What We Talk About When We Talk About Conflict

All right, we’re on Substack, so let’s get a little embarrassing.

My first novel (unsold, and you will soon see why) starts out with a protagonist trapped far away from home and with no means of escape. He’s cold, and he’s hungry, and he’s homesick. This was a wilderness survival story, and my protagonist doggedly tries to keep himself sheltered and fed for 70 pages before the plot sets him off in an entirely different direction. After that, the thing gets pretty good, which is why I don’t want to be too specific — there’s always a snowball’s chance in Hell I might eventually sell it.

But those first few chapters?

My beta readers were very kind. Lacks some tension, they said. Has some pacing issues. Is, ah, boring.

It wasn’t the conflict! They agreed — I had plenty of conflict. Man vs. Man: he had an imaginary friend he was always arguing with about what he should and shouldn’t do next to survive. Man vs. nature: the weather was unpredictable and always hounding him, and he was constantly struggling to find his next meal. He had internal conflict, too! He felt terrible about his inability to help himself! The thing was lousy with conflict. The guy couldn’t go five minutes without being set upon by a plague of one shape or another.

Nevertheless, my beta readers also agreed that these chapters weren’t working.

I did a lot of things to try and fix them. I changed the entire novel from third person to first person and then to present tense and then back to past tense and then back to third person. I added chapters to the beginning. I added chapters to the middle. I deleted all of the adverbs. I sent the protagonist to another location. I did all the things the internet says to do: make a character active (he actively wants to go home!) Make sure he’s likable (he saves a, er, cat!) Add conflict! You know just . . . just add it! Like mozzarella! Slather that bad boy in gooey conflict! Everyone loves mozzerconflict. So I made him hungrier and the weather worse and I sent in some bad guys with guns.

Still, my beta readers hemmed and hawed. Yes, they agreed, I had obviously added these things. But inexplicably, no matter how much action I added or how many cat-adjacent animals my protagonist saved, nothing was getting any better. The wheel might be spinning a little faster, but it still felt like a spinning wheel.

Spoilers: it was, indeed, the conflict.

It depends on which sources you’re looking at, but the internet seems to agree that, loosely, “narrative conflict” is, “opposition to the goal your character is working towards.”

Some definitions go a little deeper and break it down into categories like those I previously mentioned: internal vs. external, man vs. man, man vs. nature, etc. With the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think “define to decode” exercises like these are particularly useful — it’s fine if you’re doing a seventh grade book report on The Scarlet Letter, but learning a bunch of increasingly-specific definitions is not the same as finding solutions. In fact, you might be lulled into a false sense of “it can’t possibly be the conflict” like I was because you’ve got man vs. whatever! You’ve got internal strife! Guys with guns! Evil aliens! Infidelity!

So let’s pivot away from that, because whether it’s man vs. man or internal or whatever doesn’t really matter. We’ve all read absolutely sloggy stories about alien invasions and absolutely gripping ones about gardening.

Also with the benefit of hindsight, I think the tricky thing about “conflict” is the term is vague. We tend to use the term to compliment when a bunch of different aspects of a story are working well together, or to complain they’re not working at all (the term “plot” functions in a similar way, but that’s another post for another day). Some of these aspects are tension, motivation, and stakes. A lay person’s complaint about “conflict issues” could refer to all of these, or one of them.

Alternatively, when you start thinking about conflict as an ingredient to be added to up the tension or reveal character or move the plot forward (etc etc) you might get the mistaken impression that merely having conflict in your story will do these things. And it won’t. Not all conflict is created equal.

Conflict should force characters to make decisions that result in consequences.

Think about the most tense, impactful moments of your life. When you were about to ask someone to marry you, or interviewing for a job you really wanted, or getting ready to hit submit on a story. This is all conflict. There was a person between you and your goal – to have a family, to get a better paying job, to get published – who might say no. I bet your heart was pounding and your hands were sweaty not because this barrier simply existed, but because you were wondering, Am I making the right decision? Should I think about this some more? Have I done everything I can?

“Well duh,” you say, like I did, once upon a time ago. “I can walk you through the conflicts in my story and the decisions and the consequences. They’re all there! So it must not be the conflict.”

But are they real decisions? Are they real consequences?

Here’s a couple of examples of a conflict. See if you can spot why one has a real decision with real tension and stakes and consequences, and one doesn’t:

Example 1: Dave wants to marry Rachel. He’s pretty sure she’ll say yes because they love and are devoted to each other, not to mention she’s been hinting that she’s expecting a proposal. Still, his blood pressure is through the roof as he grips the ring in his pocket.

Example 2: Rick doesn’t really want to marry Jane, but Jane’s given him an ultimatum and a deadline, which is tonight. Jane is pretty and nice and wealthy (so wealthy!) and he does love her, but she’s kind of mid and boring, and there are so many women out there. Is he really going to throw away all those other potential women for “pretty and boring”? At the same time, what if they break up and he doesn’t find anyone else? Or, what if he finds someone he truly loves, but they can’t give him the lifestyle he wants, like Jane can? If he ends things with Jane, he doesn’t think she will take him back. His blood pressure is through the roof as he grips the ring in his pocket.

For the first, there’s no reason for Dave not to propose, other than he is physically nervous - he might flub a line or put his decision off, but to what end? The story hasn’t given us a reason to think anything will happen other than Rachel will be overjoyed and say yes. The writing might focus a lot on Dave’s physical nervousness to relate the character’s state of tension, and it might be a fun passage to read, but it won’t really be a tense read for the audience.*

On the other hand, we don’t know what’s going to happen with Rick. Will he propose? Won’t he? If he does, will he inadvertently slip and reveal his motivations during a proposal, which will change the nature of the conflict between him and Jane? Or will he keep his cool and then maybe we, the reader, don’t even want Jane to say yes! We’ve set up a conflict with a huge number of directions that it could go in, with built-in possibilities for escalation and further conflict. And that’s because this conflict has:

1: A character who has to make a decision between at least two options, both of which offer comparable levels of pleasure or pain. (Rick could settle for Jane and live a life of unfulfilled luxury, or he could pursue the potential jackpot of another woman who offers him everything he wants and needs — but who might not exist.)

