Category Archives: Conflict

I hate conflict. Okay, arguments can be constructive, I’ll give them that. I hate it when they turn nasty. And I really hate fighting. I’ve seen it and it sickens me. Yet conflict, confrontation and fighting are staple tools in storytelling.

So what happens when you’re a passive, a person who tries to avoid conflict, but you know you have to write it, to face it so you can tell a good story? There are five things you can do to overcome your fear of writing conflict:

1) Don’t be afraid of yourself
If you’re really honest about it, it’s emotionally painful to feel what your characters feel and most of us don’t like experiencing the dark side of ourselves. Writing coaches, like Donald Maass, ask questions that force you to dig deep into your own psyche and then they ask you to apply that to your character. It can be freaky and unnerving but it’s definitely worth it. When I do this, I’m always aware that I’m doing this to extrapolate information, and that fiction is fiction and not real life.

2) Don’t be afraid of your readers
We’re all told “write what you know”. Does that mean that if we write about a cruel character that we’re cruel people? Or, that if we write about a weird aunt in conflict that we’re making a statement about a relative? Certainly not, although you may hear “so that’s what you think of me!”

“Write what you know” doesn’t mean having personal experience on the matter or that a character is a direct reflection of someone we know (although it could be). It means that we do our research well so that we don’t resort to stereotypes. Just think, if we had to write by that rule, then there wouldn’t be any historically based fiction. This adage can also get you into trouble. A writer friend confided that she understands parental conflict when it comes to a males but not females. She had a great relationship with her mother and fought with her step-father. Hence, she has to take great care to ensure that all her stories aren’t about females in conflict with males and that females in conflict appear genuine.

3) Know that it’s okay to cause trouble
Throw out the socialization, normalization rules you’ve learned. It’s okay to be mean and it’s necessary to cause trouble, get people (your characters) into trouble. It’s important for your characters to feel pain, experience anguish, fight hard for what they want. As readers, we want someone to cheer for, a way to safely experience conflict, and experience the catharsis of conflict overcome. Readers want that and as writers, it’s our responsibility to provide that. The greatest gift I received when I started writing was permission to be cruel to my characters.

4) Overcome your lack of experience with conflict
You’re a nice person and have avoided conflict all your life. What does it look like? What is it like? How does a person in conflict feel? Why would they react that way instead of hiding? The trouble is, that when we don’t understand conflict or the ramifications of being in conflict, it’s too easy to fall into stereotype cliché’s about a situation.

Avoid the stereotypes by realizing that conflict arises from different people wanting different things, and doing things differently. People are NEVER in perfect agreement. Know your characters well enough (their history, perspective and motivation) to take on their persona . Know how they’d respond in certain situations and why. Research the effects of stressful situations on the body and people’s reactions, research martial arts, fighting, war and its effects on people. Talk to people – other writers, people with direct experience, or experts. Read historical accounts, biographies, blogs and forums where people discuss their situation. Understand how life stages affect goals, motivations and responsibilities. For example, parents may perceive potential harm if a teen goes to a party whereas the teen may be oblivious to that and desperately wants wo be with her friends. Research will help you get a feel for the issues and how people have reacted in similar circumstances.

5) Know why you’re telling the story
There must be a reason for telling the story. The character must be overcoming something for some reason, otherwise, there isn’t a story only a vignette. If you have an audience for vignettes without conflict, that’s great because not everyone likes conflict. Otherwise, give your character a chance to learn and grow, to fight for something important. Conflict is about overcoming a problem. It’s not about taking the easy way out which can be done in one paragraph. Are you going to dash through the poison ivy or leisurely walk around it?

Conflict is a part of story structure. Who is the protagonist? What does he want? What is he willing to do to overcome the obstacles to get what he wants? What are the consequences of his actions because not everyone wants him to get what he wants? What is he willing to do? What will he actually do? Is he doing the right thing for himself or for other people? Doing the right thing is very hard to do.

We all strive for happy, peaceful, fulfilling lives yet we all experience conflict every day whether it be with a stranger, a loved one, a friend, or if we are troubled by something. How do we get through conflict? How can we write our character through it? Motivation. Your character, just like you in real life, has to be motivated to stand up for what’s right, to fight for the goal, to change his world so he can become who he wants to be and to live the life he wants. Writers are motivated to write the story, to overcome the internal and external conflicts and challenges we face in order to tell a tale. We must give our characters the same opportunity to face the challenges, to live their story so they can experience and overcome the conflicts no matter how big or small they are.

