What is a Story Conflict.
Each story has a conflict in it: confrontation of rivals, difficulties of making friends in a new city, dark lords throwing hordes of minions at the protagonist. Good stories have several conflicts reinforcing each other, creating a beautiful mess which the protagonist should solve.
Great conflict creates a captivating story. Let’s take a glance at what conflict is, it’s types and how it makes the plot become a attention grabber.
What is the Conflict?
Conflict occurs when two sides’ interests collide. In storytelling terms, it’s when a character meets an obstacle on the road to their goal. That could be an obstacle of any kind: person, force of nature, any external and internal issue. To achieve the goal, a character should confront an obstacle, creating a point of a conflict.
You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the conflict. It’s not only creating an interesting reading experience, which is important; conflict works as a herald of a change. Depending on the obstacle and the way a character overcomes it, it could change, resolve, or/and set up lots of things. It helps move the plot forward.
More about that below, but for now let’s look at which types of conflict we define.
Types of Conflict.
There are two types of conflict: internal and external. Each one of them opens up a road to a variety of obstacles and setbacks your characters could encounter on their path.
Internal Conflict
The conflict took place when a part of a character’s personality stood in their path. Here, a character themselves is an obstacle on the path to the goal.
There are two conflicts that fall under the umbrella of internal conflict.
Person vs Self
The inner fight of character with themselves. Their opponent is their flaws, insecurities, and moral principles. Fight the weaknesses to become better or succumb to them. Abandoned moral principles to achieve the personal goal, “greater good” or stick to them.
Remember Frodo in the finale of The Lord of the Ring. It’s an example of a moral struggle. Abandon everything and keep the ring to himself and succumb to false pleasure of bearing it. Or stick to the principles, to what good he has within; cast the One ring into the fire and save the day. Good thing that Smeagol was close.
Person vs Destiny
In core of it is a character struggling against their destiny or faith. But this conflict is a little vague.
In some cases characters could not accept their destiny to become a great person, fearing responsibility (and other stuff like this). That definitely an inner conflict ( depends on the context, though). In other cases characters would struggle to keep their faith in a god and let us say challenge the church. In this case, it could be both an inner and external conflict at the same time? Or only one of them.
This conflict highly depends on the context of what is happening. Anyway, in cases when you see the person struggle to accept what was bestowed onto them or trying to find their faith, it would be Person vs Destiny type of conflict.
Overall, the role of the internal conflict is to make or break your protagonist from inside. Challenge their insecurities. Challenge their morality and beliefs. Challenge their faith. By creating an internal conflict, you’re setting a space for a character’s growth or demise.
External Conflict
This type of conflict takes place when any external threat or an obstacle prevents a character from achieving their goal.
There is five conflict that fall under the umbrella of external conflict
Person vs Person
When opinions, moral views, and goals collide, we have an interpersonal conflict. One side should overcome another one in order to achieve their goal. Doesn’t matter if it is two comrades that have different opinions on the matter, or two fighting factions, at the end of the conflict one side would prevail.
The Games of Thrones is a good example. We have one side: Stark took their revenge over their father’s execution. And we have another side: Lanisters wanted to stop them from achieving their goal and keep themselves alive. These two opposite goals between two factions resulting in huge scale conflict that bathed Westeros in blood.
Person vs Nature
Loving Mother Nature, well in this case more like the monster which tries to kill you all the time. This conflict is about confrontation between a human (or any intelligent species) and nature.
“Sole Survivor” is a great example. It is a personal story in which one conflict is a struggle of a man in order to survive in the wilderness.
Any catastrophe movie, it’s a good example of such conflict as well.
Person vs Society
Where the value and views of a person won’t match the one accepted by society, we have a societal conflict. In this type of conflict, characters often decide that enough is enough and give a fight to the society itself.
On a bigger scale we can speak about a revolution of sort: cultural or civil war. For example, Hunger Games. As the story progresses, Katniss Everdeen bat heads with government more and more. At the end, conflict grew into a full-fledged rebellion.
