Category: obstacle

Over the past month or three I’ve seen a bunch of people offer their views on conflict in storytelling. And a lot of them had very strong opinions about it. What it is. Why we shouldn’t be obsessed with it. Why, maybe, we don’t even need it in our story.

To be blunt… I think they were wrong. But they were wrong for a few different reasons. And I think if we go over those reasons, maybe we can all get a better grasp of conflict, how to use it, and how we can make it work best in our stories. Sound good?

Let’s start with basics. What is conflict?

In a literary sense, conflict is something between my character and what they want. It’s an opposing person or force or set of conditions. Note that the thing they want doesn’t have to be something physical and neither does the thing between them and it. My hero wants to date the cheerleader/ save Uncle Ricky’s Surf Shop/ get the big promotion/ save the world from destruction, but first they have to overcome their shyness/ raise $50,000 by Friday/ figure out what happened to Doug from sales/ stop the alien invaders. Feel free to mix and match those into whatever combination works best for you.

Conflict is what drives my plot forward, because it forces my characters to make decisions and take actions. If there’s no conflict, they don’t need to do anything. And if my characters don’t do anything… well, that’s not much of a story. It might work in a weird artsy way but… look, nobody wants to read the story of how I once did data entry for eight hours a day for the better part of a month.

Two key things to note, before we move on.

First is all the random conflicts I mentioned in those examples up above require a degree of effort to overcome. None of them can be brushed aside or ignored. If I’m thirsty and go the kitchen to get a drink of water, there isn’t any opposition to overcome or effort required. There’s not really tons of consequences if I don’t do it. It’s not so much forcing me into action as barely requiring minimal action. If something doesn’t require much conscious thought to resolve, it’s not conflict.

Remember this. It’s going to come up again

The second key thing is that most of these conflicts don’t involve lots of shooting or punching or ninja throwing stars (spoiler about that cheerleader). There’s a common misconception that conflict just means aggression and violence. If I had to guess, I think this view’s grown out of ye olde advice nugget “start with action” which gets misunderstood a lot to mean we should always start with car chases and kaiju attacks. And that just belief just grew from there and now some folks see conflict and action as the same thing.

Remember this, too.

Now… with all of that in mind…

First, I’ve seen a number of folks who have odd ideas about conflict, and I think it comes from that misconception that conflict and action are the same thing. They’re smart enough to know “start with action” doesn’t always mean explosions and no-holds-barred cage matches. It can mean almost any sort of action, right?

The catch is these folks now think any sort of action counts as conflict. Walking my dog is conflict. Eating lunch is conflict. Taking a shower is conflict. But like we just said, conflict needs a degree of effort. It requires something preventing me from doing the thing I want to do. Yeah, it’s possible taking a shower could be a huge conflict in my story but… that’s probably going to be a really specific story.

A simple way to check this is a trick I’ve mentioned before. Whatever story we’re talking about, get the whole thing in your head and write out a good solid summary. One page, tops. Try not too skip anything, but don’t overthink it. Just get it all down like you were telling it to me at a bar or over dinner or something casual like that. “I just read this great book about…”

When you look back over this summary, you’re probably going to see the word but a few times (or maybe some of its kissing cousins like however or although). And a lot of those buts are going to be points where there’s conflict in the story. If I didn’t instinctively use but to explain how this element fits in my summary, there’s a really good chance this element isn’t conflict.

I mean, look at my choose-your-own conflict example up above. It’s a simple story explanation, and what’s the conjunction tying it together? It’s a natural way to explain conflict. They want this, but that.

Another thing I’ve seen a lot of in the discourse is some people arguing conflict’s completely unnecessary in a story. But almost all of their statements seem to tie back to that misconception—that conflict only refers to sword fights and alien invasions and ninja cheerleaders. And conflict can cover a lot of stuff. Heck, how many 80s movies are just about needing to raise money to save the orphanage or the car wash or, yes, Uncle Ricky’s Surf Shop? How many romantic comedies are based around misunderstandings that need to be resolved or class inequality?

So a lot of the folks insisting conflict’s unnecessary in a story are just, well, misunderstanding what conflict is. They’re defining conflict as just punching and ninja cheerleaders and the like, and therefore this story which has neither punching nor ninja cheerleaders… has no conflict. And that’s almost certainly not true. I mean, it’s true that they don’t have a ninja cheerleader, yes (maybe? ninjas are everywhere), but it’s not true the story doesn’t have conflict.

