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Take, for example, the reccurrence of Mary’s leukemia. At the end of the book, when it’s clear she doesn’t have a lot of time left, Rhage goes to the Scribe Virgin and begs her to save the woman he loves. The Scribe Virgin considers the request and presents him with a heartbreaking solution. She tells him that she will take Mary out of the continuum of her fate, thus rescuing her from death. But in return, to preserve the universal balance, Rhage must keep the curse of his beast for the rest of his life and never see Mary again. Further, Mary will not remember him or the love they’d shared:

His voice trembled. “You are taking my life from me.”

“That is the point,” she said in an impossibly gentle tone. “It is yin and yang, warrior. Your life, metaphorically, for hers, in fact. Balance must be kept, sacrifices must be made if gifts are given. If I am to save the human for you, there must be a profound pledge on your part. Yin and yang.”

—LOVER ETERNAL, p. 428

That’s some serious internal conflict. He has the power to save Mary’s life, but only at great cost to himself.

Conflict is the microscope of a book. When it’s trained on a character, you see what’s underneath the narratives of physical description. You see whether someone is strong or weak, principled or apathetic, heroic or villainous.

In the Scribe Virgin/Rhage exchange over Mary’s disease, Rhage’s conflict is both external, because it’s being forced upon him by a third party—namely the Scribe Virgin, in the form of her proposal—and internal, because he must confront how badly he wants to get rid of the beast and how much he loves Mary. He proves he’s a hero because he sacrifices his own happiness for his love’s benefit—and on a broader level, it’s the culmination of his journey from the self-centered male he once was to the connected, compassionate guy he is now.

See why I ended up loving him?

Conflict is absolutely critical in every story. And I think of the ins and outs of getting through it as the chessboard across which the people in the book must move: What they do and where they go to reach resolution are just as significant as what first put them between their rock-and-a-hard-place.

Rule number seven: Credible surprise is queen to conflict’s king.

Credible surprise is the ultimate play on the chessboard for an author. Plenty of things are surprising, but without prior context to give them weight, they’re not credible. To really make a resolution sing, you need both halves—a really strong conflict and an unpredictable, but believable outcome.

Take, for example, Lover Eternal’s end result. When Rhage accepts the Scribe Virgin’s bargain to save Mary’s life, he and his shellan are done. Permanently. And yet his love comes back to him (thanks to some rock-star driving from Fritz—who knew the doggen had had a Jeff Gordon injection?) both cured of her disease and with all her memories of him and what they’ve shared intact. Great! Fabulous! Except that’s not possible according to the agreement Rhage made with the Scribe Virgin.

Hello, credible surprise. It turns out that the sacrifice for Mary’s salvation has already been made. When the Scribe Virgin goes to Mary to rescue her from her fate, she discovers that the woman has been rendered infertile as a result of her treatments for leukemia. In the Scribe Virgin’s mind, this is enough of a loss to balance the gift of ever-life. As she states:

. . . The joy of my creation sustains me always, and I take great sorrow that you will never hold flesh of your flesh in your arms, that you will not see your own eyes staring at you from the face of another, that you will never mix the essential nature of yourself with the male you love. What you have lost is enough of a sacrifice. . . .

—LOVER ETERNAL, p. 438

Who could have guessed that Mary’s infertility was the key to the ending that kept the heroine and the hero together? I didn’t . . . but then, surprise! And here’s why it’s credible. Mary’s infertility had been mentioned before