Layers of Conflict

 A good story keeps the reader reading. But how does one achieve that? Is it through sparkling style? Voluptuous vocabulary? Stunning sentence structures? Nay, 'tis through suspense. I've read brilliant stories by other teenagers - not even teenagers I personally know - that have had me on the edge of my seat, obsessing as I wait for the next chapter to come out. (When I tell these authors this, they are thrilled, because that's exactly what they wanted to happen.) That's the kind of story readers love to read and writers long to write.

So how does one generate suspense? Well, cliffhangers come to readily to mind, as does dramatic irony - when the reader knows something the characters don't. The reverse also works, when an unreliable narrator keeps secrets from the reader, or when there is simply a burning question to be answered. Whodunnit? How will the good guy escape the bad guy? Who will get the girl? These questions are called story engines, and they're another good way of generating suspense.

But all of these techniques rely on the true drive of the story, the conflict. The conflict is what the character must contend with, from the moment of the inciting incident to the resolution of the climax. (I've said before that a cliffhanger is an unresolved mini-climax.) One excellent way to generate suspense is to make the conflict worse. Throw a monkey wrench into already-malfunctioning machinery. Add layers of conflict.

Let's look at an example from a real book, book two of the Fablehaven series by Brandon Mull. (Spoiler Alert.) I really admire Mull's imagination. The heroes are trying to retrieve a dangerous magical artifact from a magically guarded vault. There's a nice basic conflict. 

This vault has multiple levels of security (think Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone), and the main character, a fourteen-year-old girl, and her adult companion make it through, but the adult is repeatedly injured in the process. (Story engine: will he survive?) Okay, that's pretty bad, but not anything unexpected in a middle-grade adventure story. 

When they make it to the final trap in the vault, they have to hold special rods that manipulate gravity. If they go too high, they'll be impaled on spikes in the ceiling. If they let themselves plummet, they'll die from the fall. That's nerve-racking, but they can get around if they're careful. No problem, right?

Except the final security measure is a black cat with nine lives. They have to kill all nine incarnations - but each version of the cat is bigger and deadlier than the last. The last incarnation is a giant, bat-winged, snake-covered, acid-spewing, multi-headed panther.

As if that's not bad enough, around the cat's third or fourth life, the bad guys show up in the vault.

This is well-layered conflict if I've ever seen it. I count five layers there, possibly more if you count each level of security in the vault and each of the cat's lives. (These multi-layer traps are nice mirrors for the conflict-layering technique.) Take a hint from Fablehaven: layer conflict. It will keep your readers on the edge of their seats.