I have a cartoon taped to the cabinet above my computer.  Picture three garbage men reading manuscript pages they have pulled from the trash.  Just beyond them, behind a window, sits a forlorn writer, staring at his typewriter.  The caption reads (one garbage man saying to another), "Here, I think I found it...He sacrificed plot at the expense of developing a strong central character in the third chapter and totally disrupted that great, plausible motive he had going."

My mother sent me this cartoon.  I guess she thought it was funny.

Frankly, I don't see the humor of three guys in droopy overalls with mayonnaise on their fingers having a better idea than the writer of what's wrong in his story.

That's not funny.  That's a nightmare.

We authors have it tough--juggling characters, plot, and conflicts.   How do we keep all these elements alive and compelling without sacrificing something?  How does one manage it all?

Your story may grow from any number of elements including a situation, a concept, a setting, or a theme.  This element stirs your emotions, demands your attention, and pretty soon takes a form of its own within your imagination.  You've discovered a vital catalyst to the birth of your story.  But, in the words of Dwight Swain (Techniques of a Selling Writer), "Without a focal character, you have no story."

The foremost way to engage reader participation in your story is through the characters.  Readers become emotionally engaged when they are aligned with, or opposed to, characters' beliefs, fears, and motivations.  Reader satisfaction, then, depends on understanding your characters.  John Gardner (The Art of Fiction) says, "Characters must stand before us with such clarity that nothing they do seems improbable."  Your job is to create people, including villains, who are absolutely certain in their beliefs and goals.

What does the hero want?  Why?  What inciting incident defines his perspective on the world?  What does he believe to be true about himself?  Most important of all, why is this the character for this story?

In his book, How to Write a Damn Good Novel, James Frey states, "A good novel is about a particular human being involved in a particular struggle."  Through empathy with this particular character, readers enter your fictional world and take part in the journey, even to vicariously experiencing the struggle.  Some say this is the whole point to fiction.  That all drama is about the quest to discover, "Who am I, really, when the chips are down?"

From real life, we know that the answer to this question holds the truth to a person's inner character.  True human nature is known only by witnessing a person make choices under pressure.  John F. Kennedy said that "a man does what he must, in spite of obstacles, pressures, and the opinions of mankind, and that is the basis of all human morality."  So it is with the characters in our fiction.  Force your characters to tap into their deepest reserves to overcome obstacles.

This brings me to the element of plot.

A story is not a string of events.  Events do not become a plot until they matter to a particular character.  For instance, terrorists taking hostages is an event.   When one of the hostages is the wife of maverick officer John Book, (Die Hard), the event is important, crucial.  We're invested in the story.  The action scenes pull us along because of Book's emotional stakes.

In other words, action must have meaning, a personal impact on the characters.   Action doesn't drive the story.  Action drives emotion.  Emotion drives the story.  Again, readers read to be engaged.  They seek to connect and we provide the connection through emotions, those universal feelings of anger, fear, shame, frustration, embarrassment, love.  How do we provoke those emotions?

Through conflict.

In his book, The Screenwriter's Workbook, Syd Field says, "Drama is conflict; without conflict there is no action, without action no character, without character no story ....Everything you do, every scene you write...is held together by the dramatic context of confrontation."

Conflict is complex; its purpose and source are multi-dimensional.  Conflict is more than the obstacles you place in the paths of the hero and heroine.  And it is more than what keeps them apart.  Conflict is most importantly the barrier that keeps the characters from moving forward in the best direction for themselves, what keeps them from becoming the best they can be.

Ultimately, conflict challenges your characters to move past their internal boundaries and grow.  Kennedy noted, "When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters.  One represents danger and the other represents opportunity."   You push your character to the edge, to where he has only two choices: He can remain fixed in his beliefs, hold fast to his goal, regardless that now his goal resembles a concrete block tied to his ankle and he's falling overboard.  Or he can question his goal, cut loose from the stranglehold of his beliefs, and realize a life-changing truth.  In other words, he grows.

Character growth doesn't just happen at the end of the book, any more than conflict doesn't just appear at the beginning.  Character change grows organically.  What he must become is already rooted in his personality.  What he needs to learn is planted in your story from page one.

Simply put, the end of the book delivers the beginning.  Throughout the story, your protagonist has made choices based on his beliefs and goals.  One by one, these choices have determined his path, propelled the story, and narrowed his future choices.   At the climax of your story, your protagonist is at the point of no return, where he cannot turn back and become who he once was.  There is, in other words, a direct line of action/reaction because of your character's character, from the first page to the last.

Character, plot, and conflict.  These elements intertwine from page one, weaving together, forming a tight braid with only one possible ending: the perfect story.

Award-winning author and RITA finalist, Laura Baker, writes romantic suspense set in the Southwest.  Her current release from St. Martin's Press is RAVEN, a Romantic Times Top Pick.