War. What is it good for?

Get the full show notes on the blog here.So last week we did “conflict” and this week we’re turning it up to 11 with War which, as you might imagine, is extremeconflict.Don’t miss adjacent episodes on raising the stakes and “White Knuckle Scenes” which address the concept of “tension” in fiction and our first “conflict” conversation way back on episode 10.Last week we told you that conflict, according to this resource from Oregon State, means “thwarted, endangered, or opposing desire. It’s when a character wants something, but something else gets in the way.”Today we’re going to take War as extreme conflict and work out what they do to the narrative in three specific capacities:As setting (or backdrop)As primary conflict (this story is about the war or violence itself)As exposition (it happened before the story but the residue is still here)A few years ago, World War II novels were all anyone was publishing and I (Kasie) read WWII in every theater on the globe:Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (San Francisco)All the Light We Cannot See (Normandy/coastal France)The Postmistress (Cape Cod)Five Quarters of the Orange (French countryside)The Orphan’s Tale (Western Europe)Sarah’s Key (Paris)Wildflower Hill (Australia)Shanghai Girls by Lisa See (Shanghai)The House at Tyneford (England)The Bronze Horseman (St Petersburg)Atonement (England)It felt like the only thing worth writing about was the stories surrounding World War II and I think the compulsion was that so many people who’d lived through the conflict were passing away. In any case, the “theaters” of war were many – the Pacific, the East Coast, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Great Britain. There wasn’t a place on earth that the war didn’t touch. I haven’t read any novels about Canada or South America during that period, but I’m sure there are some.In any case, what was it that made WWII so compelling? Even Outlander jumps off from WWII before plunging back into the Scottish rebellion of the Jacobites in the 1740s. People were changed, irrevocably, by WWII.And that – irrevocable change – is the reason war is a compelling topic for stories. Read more on the blog.