If you’ve ever been caught in the rain without an umbrella, or caught in the middle of a murder of crows without an umbrella to fend off their attacks because they followed you to work after remembering that you were the one who threw rocks at them to be quiet that morning on your lawn even though you live 25 miles from your office, then you’ve experienced one of fiction’s timeless conflicts: man vs nature.

This is the third installment in our six-part series about the key conflicts in literature. For those who hate themselves for what their father did to them, you can check out our Man vs. Self article, and for those who hate their father for what he did to them, then our Man vs. Man article might be more up your alley.

Man vs Nature conflicts are different than many other conflicts in fiction. Nature has no motives, plan or vendetta. Characters are fighting against something that has no awareness that they exist at all. This is relatable because it reminds so many readers of their love lives.

But it’s also relatable because this conflict has been with us since caveman times, when leopards would come and take our children in the dead of night instead of the elders who made up a bunch of bullshit rules for our tribe to follow.

And yet with all of our modern technology, it’s a conflict that’s just as relevant to our lives today. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably lost loved ones to cholera or rabies, with no cure in sight. And the greatest blow to my publishing career was not a vindictive agent or publisher, nor was it my lack of self-confidence. It was a fire that destroyed D&E offices in 2021, and while the courts argued that it was caused by my business partner siphoning electricity from a nearby building – making it a man vs technology conflict – once the fire got out of control, it really just became man vs the natural melting point of human flesh.

We’ll trek across vast deserts and gun down ravenous herds of deadly goats on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

~

Tip One – Use Nature to Reveal Character

Much like alcohol, a man vs. nature conflict will often reveal a person’s true identity. Back in 2018, when D&E Publishing was really taking off as a company, I took my employees on a scavenger hunt through wilderness of southern Utah. Groups were paired off with nothing but a half-bottle of water, a compass, a magnifying glass, an emergency flare and a copy of a survival guide that I wrote but decided not to publish because it wasn’t profitable.  

I quickly learned which people were the strivers and which were the cowards who immediately went to their cars afraid they’d die of dehydration. I also learned a lot about myself, particularly that I’m not a great planner and I don’t have a great understanding of how much damage emergency flares can cause during the dry season.

In your fiction, you should similarly use natural calamities to reveal character strengths and flaws. In Cast Away, for example, we learn that average humans are so resourceful, they can even learn to make friends with volleyballs. Diseases show which of us are so self-centered that we refuse to wear a piece of cloth on our face for a few hours a day to save our fucking neighbors and grandparents.  

Tip Two – Make Nature Specific

Don’t just say that a storm is approaching. Describe the atmospheric conditions. Is this caused by a high pressure or a low pressure system? Give barometric readings or your reader just won’t buy it.

I remember one reader sending me a manuscript about a bear attack. In his book, the side character was killed instantly when the bear ripped out his jugular. Having once watched a friend be killed by a bear during a camping trip, I knew that the bear was likely to start by eating his abdomen and then his face before he slowly died of blood loss. I rejected the book on the spot.

But you also have to be specific about what nature can’t do. If your snake finds a way to open doors, or your Ebola finds a way to drive a car, well… then we’re moving into man vs. the supernatural territory.

Tip Three – Don’t Ignore the Cost

Conflict needs to have consequences for it to be interesting. If your party ventures across dangerous terrain and comes out on the other side never losing a member or an important item, your reader won’t feel anything.  

And it’s just not true to life. Hardly a day goes by where I don’t think of my employees lost in that fire at D&E offices, and also that homeless man who would use our lobby as a quiet place to shoot heroin after 7 pm.

But you don’t have to kill people just to titillate your reader. A cost can manifest itself in many different ways. Jurassic Park has loss of life, sure, but the greater cost I’ve always found is that kids will never get to enjoy that awesome park and investors won’t be able to recover their losses. And in my novel, Canucks Amuck, about a Canadian zombie invasion, the loss of life pales in comparison to the devastation caused by socializing the American healthcare system.  

They say we are our own greatest enemy. And while I’ve never found that to be especially true – I’d have to give that title either to my second wife’s new husband or my former agent, who once called and said I won a million dollar sweepstakes so he could break into my house while I went to the gas station to sign the check – it’s undeniable that our internal struggles make for excellent fiction.

