100 Things You Should Know About Writing (Part 1)

2) What Conflict Is and Isn't.

When I started out writing, I knew conflict was one of the important bits that goes into a story. 

I knew that without conflict, the story was boring. 

And I remedied that by putting in lots of scenes of characters bickering and at least one antagonist with whom the character would fight most of all. 

Did that make for an exciting story? 

No.

Because let's face it, pages and pages of bickering become rather monotonous. Besides that, a reader will only read a story for so long before he/she realizes that the characters are fighting just for the sake of fighting, and decide that the book is therefore stupid. 

If you've read Section 1, you'll know that conflict from a writer's point of view is a factor or variety of factors that prevent the protagonist from achieving his/her goal. 

So looking at the examples I mentioned above: 

Characters bickering isn't conflict unless it's absolutely vital for them to be at peace for the goal to be achieved. 

And no antagonist is a conflict. The things he/she does to prevent the character from achieving the goal are the conflict. If killing the antagonist is the goal, finding him when he's hiding is the conflict. Getting through all of his minions in order to have a shot of killing him is the conflict. 

Not because it involves a lot of fighting, but because the minions are standing between the protagonist and achieving his goal. 

Right. Now that I've gotten this point across, let's look at the types of conflict available to you as a writer. 

When a protagonist is setting out to go after a goal, conflict can come from two places: 

Outside the character (This is known as External Conflict.) 

and, in a sense more importantly because new writers totally underestimate it: 

Inside the character (known as Internal Conflict). 

So when your character's going after a goal... let's say to save the world, most of the things a villain is going to throw in the hero's way will be external. 

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that the villain is in fact the hero's beloved brother, and the hero knows the only way to stop him is to kill him. That, my dear, is internal conflict. And internal conflict can ratchet the tension right up because the hero has an excellent reason to not try to stop the villain. 

Often, the greatest challenges to a character comes from their own hearts and souls. 

Try and find those challenges. Find their hopes, their fears, their weaknesses, and the things they most wish to avoid. And go find the thing that most challenges the character. 

Your story will thank you for it. 

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to ask questions in the comments! If it's about conflict, I'll do my best to help. If it's about some other aspect about writing, I might schedule it into my writing plan, if it's not already there, and dedicate that section to you.

If you found this section helpful, please don't forget to vote for it. :-)

Coming up: 

More on Stakes

Character Choice

The Inciting Incident