Elements of conflict

overstating harm

Like many conversations with friends, left turns are the norm. So, when I sent the latest and much appreciated Junot Diaz mini lesson on the fundamentals of writing conflict to my BFF writer group-chat, my friend Michael told me to read Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman (available for free download on Audible right now, BTW).

Wait. Why did he suggest this? In fiction, we’re supposed to ratchet up tension and conflict all the time, not resolve it. The whole point is to torture our characters with one trial after another, not make their lives easier. I gave my phone a little side eye, but I downloaded the book because I always take Michael’s book suggestions, grabbed the dog leash, and plugged in my headphones.

Before I was even down my driveway, Sarah Schulman was already talking about how heightened rhetoric of threat around normal conflict leads to “overstatement of harm,” which Schulman asserts is a primary escalator of most conflict.

She proceeds to break down real conflicts ranging from the intimate to the international and asks that the reader read her book the way we “would watch a play: not to emerge saying, ‘The play is right!’ but rather to observe that the play reveals human nuance, contradiction, limitation, joy, connection, and the tragedy of separation.”

Oh man, I kinda wanted to shut it off during the descriptions of intimate conflicts—sexual relationships, long term partnerships, dating, work, friendships, parents, siblings, and so on. She made me think back to some doozies of conflicts where I may have (Nina looks away from the camera and picks at a hangnail) overstated harm. Shit. How did I get looped into this? I was just trying to think up some small hurdles for my fictional character to twist her ankle on, and suddenly I’m in a self-reflective moment considering some choice moments when I acted or reacted disproportionately out of fear or self-righteousness. As the kids say, “My bad, G.”

We do it all the time. Exaggerate. In exaggeration, we push the levels of emotion to get a reaction—a laugh, a win, or to coerce people to our side more easily. In fact, I just told my two youngest that the state of the laundry room was killing me. I did it because I want them to clean the goddamn laundry room. But guess what? The state of the laundry room is, in fact, a bummer, but it’s not actually killing me.

Thankfully, the next conflict Schulman described was political, and I was able to put the personal mirror down, but as she was talking about the 2014 escalation in Gaza, I couldn’t help but think about the wars of today, and the political strife in my little town of Bar Harbor, Maine.

The conflict that we have in Bar Harbor is normative conflict, meaning the people here have some discomforts but we have low levels of poverty and violence, we have highly regarded schools, unparalleled natural beauty, and economic vitality as a host community to Acadia National Park. So, it’s a great place to live and visit. That said, we have no affordable housing stock, we have rising taxes, traffic issues year-round (only one way on and off the island) which are compounded by summer visitation, and on top of all of that is the ongoing friction of navigating climate change.

Many of our small businesses serve travelers and the consumerism around travel is thought to be a primary contributor to climate change. That’s the rub—how to be proactive about our consumption, waste, and impact on the earth, while also welcoming tourists as our primary economic driver.

I went to a regional middle school track meet with my youngest child a few weeks ago, hundreds of people traveled from eastern and northern Maine to be there. There were hot dogs and buses and ice cream cones and band-aids and sunscreen and Doritos and Gatorade and freezer pops and coffee cups and ice packs and popcorn. It was a wholesome event celebrating the successes of kiddos who are learning the values of practicing, caring for their bodies, and perseverance and yet there was an impact from the travel. Waste was generated. Fuel consumed

.

Consumption is human.

So, it’s important in the realm of conflicts such as these, Schulman cites, that "we move from the Abuse-based construction of perpetrator and victim to the more accurate recognition of the parties as the conflicted, each with legitimate concerns and legitimate rights that must be considered in order to produce just resolution." It is the path of the greatest proactive leadership.

Shulman goes on to say, in a rather hopeful way:

The community surrounding a conflict is the source of its resolution. The community holds the crucial responsibility to resist overreaction to difference, and to offer alternatives of understanding and complexity. We have to help each other illuminate and counter the role of overstating harm instead of using it to justify cruelty. I suggest that we have a better chance at interrupting unnecessary pain if we articulate our shared responsibility in creating alternatives.

All this heaviness aside, I need to bring us back to the challenge at hand—making my character’s life a living hell. So let’s reverse engineer what Schulman says for poor Tabitha Gray. Her actions must be perceived as threats to those she engages with. She or those around her must overstate the damage they have suffered to set her into a hyperbolic sinus rhythm of escalating action and reaction—every step forward met by a step back, and every misunderstanding magnified into a crisis. The stakes must be high, the emotions raw, and the misunderstandings deep. The more Tabitha tries to clarify, the more she inadvertently entangles herself, leading to a web of exaggerated claims and defensive reactions.

Lord, let me not be like Tabitha.

Ciao,

n