Now that I understand the role of conflict in story, I look forward to creating the situations and seeing how characters handle them. Doing the research, delving deeper, thinking it through – I love that process and the resultant richness it adds to the story. Conflict is its own character with its own personality, twists and depth.

The best way to write conflict when you’re afraid of it is to throw yourself into its path and find a creative way out of the situation. After all, that’s what we make our characters do!

Happy writing.

Just Under the Surface: Subtle Conflict

April 27, 2015

Kristin Luna

Balancing Acts Character Conflict Craft & Skills Kristin Luna Reflection The Writing Life Writing Tools 2 Comments

In our culture, the bigger the explosion, the better it sells. Action movies rule the box office, and readers ferociously consume romance, fantasy, and thrillers for the intense conflict. Our sensory input sure loves the loud conflicts. But what does the mind love? What does the brain crave? Subtle conflict. Tension between two lovers because of the faint scent of perfume on the collar. A character’s chest pain that doesn’t seem to subside. A character’s gnawing feeling to return home. These are sometimes called “minor conflicts,” but can change the entire ending to a story and leave readers breathless.

When we think of conflict, we think of some pretty violent words: fight, war, blood, feud, anxiety. Okay, maybe I just have anxiety when I think about conflicts and confrontation. But here are words we don’t usually think of right away when it comes to conflict: sleuth, spy, unreliable narrator, slow, time, patience. When does a plot twist truly blow your mind? When the hints and foreshadowing have been so subtle that you didn’t piece it together until it was right in front of your face. This kind of conflict takes time and patience to build.

In subtle conflict, the author dives into character motives, changes in the environment, and/or a slowly-shifting political climate. Not as flashy as a war, say, but an extremely effective tool when planning a book’s climax.

One of the best examples of subtlety in contemporary literature (that I can think of) is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Stevens, the protagonist, is a butler in England that takes great pride in his work. He is very loyal to his job and his employer to a fault. Stevens tells about his day-to-day duties through his own rose-colored lens in such a boring way that you begin to question why you’re reading the book in the first place.

And then, something small, almost inconsequential, strikes you as amiss. Very slowly, you begin to piece together that not everything is how Stevens perceives it to be. By the end of the book you realize, through no major conflict, what the conflict truly is: Stevens lies to himself, seeing only the best in his employer and his life. He is the conflict; he refuses to see things as they truly are.

While I don’t expect very many people would describe The Remains of the Day as “exciting,” or “thrilling,” I describe the book as being “artfully written,” and “beautifully subtle.” When I finished the book, all I could say was: “Wow.”

While anyone would agree that strong conflict is necessary in a compelling book, that doesn’t necessarily mean those conflicts have to be loud and in your face. They can be floating just under the surface, slowly building pressure and tension until the climax.

Fire-breathing dragons are cool, and explosions are nice. But don’t forget the subtle conflicts that can truly make your story memorable, unique, and blow your readers’ socks off.

About Kristin Luna:

Kristin Luna has been making up stories and getting in trouble for them since elementary school. She writes book reviews for Urban Fantasy Magazine and her short story “The Greggs Family Zoo of Odd and Marvelous Creatures” was featured in the anthology One Horn to Rule Them All alongside Peter S. Beagle and Todd McCaffrey. Her horror story “Fog” will be featured on Pseudopod in May of this year. Kristin lives in San Diego with her husband Nic, and is working on a young adult novel.

Close Conflicts of the Romantic Kind

April 25, 2015

Scott Eder

Conflict Craft & Skills 2 Comments

Here on The Fictorians, we’ve been talking conflict all month—internal, external, character vs …, writer vs…, but we haven’t yet talked about romance. Time to change that. Now, I’m a Fantasy guy, both as a reader and a writer. The reading came first, of course. I started with Tolkien, Brooks, Hickman, McKiernan, and Eddings back in the day, gobbling up epic tales of elves and dwarves and dragons, magic and mysticism, and good versus evil on a planetary scale. Man, I loved that stuff. Still do, actually.

Over the years I’ve read a gazillion books, but the stories that stick with me, the ones that hold a piece of my soul, are those that not only satisfied my need for the magic, but also spoke to my heart. I love stories that explore the spark, the attraction, between two characters. A strong romantic storyline, carefully fed and nurtured, can turn a good story into a magnificent tale that brushes against the reader’s soul.

And what writer doesn’t strive for that each and every time he puts words to paper?

