Contrast & juxtaposition

At odds with the world

In a rich story world, there will usually be multiple sources of contrast, juxtaposition, and conflict.

Here's a small example from Tom Sawyer, but to understand it, you need a little context.

There are three boys: Tom, Joe, and Huck.

Before the snippet below, Tom has suggested that he and Joe should learn to smoke, and Huck has carved pipes for them from corn cobs.

The snippet shows them beginning to smoke and thinking everything is going fine. We then jump ahead by about a page [...] to find Tom and Joe have become violently ill (the fountains and pumps are metaphors for sweating and vomiting).

Given that context, what are the areas of conflict in this snippet?

Now they stretched themselves out on their elbows and began to puff, charily, and with slender confidence. The smoke had an unpleasant taste, and they gagged a little, but Tom said:

"Why, it’s just as easy! If I’d a knowed this was all, I’d a learnt long ago."

"So would I,” said Joe. “It’s just nothing."

[...]

Both boys were looking very pale and miserable, now. Joe's pipe dropped from his nerveless fingers. Tom's followed. Both fountains were going furiously and both pumps bailing with might and main. Joe said feebly:

"I've lost my knife. I reckon I better go and find it."

Tom said, with quivering lip and halting utterance:

"I'll help you. You go over that way and I'll hunt around by the spring. No, you needn't come Huck—we can find it."

So Huck sat down again, and waited an hour. Then he found it lonesome, and went to find his comrades.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer(1876)

While you can see we've highlighted four pairs of feature-contrast, there are overall three fronts of conflict:

  • Tom and Joe vs their own bodies: when they decided to try smoking they were feeling cocky and confident, and now they are all violently ill.
  • Tom and Joe vs Huck: Tom and Joe are embarrassed that they are sick while Huck, the more experienced smoker, is fine, so they want to get away from him.
  • Huck's self-sufficiency and pragmatism vs his desire for company: Huck is happy to let the other boys go off by themselves if that's what they want to do, but when he feels lonesome he goes after them.

So you can see there's a lot of contrast and conflict packed into even this short passage.

Here are some examples where we describe multiple conflicts at once:

Mikolaj clung to the end of the crane, dangling over churning water, holding on for his life as the boat rocked from side to side, sending him through wide, stomach-dropping arcs in the air. He looped his belt over the tip of the head-sized hook, hoping for a little more security as the boat flung him back in the other direction.

Below him, he saw the beast shamble onto the bridge. Bizarrely, it started the engine—as if it were the captain now.

Mikolaj screamed at it, hollering meaningless sounds as he felt the motor come to life.

The boat moved forward slowly, then more quickly, and once it gathered speed the beast turned the wheel, pushed the throttle, and drove the boat over the rim of the whirlpool, and Mikolaj, still dangling from the end of the crane, had just enough time to howl in anguish and defeat before they plunged down, down, into its long dark throat.

We have two sources of conflict:

  • Mikolaj vs the sea: there's some kind of wild storm and he's struggling to stay on the crane as opposed to being thrown into the ocean.
  • Mikolaj vs the beast: he wants to live, and the beast has other ideas.

I don’t know who told her, but when Ainsley found out, she went nuts.

She stomped up to the front counter, grabbed the intercom and started screaming about me and Ivan, saying the worst things. Justine was baffled and tried quietly to take the mic, but Ainsley batted her away and kept on ranting and pointing us out.

The customers stopped to watch, turning their heads back and forth between me and her, like they were watching tennis except I wasn’t returning any shots. I tried to shrink down and stack the shampoo, but she kept going, putting on a big angry show.

I couldn’t see Ivan anywhere, but I could see Mr Cameron marching towards her, his face red and his little moustache twitching like a butterfly.

Before he got there, Ainsley shouted that this was the worst supermarket in the neighbourhood, that the deli staff didn’t wash their hands after using the toilet, and that she quit—then she dumped the mic, tossed her name badge at the window, and stormed out the front doors into a blaze of sunlight.  

We have:

  • Ainsley vs Ivan and the narrator, in a conflict we don't know much about.
  • Ainsley vs Justine, fighting over the mic.
  • Ainsley vs Mr Cameron, in a "you're fired/I quit" type situation.

More broadly speaking, the conflict is between personal passion vs social order.

There's an accepted way of being in a supermarket and a workplace, and Ainsley is burning all of that down because she's upset and angry about something.

Again, have fun. This is the last writing activity in this lesson, so this is a chance to just let loose.

  • If you've been building a consistent world throughout this lesson, you probably have all sorts of conflicts bubbling under the surface, and this is your chance to throw them all on the table at once.
  • You might want to think of this as a climax of some type, a big moment in whatever's been building in your story world.
  • Don't worry about the structure, but try to introduce at least two sources of conflict.
Describe a climactic scene with two or more sources of conflict.

And we're done! That's all the writing!

Now let's pull everything together into one place and see what you've done.

Previous page