Secrets of Writing: Progressive Complications
This is the meat of the story. This is where a large part of your creativity comes into play because here is where you heat up the conflict and keep the flames stoked high. Without conflict, you have a cold story. A dull story. A story people are not going to care about.
In life, the things that are worth having are the things we have to struggle for. Nothing that comes easy is precious to us. But when we fight for something, it’s like gold. This is a truism every member of your audience can relate to, which is why the conflict is one of the most important components of the story.
When we go about our day-to-day affairs we take the path of least resistance. When we walk to the store, we almost always take the same route. This is the way human beings function. But it’s all pretty boring. It’s not the stuff of fiction.
In a story you have to make your hero’s journey as interesting and exciting as possible. The greater the conflict, the greater the hero, the greater the audience’s interest level. Progressive complication deals with putting pressure on your character in a way the Audience can relate to. This is done by playing with the technique known as Reversal. Reversals are the walls that spring up between expectation and result.
When you take that walk to the store, something could happen along the way unlike anything that has ever happened all the millions of times you took that same walk. And it could prevent you from getting to the store by taking the path of least resistance. In other words, you have hit a wall. A complication. Now you have to find a way around that wall.
Your Hero is going after the Grail of the story. They need to go after it in a relentless way. They will scale any wall, climb any mountain to get there. And you need to demonstrate that. The value of the Grail is measured by the risk the Hero takes to reach it.
So back to our analogy about walking to the store. Let’s say a carton of milk in the store is the Grail. The Hero’s name is Kyle. Kyle is having a major jones for some Capt. Crunch cereal. He goes to the fridge and finds he’s out of milk. So he heads out and walks down Sycamore street toward the convenience store two blocks away. Suddenly, there’s a terrible earthquake and a huge flaming crevice opens between Kyle and the distant store. He can’t go down Sycamore, which is the route he always takes. So he turns down Willow, a side street that connects to Maple Blvd, which’ll take him south, the direction of the store.
But, because of the quake, police and fire trucks have shown up and are blocking off Maple Blvd. So now Kyle has no choice. He must try another route. He turns and walks down Willow in the opposite direction until he gets to Pine Street. He takes Pine to Oak street and cuts back up Sycamore, on the other side of the crevice. He sees the store in the distance. But as he walks down the street he sees a mob of looters running amok ahead. Kyle’s on the only street he can take now. So he decides to go ahead and take his chances. He’s gotta have that milk! As he walks toward the store, a band of thugs come up and try to rob him.
Kyle rushes them like a running back, breaking through their line. He knocks them aside. But one of them has a gun and starts shooting. Kyle dives behind a parked car. The gunman shoots at the car. The gas tank blows. Kyle rolls away as flames and shrapnel go flying. A jagged chunk of hot metal skewers the ground where he just was half a second ago.
The gunman comes after him, taking aim. Kyle grabs the shrapnel and throws it. It slices into the looter’s chest, stabbing him in the right lung. He goes down, gurgling blood. His gun falls to the grass. His friends see this and come after Kyle, screaming with rage. Kyle grabs the fallen man’s gun and makes a run for it. They start shooting at him.
Kyle spins, fires, and the looters go down one by one. Kyle is now only 10 yards from the store. But the police heard the shooting and pull into the parking lot, sirens blaring. They see Kyle has a gun and jump out of their cars, ready to shoot, ordering him to stop.
Kyle ignores them, runs into the store. The cops start firing. Bullets shatter the store windows, hitting product on the shelves. Soda bottles explode. Cartons of cereal go flying, spritzing Cherrios. Kyle rushes to the back, but a Pakistani clerk tries to block his way, jabbering in some foreign tongue.
Kyle throws a punch, it connects with the man’s nose. The clerk goes flying back into the slurpee machine. He hits his head, bounces forward, falling unconscious to the floor. Cherry slurpee slush dribbles onto his back.