Again, conflict needs to be an opposing force or obstacle, but it could be the nagging doubt in the back of my mind that never shuts up. Or a letter from the bank telling us they’re going to foreclose on the surf shop if we don’t pay back all the loan money by 5:00 this Friday. Or the third point of a romantic triangle. Or the hundred miles of desert between me and getting that drink of water.

I think some of this misunderstanding also spills over into discussions about storytelling forms or structures. Someone will say “this type of story doesn’t need conflict” and then give an example that… well, has conflict. Not jetfighting/ spinkicking conflict, no, but they’re absolutely stories with obstacles that need to be overcome. It might not have one main, overall conflict, but the individual elements have lots of smaller conflicts. Or maybe the ensemble characters don’t have a single united obstacle they’re all trying to overcome, but they each have their own individual obstacle to deal with throughout the course of things. And sometimes it’s just plain old regular conflict.

Now, a closing disclaimer or two before anyone starts typing up responses.

Am I saying it’s impossible to have a story without conflict? No, of course not. But as I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, I personally find it really hard to be interested in a story about a normal day where nothing happens. Yes, it may have beautiful turns of phrase and inspired vocabulary and vivid imagery, but they’re all serving… well, a boring, normal day.

And ultimately—again, might just be me—I don’t think a lot of readers are going to sit through a boring, normal day. No matter how inspired my vocabulary is. Because we all go through boring, normal days all the time. We want to see something happen.

Even if it isn’t a spinkicking ninja cheerleader.

In other news…

I’m going to be at WonderCon this weekend! All day Sunday. I’m part of a panel Sunday morning at 10:30 on writing blended genres (Room 300 C) and after that, starting at 11:45, I’ll be in the autograph area for forty-odd minutes scribbling in books. And then I’ll be walking the floor saying hi to folks and looking at things. I’ll be the guy in the cranberry blazer with a Midnight Burger shirt.

And next time… well, I’ve been bad about the ranty blog these past few months, so I’m going to try to redeem myself.

Until then, go write.

Sorry I missed last week. Taxes. As I mentioned earlier.

A few weeks back, during my usual Saturday geekery, I had a sudden epiphany about Asylum movies. Even though, technically, it wasn’t an Asylum movie I was watching. I feel safe saying whoever made this film studied at the feet of the mast… well, at the feet of the Asylum producers. And it’s a problem I’ve seen in a lot of book manuscripts. So I made a note of it and told myself I’d have to do a post on it sometime soon.

And then last weekend’s geekery gave me a trio of movies that suffered from the exact same issue. So I thought, wow, serendipity. Definitely a sign of… something. So sometime soon became this week.

Once or thrice here I’ve talked about the ideas of plot and story. Plot is what happens outside my characters, story is what happens inside my characters. The basic idea of a narrative is that conflicts (of many different types) will drive that plot forward, and the plot and story will work together and feed off each other like some beautiful alien symbiote that bonds with you and manifests as bio-armor under times of stress or when you summon no, wait, that’s the plot of the Guyver. I’ve talked about how plot and story work together before. Stick with that, forget the Guyver. For now.

What I wanted to talk about was the conflicts, all those roadblocks that pop up between the beginning and end of the story. The things that get in the way of my characters getting what they want. Because some of these things are great and some are… not so great.

As I mentioned above, I have conflict in my book to drive the plot. My character has to overcome social pressures, financial constraints, power structures, ancient death traps, and a variety of other obstacles. Dealing with these things (or failing to deal with them)  forces my character to grow and change internally (sometimes called a character arc) while at the same time usually subjecting them to greater pressures/constraints/death traps. That’s dramatic structure. Who my character is at the beginning of the book starts and shapes the plot. Who they become at the end helps them resolve the plot.

Here’s a cool way to think of it. Picture a staircase. Every time we climb up a stair, it feels like we’re on level ground, but we’re actually higher than we were before. As we keep climbing stairs, we keep going higher. That’s conflict moving the plot. Climbing stairs moves us higher. Make sense?

Now, the problem I was seeing is that some storytellers had lots of conflicts popping up—but they didn’t actually do anything. They didn’t affect the plot in any way. They’d encounter a new obstacle, deal with it, and then be… right back where they started. Nothing gained. Nothing accomplished. Nothing learned. Our characters haven’t moved any closer to the end of the plot, haven’t grown or changed in any way. These conflicts were so self-contained we could just snip them and lift them out and there wouldn’t be any real change. Heck, we probably wouldn’t even need to stitch things together on either side.

