Punch Up Your Writing with Conflict

Last week I talked about the importance of conflict in your fiction.  Conflict, as I stated then, is a function of your characters’ motivations. Your protagonist and antagonist must need to have or do things, and those things must be in conflict. These motivations can appear to be simple at the beginning of your story. The characters may even think so themselves at first.  But you, the writer, need to know the deep down reason why their opposing goals are important to these people before you begin to build your plot. If they don’t care deeply about these goals, your reader won’t care either.  And if only one is deeply invested, readers will wonder why the other one doesn’t just give up.
As an example, let’s consider Rocky – Sylvester Stallone’s first sold script. Yes, it’s a boxing movie, but how much of the film is actual fighting?  That’s good evidence that, as i said earlier, conflict is not violence. What does our protagonist, Rocky, really want in that film? He wants a shot at the title.  Keep that in mind, because his actual objective is important. But he also wants to prove he’s not a loser. And he wants his girl to respect him.
Our antagonist – Apollo – wants to prove once again that he is the best ever. There’s another lesson here: note that the antagonist isn’t necessarily a villain.  He doesn’t have to be evil.  And I prefer stories in which both the protagonist and the antagonist have worthy goals and are both absolutely determined to attain them.
In that context you can see that the plot of the movie is not about who’s the best boxer. It’s all about what Rocky is willing to do to attain his goals.  Each beat in the script is about Rocky facing some obstacle to achieving one of his goals. And really, he’s not particularly good at much of anything.  Consequently, each beat in the film contains a conflict that shows us how badly rocky wants these things he is driven to have. 
To help us care about your protagonist it is good for him or her to face more than one conflict. Next week I’ll talk about how to use multiple conflicts to raise the stakes and strengthen characterization.