2: The two options are mutually exclusive — to pursue one means abandoning the other. (Settling for Jane means giving up the imagined woman; pursuing the imaged woman means breaking up with Jane.)

3: The option that the character chooses will result in consequences that are good and/or bad, forseen and/or unforseen. The opposite must also be true: not choosing other options will also result in consequences, good and/or bad, forseen and/or unforseen (Rick breaks up with Jane, and makes sure to emphasize that he’s doing her a favor – now she can find someone who really loves her! Jane is unimpressed. Rick hits the market looking for his dream woman and finds the pickings are slim. To make things worse, Jane takes it upon herself to make sure that Rick never gets another date again.)

You’ll notice that this is similar to the South Park guys’ “But/Therefore” advice for storytelling, but I think it’s too easy to “follow” their tree while misunderstanding what constitutes a meaningful “but/decision” and “therefore/consequence.” So here’s a few more hypothetical examples of what does and doesn’t qualify:

For decisions:

It’s two weeks until payday, and Alice doesn’t have enough money to pay her electric bill, and no one to ask for help. She doesn’t pay her electric bill, and her electricity is turned off. This is not a decision. There is no alternative path in this narrative for her to pursue. For a decision, you need an Option A and an Option B.

It’s two weeks until payday, and Alice doesn’t have enough money to pay her electric bill. She could go without electricity for two weeks, or she could ask her kind and generous mother to loan her some money. This is not a decision. Option A and Option B should both be tempting or repelling to a similar level. No reasonable person would choose to live in the cold and darkness when they know there’s a no-consequence avenue for getting what they want.*

It’s two weeks until payday, and Alice doesn’t have enough money to pay her electric bill. She could go without electricity for two weeks, or she could contact her asshole mother and borrow money from her, but her mother will probably use this as a way to try and insinuate herself back into Alice’s life. This is a real decision. Going two weeks without electricity would suck ass. Indebting yourself to your shitty mother would also suck ass. These are her two options, and she must pick one.

Now consequences:

Alice decides to go without electricity. She lives in relative misery for two weeks, pays her electric bill, and her power is turned back on. This is not a consequence in the narrative-furthering sense. Consequences can’t be that your character just returns to their pre-existing norm - they have to lose or gain something. If I can wholesale take out a “conflict” and your story doesn’t change, it’s not a real conflict.

Alice decides to ask her shitty mother for money. Inexplicably, her mother has become a kind and generous woman. She gives Alice the money with no caveats, and we never see her mother again. Alice feels bad for judging her mother. Same as the above. If I can wholesale take out a “conflict” and your story doesn’t change, it’s not a real conflict. Also, “character feels bad” is not a real consequence, not unless those bad feelings cause your character to immediately blow all this money on a good-feeling cocaine binge.

Alice decides to ask her mother for money. Her mother says she will give Alice the money, but only if Alice agrees to sign up for her MLM scheme selling scented brain slugs, which would bring Alice into a seedy business and also put Alice even deeper into her mother’s debt. This is a narrative-furthering consequence. Going two weeks without power is starting to look more attractive, and if Alice chooses this option, it naturally creates opportunities for further decisions/consequences.

Alice decides to not pay her electric bill. She makes it a few days of roughing it, eating room temperature pepperoni sandwiches and taking cold showers, but juggling an unpowered life quickly becomes unmanageable. She forgets to charge her phone in her car, it dies overnight, and she misses an alert that the scented brain slugs have risen. She awakens to find her house surrounded by her mother’s brain slug MLM army. This is a narrative-furthering consequence. Though Alice didn’t see this coming, her being in this situation is still a consequence of the decision that she’s made. Now she’s surrounded and has no way to call for help. She’s going to have to make some more decisions.

We’re getting a little long in the tooth here, so let’s wrap back around to me and my poor hypothermic cat-saving protagonist. He had a goal -- to not die in the wild, and to eventually get home. I was throwing plenty of conflict at him. But I had given him no way to escape his situation, so he just wandered around suffering and being sad* that he was stuck. Everything I threw at him didn’t make him any less stuck – they were just annoying things he had to endure. And when he did have decisions to make, they tended to look like:

Option A: Make a fire and don’t die in the cold

Option B: Die in the cold

There are survival stories out there that really work -- Hatchet, Island of the Blue Dolphins, freaking The Martian. But each of these stories dig into the richness of possibilities of what a protagonist can do to survive, the options they have available, what they give up to pursue those options, and what happens when they bank on an option that goes wrong. And most importantly, the authors always give these characters a way to help themselves. My guy was quite literally killing time until rescue showed up, and I’m not sure why this didn’t strike me at the time, but that means he was quite literally killing my reader’s time until the plot shoved him along. It felt like wheel spinning because it was.

And if you’re chortling and saying well, that’s not my problem, you might be right. But you’re here, reading this — you’ve read this far — so, you know. It’s worth asking yourself: do your characters really have reasonable and compelling options constantly presented to them as they pursue whatever their goal is? Do consequences result from choosing one of those options every single time, consequences that follow them and continually impact the narrative that follows?

*Of course, you can (and should) have plot elements where a character expects a thing to go one way and then is wrong. But that’s not a decision – that’s a surprise. I’m sure there will be a post on this later.

** I’m sure I’ll also make a post on why “character feels bad” alone is not a sufficient consequence, so stay tuned in for whenever that happens.