I’m not talking about writing a Romance novel, but a sci-fi/fantasy story with romantic elements. There’s a big difference between the two. A novel classified as romance is subject to what I call the “Three Laws of Romance”:

The Law of the HEA – the story must have a “happily ever after” ending.
The Law of Astronomical Odds – the odds against the characters realizingtheir HEA must be so astronomical, the reader cannot possibly foresee how they could ever get together.
The Law of Forever Apart – keep the budding lovers apart for as long as possible. Once they get together, the story is over.

These three laws constitute an emotional contract between the Romance writer and the reader. Before reading the first word, a reader has their story-level expectations set. She buys into the formula and looks to lose herself in the unique twists and turns the author takes to reach that HEA.

Once a writer drops the “big R”, introducing a romantic subplot off the main sword and sorcery epic, the laws vanish. Anything goes. As a writer, this is where I live. I’m a lawbreaker, a rebel.

Badges? I don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

Let’s talk about developing the romantic conflict. For writers who consider planning/outlining a four-letter word, the romantic storyline is something that develops organically, something that the characters “feel” while the words flow from the writer’s brain to his fingertips.

But I’m a hard-core plotter. I have to know what to do when or I’ll leave something out. In the early stages, while developing each primary character’s internal and external conflicts, I consider a third type—the romantic conflict. Which characters will fall in love, or like, or lust, depending on the needs of the story? How will it happen? Will it have a HEA? When will it happen? Writing in a land with no “Big R” laws, I can do whatever I want. I can string the reader along, plying her with stolen goblin kisses behind the ale casks and furtive cyclopean smiles from the high window in the wizard’s tower, only to have one of the characters turned into a coconut in the last chapter. While that might add a kick to a refreshing adult beverage, being turned into a fuzzy, hard-shelled fruit wreaks havoc upon a budding relationship.

That’s a mean example, but makes my point. Being a romantic, I would never do that to my readers without a significant amount of foreshadowing to cushion the blow. I want the guy to get the girl, or the elf to get the elf maid, or the whatever creature to get the blue whatsit. The key here is to consider adding that dash of romantic conflict to any plot.

Romance, love, attraction, they are all inherent in the human, or quasi human, condition. Fully resolved characters will encounter this at some point in their existence. Embrace it. Develop it. Write it. Give the story the added spark.

No Evil Required

April 24, 2015

Evan Braun

Author's Perspective Character Conflict Craft & Skills Evan Braun POV 1 Comment

Evil exists in the world. In fact, to some degree it exists in all of us—a dark side that usually only emerges in our most private thoughts but may occasionally peek into the light of day. For the most part, we don’t let this happen. Indeed, for the most part we are good people. In evolutionary terms, goodness propagates itself more successfully; evil is inherently maladaptive.

The worst kind of motivation for a villain is intrinsic, deep-seated evil. They’re evil because they were born that way. Or they crave power obsessively. To me, this almost never rings true. I suppose there are some people like that in the real world, but they must be a rare breed. Most people think of themselves as more or less good—not necessarily saintly, but closer to Mother Teresa than to Adolf Hitler.

Intriguingly, even the people who really are closer to Adolf Hitler probably view themselves as being closer to Mother Teresa, and this is fertile ground for growing conflict in our stories. First of all, a villain is not the same thing as an antagonist. You don’t need a villain to tell a good story, but you probably need an antagonist. What’s the difference? Well, think about it this way. Sometimes you just have two fairly normal people who just happen to want very different things… perhaps even diametrically opposed things… and thus the clash happens. (Exhibit A: Sad Puppies vs. Social Justice Warriors; no evil, moustache-twirling villains here, but a hell of a lot of conflict-enriching antagonism.)

When building a story, try setting up a conflict between two or more sides in which every side could be anchored by a strong, relatable protagonist. The only difference between a protagonist and an antagonist is often the fact that the protagonist gets the primary point of view; if you swap things around, those two characters can easily switch roles without changing the fundamentals of the story.

As a thought experiment, it could even be interesting to try actually writing the story from different points of view. Walk in your antagonist’s shoes; make them the protagonist and see what happens.

Indeed, conflict requires no evil. Just opposition. And effective, relatable, compelling opposition is rarely in short supply.

Evan Braun is an author and editor who has been writing books for the last two decades. He is the author of The Watchers Chronicle, whose third volume, The Law of Radiance, is forthcoming this spring. He specializes in hard science fiction and lives in the vicinity of Winnipeg, Manitoba.