Today will be the first installment of a six-part series. Each part will focus on one of fiction’s categorical conflicts. Perhaps because it’ s February or perhaps because I just discovered this weird lump that I should get checked out but probably won’t I’ve decided to start with Man vs. Self.

This is, I think, the most relatable type of conflict. Everyone has fears and self-doubt. When I first started D&E Publishing, for example, many friends and neighbors didn’t invest in my company because of a lack of confidence in their business skills. And I’ve gotten emails from so many viewers who are terrified they’ll never make it as a writer due to their personal flaws. Which is crazy because I’ve only told a few of my viewers that.

In your fiction, this conflict can be small and muted, like a character deciding to reconnect with a friend they lost touch with, or it can be large, like the protagonist realizing that his split personality is the one who’s been drowning all of those nuns.

Readers like these types of conflicts because they’re relatable, but they also like these stories because they feel better about themselves in comparison. I know when I read The Catcher in the Rye, for example, I felt glad that even though I was also expelled from school like Holden Caulfield, at least when I got with a prostitute as a young man, I took her straight to pound town.

Just a quick trigger warning: We’re going to explore some uneasy truths and deal with some heavy topics in this video. If you’re not in the right state of mind to listen to frank discussions about mental health, like and subscribe and let the video play to the end so it doesn’t hurt our viewing numbers, but feel free to turn the sound off.

We’ll try to figure out which hole we’re filling with all that chocolate and booze on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

~

Tip 1 – Root the Conflict in the Character’s Backstory

If you think about it for a second, why do we have self-doubt in the first place? It seems like in caveman times, those with self-doubt would be too distracted by guilt from murdering a rival tribe that they fail to realize they’re being stalked by a leopard while gathering berries. Yet it persists in our blood line.

That’s most likely because as human societies grew in complexity, even the most neurotic of us managed to get access to food and shelter from beasts long enough to swap DNA with each other, and then either through nature or nurture, we passed along our neuroses to our children.

And life always throws us curve balls. For example, I remember one time my father barged into my room late at night. He hid under my bed, claiming that loan sharks were after him, but when I asked if I could hide with him, he said that the loan sharks would get suspicious if nobody was on the bed and that the loan sharks would, at worst, kidnap me for a ransom but that they weren’t likely to physically harm me. Luckily, it was a false alarm, but it did lead to some trust issues, both with my father and with the loan sharks I would later work with when I became an adult.

Anyway, in your fiction, you can try using flashbacks. Tease them out slowly so the reader can understand why your character has the conflicts that they do. In my novel, Chair, we don’t learn until halfway through the novel that the protagonist’s binge eating was inspired by his family underfeeding and subsequently killing his childhood pet iguana.

Tip 2 – Connect the internal conflict to an external conflict

Our internal conflicts don’t stay stuck inside our head, unfortunately. They manifest in our actions, often in bizarre, unpredictable ways. Take my first wife, for example. An unstable childhood where she was passed between many family members meant she never developed a stable identity. Due to this, she was married to at least six men at the same time under different pseudonyms and personalities. In some relationships, she was the loving mother, others the career woman. I would’ve been more upset about the betrayal had it not been for the fact that I lucked out and got the sex-addicted slut.

In your fiction, you need to come up with external conflicts that will also bring out the internal ones you’ve established. If your character has a fear of drowning, throw their puppy into the ocean. Test a character’s religious faith by introducing them to a really hot atheist. Test a character’s acceptance of aging by introducing them to a really hot, really young atheist.

Tip 3 – Use Symbolism

Here’s an exercise. Look around your room and see what objects could symbolize your identity or at least your state of mind at the moment. I think you’d be surprised at how easy this is to do.

A quick scan of my room reveals the following: the pile of clothes symbolizes a busy mind, maybe one that’s too easily distracted. The loaded pistol atop my desk symbolizes my need to feel secure and the fact that I grew up and still live in a rough neighborhood. The lipstick stained handkerchief from my second wife I keep in my dresser draw symbolizes my tendency to live in the past and my hope that someday I could possibly use the traces of DNA on it to clone her.

And don’t be afraid of cliches. This stuff resonates for a reason. A storm is a classic example of a way to symbolize anger and inner turmoil. The skull in Hamlet is a great example of a symbol for the fear of death. The sunglasses on the corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s, on the other hand, represent an unwillingness of the main characters to accept the finality of death.

