presence. Susie misses her dog. She envies her younger sister's first kiss, her first sex, her first experiment with makeup.
Tasting the adolescence that for her was cut short only makes Susie restless in heaven:
I did begin to wonder what the word heaven meant. I thought, if this were heaven, truly heaven, it would be where my grandparents lived. Where my father's father, my favorite of them all, would lift me up and dance with me. I would feel only joy and have no memory, no cornfield and no grave.
"You can have that," Franny said to me. "Plenty of people do."
"How do you make the switch?" I asked.
"It's not as easy as you might think," she said. "You have to stop desiring certain answers."
"I don't get it."
"If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling," she said, "you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth."
This seemed impossible to me.
It would be easy for Sebold's novel to lose tension. Objectively speaking, little happens back on Earth. Her murderer is never caught. Her family comes apart, then back together, no more remarkably than any other family. Her father and the boy who loved her experience grief (see Turning Points in chapter eighteen), but how is that any different than most lives? Yet Sebold keeps Susie's longing powerful and ever-present. Susie's inner conflict is the central conflict of the novel: sweet, sad, and full of love of life and those lucky enough to live it out.
Sebold builds an entire story on nothing more than this simple yearning: to grow up and be alive. The Lovely Bones demonstrates the power of inner conflict not just to carry a novel, but to carry us deep into the sorrow and joy of human existence.
Is the protagonist of your current manuscript beset by an inner conflict? How clearly is that expressed? What actions does it result in? What about other characters in the novel? Use this exercise to help you develop this inner conflict, make it stronger, and give it expression—and to make your protagonist, and other characters, as memorable as they can be.
_EXERCISE
Creating Inner Conflict
Step 1: Thinking about your protagonist in the novel as a whole, what it is that your protagonist most wants? Write that down.
Step 2: Write down whatever is the opposite of that.
Step 3: How can your protagonist want both of those things simultaneously? What would cause your protagonist to want them both? What steps would he actively take to pursue those conflicting desires? Make notes, starting now.
Follow-up work: Work on sharpening the contrast between these opposing desires. Make them mutually exclusive. How can you ensure that if your protagonist gets one, he cannot get the other? Make notes.
Conclusion: In creating genuine inner conflict, it is not enough simply to create inner turmoil. True inner conflict involves wanting two things that are mutually exclusive. It is most effective when it tears your protagonist, or any character, in two opposite directions.
Larger-Than-Life Character Qualities
Z ingers: Oh, how I wish I could snap them off as needed! Unfortunately, they tend to pop into my mind about an hour after I need them. Happily, one of the pleasures of novel writing is that an hour later is not too late. Until the manuscript is turned in, there's plenty of time to slot those zingers in.
In Jodi Picoult's morality tale Salem Falls, Addie Peabody owns a diner in the small New Hampshire town that gives the novel its name. Addie is unwillingly wooed by the town sheriff, Wes Courtemanche. One evening Wes is pressing his attentions on her. He asks why she stays at the diner and if she could be anything in the world, what would she be? Addie answers: (1) She stays at the diner because she likes it; and (2) if she could be anything, she would be a mother. The last answer pleases Wes, and so he moves in for the kill:
Wes slid his free arm around