Without conflict you have NO story. Full stop.
You’ll often here me talk about “Perfect Day Syndrome,” where newer writers showcase their awesome characters and setting, in an awesome light, where everything is just…
awesome…
and is boring as all hell.
Another common one, isn’t necessarily where everything is going right, the characters can be facing a serious dilemma, BUT the writer puts all the characters on the same page.
“Hey let’s do this,” everybody nods. “Great idea, bro!”
Conflict is the glue that holds a scene together. When the glue ain’t there, you better have some other means of holding things together… or you’re in serious narrative trouble.
Sometimes folks will write scenes where one of the characters is full-on FURIOSA, at the other, but the second party retreats.
Imagine the scene where a wife finds a bra in her husband’s truck, that doesn’t belong to her… and she looses her noodle over it. Or a coffee shop, where a customer gets the wrong order and it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back.
In both these cases, the husband doesn’t want to end his marriage and the coffee shop employee doesn’t want to lose his job… both want to de-escalate the situation, so they remain calm and collected and try and talk the other person off the ledge.
I get these scenes a lot and when I tell writers, hey, your scenes lack conflict, they come back at me,
“No conflict? Are you kidding? Didn’t you see Angie lose it at her husband, she practically strangled the guy…”
The problem that they don’t recognize is, “Conflict” is opposition, not anger alone.
And you can’t have opposition, if no one opposes you.
Imagine a boxing match, where one boxer goes crazy on the offensive but the other boxes, literally, just covers up and runs away as fast as he can.
In this same vein, people often don’t realize “conflict” can be quite subtle, and/or about silly things.
I just had a nice Italian screaming match with the family over the unauthorized eating of my croutons.
Joe Pesci would be proud.
Granted that conflict was a little hot and bubbly.
I could have just as easily written that crouton scene, for comedy. Delivering it cold, with sarcasm, not focusing on anger and shifting the goals of the participants to achievements of a less serious nature. (More on that when I finish my Comedy genre article one of these day.)
A couple, sitting in a restaurant, discussing their divorce proceedings.
This type of dialogue could get vicious, absolutely overflowing with conflict, yet eliciting no physical heat. No frantic action by either character. I talk about this kinda dynamic somewhere, where the more you stifle the action between such conflict, the harder the conflict hits.
I don’t have a specific showcase in mind, but if I recall correctly, War of the Roses, showcases a lot of this latter kind of conflict.
Always remember, stories without conflict are quickly forgotten. ▪
About the Author —
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Newcomer or veteran writer, if you’re working on a project that needs commercial success, Nick urges to you read this intro article. And for every writer putting eyeballs on this, why haven’t you picked up my genre guide yet?
Nick Macari is a full-time freelance story consultant, developmental editor and writer, working primarily in the independent gaming and comic markets. His first published comic appeared on shelves via Diamond in the late 90’s. Today you can find his comic work on comixology, Amazon, and in select stores around the U.S.