How to make a dispute real...?

I heard my neighbours arguing yesterday, loud enough to carry across three back yards. Each of the unhappy participants saw the situation in black and white -- no shades of grey. He kept shouting, "You know what the problem is? You're the problem. You're the whole problem. All you ever do is sit around all day. I have to do everything. Everything." Her comeback to that was pretty much the same accusation, but ultimately he shouted her down, having the louder voice, and she retreated to the point where her defense was to scream "That's not true, that's not f--ing true. You're a f---ing liar."

The point is that neither (especially him) was willing to give any ground. It wasn't a discussion. It was two people blaming each other for something that both of them probably contributed to. Neither of them listened to what the other person had to say because by the time the shouting started the argument had develoved past the point where anything rational was being said. The point of the argument was not to resolve anything. It was to blame the other person.

Don't know if that helps.

The man hates her? She thinks she's (and actually is) innocent? Sounds like you have your conflict solidified to me.

He throws the first punch since he's unstable and wallowing and full of emotion. That way you can even ease her into it. She can try to be gracious as he accuses her or this, that or the other. She could even try to get away and he follows her until she's provoked to say something she ordinarily wouldn't mutter.

You want to be cruel? Well, without knowing any details, the best way to insult a woman is usually to attack her character and sexuality. The best way to attack a man is his pride and his sense of being right. I'd call her a name I think you know and have her tell him why, in quiet tones, the his wifes death is his own damn fault and if he wasn't an idiot he'd see that.

JohnDavidPaxton said:

You want to be cruel? Well, without knowing any details, the best way to insult a woman is usually to attack her character and sexuality. The best way to attack a man is his pride and his sense of being right. I'd call her a name I think you know and have her tell him why, in quiet tones, the his wifes death is his own damn fault and if he wasn't an idiot he'd see that.

Click to expand...

ooooooooo quite tones, sure fire way to know you've gone to far is to hear them..

Go for the understated. Don't go for the cliche shouting match with the endless procession of exclamation points. Don't have them answer each other's questions directly--an occasional shift or avoidance by a character makes it more frustrating for the character asking the question. Short, snippy answers toward the end (and in the beginning) help intensify the tension. Less is more. The rhythm of the entire scene, as well as rhythm from sentence to sentence, will help create tension, suspense. Sarcasm in dialogue from the angry party can infuriate the other party. It does in real life (just ask my girlfriend). Give them a bit of "business" during their dialogue if you need help to control the flow, or need to give a character time to think things over in interior monologue (but keep this to a minimum, especially at the apex of the argument".

Read really good plays. Especially dramas. You can find a lot of good examples of realistic arguments considering the playwright doesn't have the luxury of inner monologues or explicatory prose. The audience (or reader) can only infer the hostility from actions and dialogue.

Hope this helped.

Do what my friend did by accident:

Audio record your neighbors fighting.

Two things. First, make sure the argument escalates. It can't just be "you did it," "I did not do it," repeated ad infinitum. It has to get worse and worse until someone goes too far, and the scene ends. Sort of: he hints that she did it, and she laughs it off, and he says he really means it, and she tries reasoning, and he's unreasonable, and so on. Or they're arguing about the spaghetti that spilled on the floor (just an example), only it isn't really about the spaghetti; it's about his suspicion of her, and the crisis of the argument is when, meaning to shout "You killed the spaghetti," instead he shouts "You killed my wife."

Second. Just for the record, the h/h aren't always the protagonist and antagonist in a romance. There are situations where they both have problems that would keep them from committing to each other, and those problems are resolved in the course of struggling with another antagonist, rather than with each other.

The type of romance where the h/h are each other's antagonist is really difficult to end gracefully. If the conflict is a big misunderstanding (he thinks she killed his wife, but she didn't), then the resolution is anticlimactic, b/c the reader will think, "Well, duh, if they'd just sat down and talked it out, he'd have known the truth on page one, and who in her right mind wants to live with a man who once thought she could have committed murder? What will he think the next time someone he cares about dies in suspicious circumstances?" If the conflict is something other than a big misunderstanding (the classic land battle -- he wants the land to build his dream home on the lake, and she wants the land to turn it into high-rise apartments), then one of the h/h will win in the end, and one will be a loser, and it's kinda' hard to build a credible, lasting relationship on a win/lose situation. Sacrifice is all well and good, but about the only way that serves as a happy ending is if it turns out that one of them didn't really want what he/she thought she wanted, and then it's a little disappointing for the reader, b/c the implicit promise in the beginning is that those goals really, really matter to the characters.

Anyway, just something to think about. Not all romances have the h/h as protagonist and antagonist. Which isn't the question, but might help with the conflict, since perhaps they're conflicting with a third party, and less with each other, but they grow individually and together in the course of the conflict with the third party.

JD

Two of my characters were getting in to it last night and I said my dialogue out loud just to see if it sounded stupid. It was perfect.