How Conflict Drives A Story
Conflict is a part of life. In a story, conflict is essential. It defines and drives your plot. Without conflict, you have little to engage the reader. No one wants to read a story about everything being perfect. Even fairy tales have conflict.
A quick word about plot here. When distilled down to essentials, the plot is the path the story will follow. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl. Simple, right? So, how does boy lose girl? That is where conflict comes in. Does he lose her because he does something stupid or are they separated by an earthquake? Maybe daddy doesn’t like his haircut. It could be anything, and therein lies the story.
There are three types of conflict, one is internal the other two are external. Most longer works will deal with all of them to some degree. Only in flash fiction are we likely to find a single type.
Internal conflict is man vs self. Every human being goes through periods of inner turmoil and uncertainty. This causes growth. In a story, it may encompass anything that challenges the character and causes him/her to question self. This soul searching resonates with the reader because we identify with the questions the character is asking. It builds empathy and expectation. We may see the character’s reasoning is faulty and understand that they will come to a bad end if they don’t learn better. This transfers the conflict to the reader. We want the character to overcome and learn. Be careful here. If they don’t learn, we will also want them to come to the expected bad end.
The first type of external conflict is man vs man. This may or may not be any sort of physical conflict. It could be competition for a job, a girl, or a detective matching wits with a criminal. This kind of conflict is present in nearly all fiction and encompasses far more varieties than I can numerate. We experience this constantly from disagreements over what to have for dinner to international wars. Again, it engages our empathy, we identify with one side or the other. We want to cheer the character on. Except in short pieces with a single character, most stories are going to have at least some of this type of conflict. I have read two novels that did not, only two.
The other type of external conflict is man vs environment. While this can be man vs wilderness, like Robinson Crusoe, it is actually anything that challenges the character/s outside of the first two types. Maybe the crew of an interstellar transport has an engine problem and has to find a way to fix it by themselves with whatever is on hand. That’s man vs environment. It does often have elements of survival, but not always. It may not even be the main character that’s at risk. It could be a biologist racing to find the cause/agent/cure for the outbreak of a new disease. It may be as simple as a man trying to deal with how the blender works while his wife is in the hospital. We will always empathize with a character’s struggle to solve a problem, even if it’s outside of our area of knowledge or experience.
Conflicts and the way the characters deal with them, define a story and make it unique. Think of the plot as the basic framework, the story arc as the time line and the conflict as the substance. The three must fit together, but the conflict makes us turn the page.