This is hard for me to say, fans of Stories’ Matter, but… I’m dying of cancer. This may be the last video I ever publish.

Okay, not really. But that got your attention, didn’t it? Made you want to keep reading.

Fiction, at its most fundamental nature, is all about lying. It’s about tricks and deceit and pulling the wool from behind your reader’s eyes. As a fiction writer, you use big words to lie and make yourself appear smart and distract others from the fact that, if the apocalypse were to come, your uselessness to mankind would make you one of the first left behind to die.  

The hook is the cornerstone to this deception. It’s the flashing titty, the taste of that first sip of absinthe, the smell of newly-lit rock smoldering in the crackpipe. It’s there to blind the reader to the crooked teeth, the blinding hangover, the achy withdrawal and the kiss of concrete in the back alley.

In today’s article, we’ll see how we can effectively snatch our reader’s attention right off the bat. We’ll manipulate in a way that would get us fired from almost any other job on this edition of Stories Matter.

~

Before we start, let’s look at some examples of great opening hooks from classic works of fiction.

“I am an invisible man.”

From Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. This is a great opening for people who don’t read the titles of books they’re reading.

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from serve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

From Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce. As true today as whenever it was written.

“You want to be there. You know you do. Don’t lie, dahling. I know what you think when you look up at that splendorous place atop the mountain. I know what fills you, spurs you on, fuels your dreams. You’re obsessed with being chosen. Everyone is.”

From Modelland by Tyra Banks. There’s so much confidence in the prose here, such command of the language. You can tell Tyra’s going to hit you with truths other models/talk show hosts wouldn’t dream of.  

So, how can we be as effective as these three?

Step One: Start in the middle of the action

This is sometimes referred to as “in medias res,” which is Latin for “Things called media, they go to the middle.” Starting this way confuses your reader. Which is good because most people read books to appear smart. So this forces your reader to keep reading to find clarity so they feel like less of a dumbass. Using tricks to prey on the insecurities of your reader is what writing’s all about.

Step Two: Imply intriguing contexts

It’s not just about confusing your reader. And it’s not just about shocking your reader with mutilations and expletives and left-wing ideas like murdering anyone who says Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays.

A context could be an era, place or scenario. You could allude to an ongoing conflict or bring up an interesting fact about a place or era of history.

Here’s how I started Doe’s Boys, my World War II drama set in the North African theater:

“By the end of 1944, half the men in L Division would never return home. Most of those who did came back missing a body part or two. But everyone who came back whole had one pastry chef to thank.”

Step Three: Set the voice and tone

We often think of hooks as being plot dependent, but voice and tone matter just as much. If they’re anything like me, the average reader is going to spend the next month or so listening to this person, so they want it to be someone unlike their family or co-workers or therapist, somebody worth listening to.

From the opening lines of Kerouac’s On The Road, you can tell Sal Paradise is a free spirit, not someone brought down by the old ball and chain.

You could try being funny, but I’d recommend something sad and desperate. If YouTube analytics are to be trusted, that will come much more naturally to you.  

Step Four: Invite controversy

Rudyard Kipling once began a story this way:

“A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black. Then, whatever trouble falls is in the ordinary course of things – neither sudden, alien nor unexpected.”

Now, am I suggesting you start your story advocating racial segregation? Kinda. I mean, Kipling’s famous and you aren’t so he must be on to something.

But if blatant racism, sexism, homophobia, zoophilia make you uncomfortable, just choose a statement that shows a strong but understandable conviction. My 2020 crime epic A Handful of Napalm starts like this:

“The one thing nobody ever tells you about crack: It never stops being awesome.”

Step Five: Tug the heartstrings

This seems counterintuitive as your reader doesn’t even know the character yet so why would they feel an emotional connection? Sort of like how you ignore news stories about thousands dying in floods and earthquakes or force yourself not to learn co-workers names so they won’t get attached and ask you to give money to their GoFundMe when they get bone marrow cancer.

There are, however, certain universal emotional triggers that even people who walk past choking homeless people without a second thought can’t ignore: A crying baby. A barren woman. A barren woman’s dog about to be put down for biting a crying baby.

Here’s a great example of how to do this:

“I was insane the way an animal is insane because I’d lost everything.”

That’s from William Shatner’s biography and it gets directly to the heart of his pain and his struggle.