Often when we talk about building a story, we'll talk about "story problems" and "conflict." Sometimes people want to know, do I always have to have a big conflict in my story? What if they're no real problem? Does every story have to be formulaic?

The answer to each of these is a big no and a small yes. Let me tell you a story about a conference I attended. During the conference, pages from attendees stories were read aloud and then agents and editors commented on them. In one piece, the writer wrote about a child coloring. The child chose his colors carefully and colored his picture. The story was (I assume) meant to show the reader some things about color. It did not go over big.

"There's no story," one agent said. "Things happen but the story never starts. Have someone rush in, grab his crayons, and flush them down the toilet and then a story will happen."

Now, that's an extreme fix for the story but it had a point. The child was coloring - a common activity that most children engage in. And coloring is not all that exciting to watch. Something needed to come along to force change in the normality, the ordinariness, the boredom of the activity. Some people call that something "conflict' or "story problem." I like to think of it as pressure.

COAL INTO DIAMONDS

A story character doing something we all do every day is dull. The status quo is dull. Readers have enough dull - they want difference. This happens when something applies pressure to the main character to force him/her to act to affect change.

The pressure might come in the form of being sent to bed without any supper: WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.

The pressure might come in the form of being sent to bed when you want to stay up: GOOD NIGHT MOON

The pressure might come in the form of competing with your Dad over who loves the most: GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU

In two of these, there is no overt conflict. The bunnies in GOOD NIGHT MOON and GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU aren't angry. They aren't stomping around. They aren't sailing away for a year and a day. But they do feel pressure to act. Let's look at the basic "formula" for this kind of thinking.

The Main Character experiences pressure to act to change a situation and those actions result in a satisfying ending. So how does that work in our examples?

Max acts wild and is sent to bed without any supper. So he imagines a journey to a land of wild things where he can rule as the wildest thing of all. Until he realizes that he misses home, where love waits in the form of a hot supper.

• Main Character: Max
• Pressure: Sent to Bed without Supper
• Choice of action: an imagined journey to escape the confines of rules
• Results/Change: a realization of what good things he's left behind.

• Main Character: A bunny
• Pressure: Bedtime when he isn't ready to sleep
• Choice of Action: Postponing sleeping by saying good night to everything
• Results/Change: The litany lulls him off to sleep.

• Main Character: A small nut-brown hare
• Pressure: a competition with his dad over who loves the most.
• Choice of Action: the main character chooses bigger and bigger examples of his love
• Results/Change: The dad shows respect for the hare's examples and the little hare falls asleep.

EVEN SMALL DIAMONDS SPARKLE

Stories for very young children often reflect pressure that seems slight to us from an adult perspective, but when we think ourselves into that mind of the child, we see that the pressure is much bigger. As an adult, I don't feel any huge need to "win" a competition for who loves the most. But that can be very important to a small child for whom both love and winning are huge. As a result, an adult might dismiss GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU as a book with no conflict, but it does have conflict. For the little nut brown hare, it has huge conflict. And the pressure to win only lets up when the adult character acknowledges the small hare's "win." Sure, the adult then waits until the little guy falls asleep and "cheats" by adding one more thing - but the young child listening knows the little guy won.

Equally, having to go to bed when you're not tired is a huge thing for small children. And as we know, even when they are exhausted, they are not tired. So the bunny in GOOD NIGHT MOON is actually responding to that pressure within the power available to small children. He's turning "Good night" into a long, long litany that lets him stay awake until he can't stay awake any longer. Within the limited power of a very small child, GOOD NIGHT MOON is very much an act of asserting his personal power and young children know that. Even as the smooth simple words lull the listener, they're also a story with a clear response to pressure.

The pressure doesn't need to seem big to us, but it should be motivating to the main character and it needs to resonate with the reader. The older the reading child, the more the author has to ramp up the pressure to get a satisfying story. But even the very small diamonds of picture books sparkle enough to draw the reader's attention again and again.

WHAT ABOUT YOURS?

No matter what the age of the story audience, if you actually have a story (and not just a list of colors with swatches on the page like some concept picture books) then you'll have pressure in there somewhere. And boiling the story down to that core pressure will quickly show you if you have a fatal flaw in your story structure. Do you have the elements of main character, pressure, action, result? Let's look at a couple common ways that structure might be sidetracked to create something that looks a bit like a children's story but doesn't work so well for children:

Judith needs to choose which birthday invitation to accept - the one from the most popular kid in school or the one from her disabled cousin where only relatives will attend. Her mother reminds her of how much her cousin is looking forward to Judith coming. Judith decides to go to her cousin's party and has a nice time.

Okay, we have a main character under pressure. She has a party she wants to attend and one she feels a duty to attend. He mother ramps up the pressure by making it clear what the "right thing" is. So Judith caves and the story is over. Do you see the problem? Action really was out of Judith's hands. When an adult steps in and does this kind of "reminder," any young reader knows what that means - it means you don't really have any choice. The author reinforces this by ending with "proof" that the mom was right because Judith has a good time. But the story isn't really about Judith's choices and their results. It's really an object lesson on putting duty over pleasure.

Pressure is good, but if you eliminate choices, then the result will be unsatisfying for the young reader. Here's another one…

Judith wants a new dress for a party. At the store, she sees two that she likes - but one is purple, her favorite color. When she sees the price, she decides to choose the blue one instead because the purple is so expensive. She goes home happy that she made a wise choice.

Okay, we have a main character and her choices are totally her own. But the problem is the "pressure" isn't really there. We open with pressure - Judith very much wants a new dress for the party. But once she finds two she likes, the pressure to choose is very slight. Both would make her happy, but the one she likes best is a bit too expensive. So she chooses the cheaper one. The pressure in this choice is just too mild for the reader age (a child who goes to stores and chooses her own clothes is a pretty big kid).

Let's try one more…

Three bear cubs come upon an empty house with an open window. They slip in to investigate and discover a bathtub. While they are eating the soap and drinking the bubble bath, they accidentally turn on the tub. Then they have huge fun playing in the suds until they hear the humans come home. They escape back out the window and run away back to the woods.

Okay, we have three characters sharing the main character spot - that automatically damages the possible structure of the story. Some stories, though, don't really have a main character. Humor stories where the story is moving toward a kind of "punch line" sometimes don't have a main character. Puzzle stories where the reader is meant to be surprised at the end sometimes don't either. So you don't HAVE to have a main character but it's really hard to create a satisfying story without one. And usually, something else in the story is the focus besides the characters.

Do our characters feel pressure? They discover a house and they're curious…which is a kind of pressure. Curiosity drives kids pretty hard so they will accept that as a pressure. But they'll be watching for additional pressure to grow out of the bears choices to follow curiosity. Here, the bears play, make a mess, go home. There's no sense of urgency, no sense of real importance. Stuff happens, but in this case…story doesn't.

So, now test your stories? Do you have the elements of main character, pressure, action and result? Do you have enough pressure to be a believable motivation for action? Does your main character really have choices? Put your story to the test - are you making diamonds yet?