Post #192 November 11, 2019

“Story Basics: Conflict”

The website Storysci.com says this about conflict:

Conflict is the natural result of one character’s desire intersecting an obstacle. Conflict increases proportionally to the amount that each side pushes back. It drives the story forward and keeps the audience interested. Without it, nothing in the plot would be worth mentioning because story without conflict is not story, it’s summary.

Not all story conflict is between people.  Maybe your main character crash lands on an alien planet and has to survive all kind of natural forces or creatures trying to eat him or her.  In Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, the big alien cylinder-ship is the cause of much of the conflict.  But most conflict in stories is between people and this is a storytelling tradition that goes back all the way to Gilgamesh.

Your characters have to want something.  They have to want to do something.  Otherwise, you don’t have a story, as the quote above says.  I just finished a science fiction short story called “Second Sun.”  In this story, the action takes place on a station in orbit around Jupiter.  The station has a mission and the main character (the story is told first-person POV) has a goal of destroying the station and preventing the mission from being accomplished.  However, he learns upon arriving that his own estranged mother is a member of the station crew.  Here’s the conflict: does he continue with his mission, destroy the station and kill his own mother?  Or does this encounter resurrect long-lost feelings and cause him to change his mission in some way, a way that allows him to still fulfill his assignment and yet save his mother (and his self-esteem) from destruction.  The conflict in this story operates on multiple levels: inside the mind of the terrorist-anarchist main character, with and against the station crew and with/against his own mother.  But conflict is at the heart of this story.

How do you engender conflict?  How do you lay the groundwork?

The first thing to do in laying the groundwork is to develop believable, credible characters.  To do this, I often (even for the story mentioned above) write small character bio sketches.  In this way, my characters have a background I can refer to and it’s consistent.  You want your readers to empathize with the character in some fashion.  Is he going to complete his mission?  Is he really going to be responsible for the death of his own mother? 

Next, give your believable characters something to achieve, something to strive for.  Make it important, even life-threatening or altering.  It’s not enough to say Joe Blow is striving to get to the drugstore before it closes and buy a candy bar.  Give him a reason, a critical, existential reason to do that…if he doesn’t, the teen-aged home invader holding his daughter captive may slit her throat.  Now there’s conflict.

 Let’s stay with the example of your daughter being held hostage.  What might happen if the drugstore is closed.  Ah, now we have plot complications.  Maybe the distraught father swipes a candy bar from a neighbor kid.  Maybe he breaks into the house next door and ransacks the cookie jar or pantry.  More complications.  Maybe he can’t call the police because his phone’s not charged and the invader has cut all landlines (does anyone use landline phones anymore?).

Start with an inherent conflict between the desires or needs of one character and how that is impacted when it meets the desires and needs of another character.  Then describes what happens or better yet, show what happens, when these needs clash. 

Even better, as matters escalate in this conflict, maybe one of the characters changes in some way.  Maybe your distraught father is able to trick the home invader and drug the candy bar with rat poison.  Or maybe be comes to empathize with the invader such that he can talk him into surrendering to the SWAT team outside.  And after this ordeal, the distraught father (grateful beyond words that his daughter is safe) begins taking an interest in helping wayward youth.  He’s changed in an important way.

Now you have the outlines of a story.  As I said in the opening post to this series, “We don’t often think much about our skeletal frames unless something’s hurting, but your skeleton is what holds you up and the same is true for storytelling basics.  They hold up a story…or not, depending on how well you take care of them.”

The next post to The Word Shed comes on November 18 and deals with point #4 in our story lab checklist of Top Ten Storytelling Basics: make your protagonist proactive, not reactive.

See you then.

Phil B.