For the smaller scale, a good example is a forbidden romance trope. Differences in status forbid two lovers to be with each other, but they throw society a challenge and in the end up being victorious or dying, if it is a tragedy.
Person vs Technology
This type of conflict happens when the technologies have gone beyond human’s capability of control.
Machines kill all humans. In a lot of cases, it played out like that. The Terminator would be a classical example of such a conflict.
Other direction is a conflict of accepting machines as part of our society. “Bicentennial Man” is a good example of a story with such conflict.
Person vs Supernatural
When mysterious forces break their way into a character’s life, we have a supernatural conflict. Often in this case the only goal of a character is not look over the shoulder, run as fast as they could, and survive. Such conflict is often used in horror stories.
Good example would be a clown beloved by everyone. Though this fell has a strange love for sewage, red balloons, and kids’ souls.
Overall role of the external conflict is to throw at the character the meanest things which plot could realistically (definition of realistically depends on the story) support. Conflict should make them struggle on the path to their goal and in a perfect world setup or/and trigger some inner conflicts.
Author’s Note. It’s fine to feel like “Doctor Evil” when you write an external conflict.
Influence on the Story.
Now, when we know what conflict is and which types of conflict we could use, it’s time to look at ways it could affect the story.
Generally , Conflict could influence the story in four ways: change characters, change relations between characters, guide plot direction, and shape the world around characters
Change of a Character.
Here we are speaking about personality shifts. Characters overcome their insecurities, flaws, accept their destiny.
After conflict (in this case usually inner conflict) resolved, a character would be a somewhat different person. Some of their negative traits vanished, overcome by a character resolute. Depending on the story, your character either achieved their goal by overcoming their inner demons, or is ready to kick the ass of the dark lord.
Rule of thumb here is to keep in mind how every conflict could affect character psychology.
Change Relationships Between Characters.
Shifts in the dynamic between two characters. The clash of wits and wills happened, and now we oversee the aftermath.
Depending on how conflict was resolved, feelings of character and their status compared to each other would change. There is a lot depending on the context here. Pare in question could become a married couple if you write a romance. In other cases rivals could become best buddies and vice versa.
Just keep an eye on this weird human relations thingy, okay?
Guide Plot Direction.
Conflict resolution changes plot. Common way is to propel the plot forward. Characters get through the obstacle and get closer to the goal. We already spoke about that.
Another way which conflict could affect the plot is to guide it in another direction. In most cases when it happens, the character realizes that the goal they were chasing it is a false one or just not what they wanted. Conflict helps them to understand this.
In this case the character could continue pursuing the same target but now with a different reason in mind. Depending on a type of resolved conflict, it could change their approach entirely.
In another case, character could abandon their endeavour and curve the path in another direction towards what they truly desire. Usually happens when they understand that their goal was a false one, though here the same external forces could work as an obstacle to another goal.
Shaping the World.
Also known as “I kill the younglings, now where is my immortality secret?” Here we are talking about grand or slight changes to the world around characters.
With conflict resolved, nothing remains the same. Lost lives can not be returned. Burned houses won’t magically rebuild themselves (depends on setting). Depending on a scale of the story and how your characters are important (kings, knights, chosen ones, etc.), the scale of changes could change. From the village that won’t starve to death, to the world that was saved.
When you give your character the opportunity to toss around bad guys, think about how it could affect an area and society in the long run.
It’s worth mentioning that changes in most cases wouldn’t happen suddenly (once more we should consider context), it’s a process with intermediate results. Finale changes will happen right before or shortly after conflict resolution.
Conclusion
When you create points of conflict in the story, you open up possibilities to change. Thought before creating those possibilities, think through why you need them here and what type of your author mischief thrown at the character would be most beneficial for the story.
Practice and master the art of the story conflict. It’s a hard task, but it is a worthy one. It’s fuel the story, and it helps characters to push it forward.