Kyle spots the milk just behind the glass door in the refrigerated section. He makes for it. Just then, police enter the store, firing away. Bullets shatter the glass and milk cartons spray their contents. White fountains of the stuff splatters on the floor. Kyle tries to avoid the bullets, slips and falls on his back. Glass shards from the case slice into his flesh and he screams as--
What you just read is a series of progressive complications. If Kyle had just turned around and walked to a different store in the opposite direction, it would’ve been boring. But instead he walked in the direction of the conflict and here is where our story was born. Of course, you have to make sure it was a logical thing for Kyle to do. Otherwise the audience is going to say, “Why didn’t he just go to another store?” So maybe we could add a line that this particular store has a special brand of milk he can’t buy anywhere else. The only brand he finds acceptable.
Notice how each progressive complication was a logical extension of the last one. That’s how they need to work.
When Kyle went around the crevice, he encountered a road block set up because of the crevice caused by the earthquake. And as a result of this earthquake, people started looting. Kyle had to deal with the looters in order to go in the only direction left to take. And because he fought the looters he drew the attention of the police. And because the police fired at him, the milk was shot up, sprayed on the floor, and he slipped on it, falling on the glass. Now he’s lying on a slippery floor, with glass stuck in his back, and a bunch of cops are coming for him.
Every time Kyle went to take an action, something else came up to make his life more difficult. Each time, the stakes were raised. This makes the story more exciting as we read along. It also makes the Grail seem like an object of great value, even though in this case it was only a carton of milk.
Each time Kyle has a choice. He can stop, give up, or he can press on. His determination is what inspires our empathy. We can relate to life throwing road blocks in our path. It happens to us all the time, even if it isn’t as dramatic as the story you just read. Empathy makes us become involved with Kyle’s struggle. We live along side him every step of the way. We feel it when he falls to the floor and glass cuts him.
Every time Kyle choose to press on, he’s passed a point of no return. Especially as we get closer to the grail. Once he started fighting with those looters, he couldn’t turn around and go home. Now the police are after him. Now he’s in serious trouble. How you solve this crisis is the climax of the story, which we will deal with shortly.
The Trigger Event in this story was Kyle going to the fridge and finding he was out of milk. The Turning Point was the earthquake. What followed then was a series of progressive complications. This formed the bulk of the action. In a bigger story we would have scenes of dialog, perhaps internal monologues where Kyle debated what he should do. There might be details of the scene described. All of this would flesh out the world and the characters. But when you boil things down to the conflict, this is what you see. One progressive complication after the other. Each slowing down the Hero as he tries to reach the Grail. Each raising the stakes so it gets harder and more frenzied every step of the way. And finally you reach a crisis situation where it’s do or die. This is the point of no return. Either the hero wins the Grail or he loses big time. It should never be easy at the end. The end should be the toughest part of the story.
When creating Progressive Complications think about all the possible outcomes that could happen when the hero takes an action. Then separate the most surprising and believable outcomes and choose one.
This outcome will always force the hero to make a choice. How clever your hero is in dealing with that choice defines his cool factor. When he deals with the reversal and moves on, there should be repercussions that follow. And those repercussions will create a new surprise for him to deal with.
And each complication should make the stakes higher and higher until your hero is facing the ultimate challenge. This ultimate challenge is called the Crisis. And it will decide how good the ending of your story is going to be. You need to build toward a real crisis.
Whatever you do, don’t have the Hero retry the same tactics after they failed. When a hero attempts to repeat previous actions which have proven to be fruitless, it makes the Audience feel the hero is treading water and the story is going nowhere.
You start encountering the laws of diminishing returns when you repeat experiences in a story. And these don’t have to be literally the same. If they even smack of being similar you run the risk of boring the Audience. So be careful.
It’s also important to try to hit the first three levels of conflict if possible. Internal, Personal, and Societal. This makes the intensity of the story all that much greater. When you have a character with inner conflicts who is also having problems at home and with his boss, it creates a more complex story.
The example of progressive complications we used was the kind found in an action story. But if you want to see progressive complications in a suspense film, I highly recommend DEATH AND THE MAIDEN. If you want to see progressive complications in a comedy, try RUTHLESS PEOPLE. Progressive complications will work in any genre. That’s the beauty of it.
When you get to the end of the second act, or the final scene of the progressive complication stage, this scene must end down. It will, of course, be a Turning Point scene. This scene propels the story into the Crisis. You can’t enter a Crisis on an up note. You have to end down. And the harder, the better.
REMEMBER: Each progressive complication raises the stakes. Build toward the crisis.
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