Craft: Internal Conflict and "Globalness"

I've been remiss in posting this week but I swear, it's because I've been working! And I mean the paying stuff that I typically put off. I put the finishing touches on a revision to a course I'd been dragging my feet on for more than a month and sent it off to my editor yesterday. It wasn't exactly fun, but it did give me a sense of accomplishment and alleviated some of my guilt.

I was in a crunch to finish it because I've been asked to go on a sales pitch trip to a potential client in Alabama next week. And while I'm not really looking forward to being away from home for four whole days (I shudder to think what I'll be coming home to!), the good news is that travel time is writing and revising time. And I need every extra bit of that I can snap up.

In between all the real work and the writing (my meters keep moving to the right!), I've been taking a "pitch" class through the Hearts Through History RWA chapter. The class is intended to help you come up with face-to-face pitches of several lengths as well as to help you write a rockin' query letter. I'm not sure yet where the class and the exercises are going to take me in terms of my pitches at National or what they're going to do to the current version of my query letter, but this week's lesson did provide a valuable reminder about internal versus external GMC (short for goals, motivation, and conflict).

In this week's lesson, we were supposed to pinpoint our hero and heroine's internal conflicts. That is to say, what character flaw does each character have to overcome in order to live happily ever after? I wrote mine up in a flash. I knew this stuff about my characters. But even though I knew it, I still didn't manage to write it the first time in a way that made the conflict "global" enough.

When I first started writing Living in Sin, I had this idea that it would be "enough" for my hero and heroine to be kept apart by external factors (difference in their social classes, her fear of losing her property if she marries a man her brother deems inappopriate for her, etc.). The problem was, my characters didn't have any flaws. They were perfect and the only thing keeping them apart was other people. Can you say boring?

Thankfully, Lacey imparted this lesson about internal GMC to me early enough that I didn't have to go back and start from scratch. I can't precisely quote her, but her main point was that both the main characters had to have internal conflicts that had nothing to do with each other. In other words, the heroine's internal conflict can't be that the guy she's falling in love with is someone her family would disapprove of. Because that conflict is specific to him, it's an external conflict, not an internal one. It's not a character flaw, but a plot complication.

The internal conflict has to be something the character would have to resolve regardless of whom he or she is falling in love with. For my heroine, the internal conflict turns out to be that she's deeply afraid of being subordinate to or dependent on another person, and because of the period in which she lives, marriage means being subordinate and dependent. In order to live happily ever after, she has to overcome this belief and realize that when two people love one another, they can depend on each other as equals.

The external plot and the hero's personal qualities are what lead her to overcome this character flaw, of course, but it's a problem she'd have whether the hero ever came into her life or not.

And speaking of internal conflicts, I think it's time to end this post. I hear my muse calling me...