It’s the political season. As a writer, it’s interesting to take a characteristic that drives a person and thwart it– conflict. Or somehow transform that person’s point of view. Rather than use, the party names were all familiar with. I’ll use conservative and liberal. I am only going to talk about one thing that drives each individual to join a particular party. I’ll then talk about how we can take that drive to make a more interesting character to read about.
A conservative doesn’t like a change of any kind in their environment. That is why, as we age, we tend to become more conservative. We don’t enjoy the new noisy music of teenagers. Other things, such as the brilliant blue hair color, offends our sensibility. We can dye our hair a natural hair color to get rid of gray. That’s fine.
On the other hand, a liberal always sees things they would like to change. There shouldn’t be hungry people or homeless people. However, they don’t like some changes, such as climate change. Even though they have strong beliefs, they don’t want to see others’ beliefs intruding into their lives.
For our discussion purposes, let’s simplify that the two sides disagree on change even more and say. Conservatives don’t like it. Liberals embrace it.
If we take a liberal character and place them in the most rundown part of town, they’ll want to change it. They’ll want better housing for the people that live there. However, they’ll find there are vested interests that want things to stay as they are. It may be as simple as long landlords who make a great living off of these poor people. It could be as complicated as the city does not want to change the housing codes to help people in low-income areas. You can see how that would frustrate a liberal character. Frustration is a good starting point for any story.
Let’s look at the other side, a conservative. They would look at the same part of town as a liberal and not understand why a liberal would want to change the housing codes. After all, they have been like that for many, many years. Those landlords are merely making a living providing housing for poor people. Why should they be harassed? You can see that a conservative would be upset, but what the liberal is trying to do. What we have? Conflict!! That makes for a good story. Think of the old Westerns where the gunfighters meet out in the middle of the street for that final showdown. That’s conflict in the extreme because one will die.
A good writer can tease both sides’ feelings, but if they are too good at that, we won’t know who to root for in the story. Dicken’s story about Christmas starts with a curmudgeon who we don’t like. Through the visits of three ghosts, he’s changed, and we can root for him. Going back to conservative and liberal, Scrooge was a conservative at the beginning of the story and transformed into a liberal by the ghosts’ visits.
Okay, Scrooge is transformed. So what? What was Dicken’s purpose? He was working from a liberal point of view and pointing out a flaw in his community. Living for only accumulating wealth is detrimental to everyone.
