Cathy and I were on our way home from the grocery store yesterday, when we noticed a man who lives in our neighborhood on his motorcycle. He was obviously having trouble with the bike. It was sputtering and stalling, and he was delaying the traffic behind him. We were at a red light, waiting to turn left onto the same road, and we could hear a man in the vehicle behind our neighbor yelling at him. Finally, our neighbor got his bike running, albeit slowly, and he proceeded down the road. When we were able to make our left turn, we were two vehicles behind him and the man who was obviously annoyed with him.

The neighbor on the bike is a Vietnam vet. He walks his dogs, one of them always off his leash, and he never picks up their droppings. It’s said he has a habit of urinating in his yard. He does as he pleases, and many of our neighbors don’t appreciate that.

At another red light, just a little way from our neighborhood, the man in the vehicle behind our neighbor’s cranky bike got out of his car, still shouting, and our neighbor got off his bike, and the next thing we knew the angry man had punched our neighbor and knocked him to the ground. The angry man then got back in his vehicle—by now the light had changed—and he sped off around our neighbor and his bike. Our neighbor got back on his bike and took off after the man who’d hit him. It was amazing that the bike was now running without a hitch.

On down the road, our neighbor sped around the angry man’s vehicle just before Cathy and I made a left turn into our neighborhood. Whatever waited the two men on up the road remains a mystery to us, one that has me thinking about conflict in narratives.

It seems to me that sometimes writers are hesitant to dramatize conflict. Maybe it’s because they try so hard to avoid such scenes in their real lives, they’re reluctant to let their characters express their anger. It lies there beneath the surface of the narrative, never fully revealed, never letting the release have its effect on the characters.

Haven’t we all had a moment of anger when we confronted someone about something they said or did that annoyed us? Didn’t we have all sorts of complicated feelings after our explosion? Feelings of justification, perhaps, mixed with embarrassment and regret. The dramatization of anger in fiction isn’t just about what a character does or says in their rage, it’s also about how they feel about themselves on the other side of what they choose to do or say.

If you’re looking for a new writing prompt, feel free to take the story of the man on the bike and the man in the vehicle behind him and imagine what happened to these two characters after the opening scene I described. Or, if you’d like, create your own two characters who are moving toward an explosive end. Which character will be designated as the point of view in your narrative?  In what ways might their actions or statements disclose previously unknown aspects of their character? What will the effect of their anger be? Will the recipient of the anger have an unexpected response? Why will the explosive moment be a haunting memory for your point of view character? Look for the nuances inherent in any act of violence, whether physical or verbal.