a kind of spin the wheel that does not yet explore the central dynamic: the experience of loss and the conflict that determines a character’s action. What Is the Threat? All drama has conflict, but not all conflict has drama. Conflict moves along a continuum from external to internal, and the heat of the conflict rises with the intensity of the threat. The statements “I’m afraid to love anyone” and “I’m afraid to love because she is black and I’m white and this is Mississippi” pose different threats that completely change the emotional basis of the conflict. The internal conditions the external and vice versa. They become symbiotic as the private goes public. Conflict slips loose the rules of decorum and transgresses the boundaries between allowed and not allowed. The potential for collision is real and inevitable. As creators, we know a story when we feel the bite of time; as audience members, we, too, are bitten and lean forward to watch. External threats are familiar to us: the dangerous neighborhood you stumble into when lost, the boss who may cost you your job, the religious absolutes you defy, the gun that suddenly appears in the heat of accusation or shame, a sexuality that attracts the enmity of others. Threats arise when a character crosses paths with someone who responds with violent opposition. They come from being put in harm’s way due to lack of money or power or both. Most of us learn to live so we can avoid such threats, but drama doesn’t seek us out for its characters. The stories single out those who are at imminent risk, and the writer intensifies the threat and gives to the conflict its all-important emotional and moral stakes. Threat differs from conflict. A threat can be removed at any point and applied to someone else. Conflict is structural. It is embedded in...

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