Manufacturing Conflict for Fun and Profit

I am an aspiring novelist. I have been reading my fair share of books on how to amaze readers with my prose and overwhelm the planet with the breakout novel. Time and again writing instructors say that if you want to write that seething, sizzling best-seller, you’ve got to fill your novel with page after page of conflict.

Translation: if you ever hope to rise above the poverty line as a novelist, you need to riddle your protagonists with bullets of pain. Make ‘em suffer. Embarrass them. Torture them. Rile them. Make ‘em miserable. As in:

Real conflict means taking the hero’s (or heroine’s) worst fear, twisting it around and making it particularly nasty, then throwing it back at him (or her) at the worst possible moment and saying, “Here, baby, think fast!”

The end result is that you have a contingent of pro and wannabe writers who are all working furiously to manufacture conflict for fun and profit. The producers of media content are in the conflict delivery business.

Think about this for a moment.

Just about everything you as an entertainment consumer see and hear in the mass media is designed to provoke conflict for characters. The media that you ingest has been created and produced to give you the vicarious thrill of watching someone suffer.

Yet do we as a society ever question what this success formula may be doing to the world psyche? What is the psychological impact of all that manufactured conflict on readers, radio listeners, moviegoers, and TV viewers? Are we in danger of being hypnotized by this passive absorption?

Have you ever wondered why some people seem to be living their lives as if they’re locked inside a soap opera? They always seem to be walking underneath a black cloud of impending doom. They talk in the clichés of angst, just like soap opera characters.

Have you ever wondered about people, often self-confessed news junkies, who get so distraught and frightened by the outside world they isolate themselves in front of Fox or CNN? Wasn’t the official Iraq war great television?

Have you ever had the experience of receiving some great news about your personal life, and then been overwhelmed by fear that something bad was going to happen to spoil it? (And how many times in the movies or books is something really, really good followed by something really, really bad?)

I wonder if there is a connection.

If everything in our media is designed to promote conflict, and we see it over and over and over again in a variety of different ways, aren’t we being hypnotized to believe in conflict as our reality?

Does life imitate art?

And it really just isn’t about art, per se. Do you ever watch the news objectively, as if you know you’re being manipulated and you want to see how? Pay attention to the language. Reverse engineer the prose. The more that news becomes entertainment, especially on cable, the more news organizations fight for viewers by using dramatic storytelling techniques.

And how about that last presidential election? Wasn’t that the most awesome display of pandering to fear that you’ve ever seen? You can bet that the spinmeisters running those campaigns used dramatic storytelling techniques to scare up some votes.

But here’s some conflict for you: the more you study your media diet, the angrier you might get. You might start thinking you live on the wrong planet because you see a much more positive vision of life.

I believe that this is what happens to many people who have had near-death experiences. Suddenly their whole world is shaken up, not only by almost dying, but by the perceptual jolt they experienced when they peered into different realities. They are taken so far out of the norm (with their experiences with the light and life reviews and the lessons learned) that they no longer respond to the ordinary conflict mentality.

How could you respond the same way to a news story about someone dying in a car wreck if when you had your own near-fatal car wreck, you saw the light?

It all makes me wonder what our world would be like if instead of so much artificial conflict, our dramatic entertainment were filled to the brim with creative solutions. What if we had a higher level of conflict, perhaps as exemplified in near-death experiences?

Part of the conflict for me—ahem—is that as a writer I like to push the envelope on envisioning good stuff.

Just after Steven Spielberg brought out Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I thought why not have a movie where space aliens land on the White House lawn in the beginning—not the end—of the film? What would happen to the destiny of the planet if some highly advanced civilization blew the lid off our current conception of the universe?

Suddenly we would know without a shadow of a doubt that we weren’t alone in space. And we would have that all-important cleansing of many of our current ills. The star trekkers from a distant world would share with us solutions to key scientific enigmas.

When I chatted with a writer buddy about this plot, he asked, “Where’s the conflict? All drama needs conflict. If the space visitors solve everything, there’s no conflict.”

“Yeah, but wouldn’t it be exciting to explore what would happen to our planet if the space guys removed many of our current complications?”

“That might be interesting in real life, but it doesn’t make for good drama.”

I guess that’s why we get movies like Independence Day. Space aliens can’t resist trying to conquer Earth. If they were too good to us, we would all be bored. Well, everybody but me. (I often think I come from another planet as it is!)