If you wanted to use that staircase analogy, at this point the steps have kind of fallen over and become more a line of peaks. Every time we go over one, we’re just… right back at ground level. Not to mention, they’re all kind of the same peak. None of them stand out, and we realize pretty quick it’s just going to be that same thing again and again.

A term I’ve brought up here before is episodic. Yes, like TV episodes. Its when the conflicts resolve and the plot and story basically reset to where they were at the beginning. Our characters don’t grow or change in any way, they gain nothing, they just… go to the next episode. Which is exactly the same.

Neat thing to think about—because of that “reset,” it doesn’t matter what order we watch a lot of older shows in. We can go from episode twenty-three to episode fifteen to the eighth episode of season four and… you can’t tell. There’s no change because there’s no actual goal. The characters aren’t really trying to accomplish anything past the particular obstacles of this single episode.

When this happens in a larger story—say a novel or a movie—the storytellers are just dropping in these episodic conflicts because… well, we need conflict, right? So we’ll get a flat tire, spend ten minutes changing it, and then we’re back on the road. Or we’ll get caught in a super-embarrassing, borderline scandalous situation at work that nobody remembers or comments on the next day. Or we’ll find ourselves going out to rescue Wakko againand drag him back home because he just won’t stay put during the zombieapocalypse. These events are there. They fill pages. But they have no repercussions. No lasting effects. They don’t spark any changes in the way anyone thinks or acts.

Y’see Timmy, there’s conflict that advances the plot and conflict that just prolongs the plot. It isn’t there to help develop the characters or their stories, it’s just there to keep us from reaching the end too soon. So people get flat tires. Or wander out of their house during the zombocalypse. Or—no joke—fall off the Great Pyramid of Giza.

And absolutely nothing happens. No one suffer any consequences from these events at all. None.

Now, this isn’t to say nobody can get a flat tire in my manuscript. Flat tires are a real thing that happen to all of us. But I should think about why this flat tire’s happening. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m the all-powerful Creator-of-your-choice in the world of my story. Nothing happens here except by my choice and my will. So why is this flat tire happening? What purpose does it serve in my story? Is it advancing the plot? Giving someone a moment to expand their character arc?

Or is just happening to keep them from getting where they’re going too soon?

Look over some of your story points. Are they advancing your plot? Or are they just stretching it out?

Next time… I had a new idea I wanted to talk to you about.

Until then, go write.

There’s an aphorism about writing I heard a while back—“get your character up a tree and throw rocks at them.” It’s one of those fun, quick statements with a lot of truth behind it. A complex idea boiled down to something simple.

There’s another one, part of Pixar’s rules of storytelling. “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.”  Because we’ve all seen that, right? The character who randomly finds the exact thing they need just when they need it.

Put these two together and my character’s picked the worst tree to climb up. Because it turns out that’s the rock-throwing tree! Since our town was founded, people have always thrown rocks up at that thing. The local little league uses that specific tree for pitching practice. Young couples throw rocks at that tree to see if they’ll live happily ever after. And they say if you throw rocks at it under a new moon, you can speak to a lost love one final time.

Okay, maybe going a bit overboard there. It’s kind of silly to believe this one tree has so many legends and habits and traditions of rock-throwing associated with it, right? Especially because some of them, you’ve got to wonder… why? How the heck did this become a thing? Why would all these people one day choose to throw rocks at this tree?

Which is what I wanted to talk about.

We’ve talked about the need for conflict before. If there’s no conflict—or an utterly minor, negligible conflict—I can’t have much of a plot. And without a plot, my characters are just kinda standing around without any. So this idea of throwing stones—of putting lots of obstacles between my character and their goal—is a solid one. We want our characters to have something to do, and we don’t want it to be easy for them to do it.

BUT…

Kind of like with the rock-throwing tree, we need to feel like there’s a reason behind this. If our character was stuck up in a tree and people just happened to randomly decide “hey, let’s throw rocks at that!”… we’d probably call foul. It’s just not terribly believable.

Okay, it might be believable once. Our minds will give a little leeway (especially in fiction) for a single bizarre coincidence. To quote the esteemed philosopher Elim Garak, however… I believe in coincidence. Coincidences happen every day. But I don’t trust  coincidences.

If I’m going to have a lot of rocks thrown at my character, I need some solid, in-story reason why they’re being thrown. Because after my characters lose their keys or forget the password or drop the flash drive or run into a third mugger… well, it starts to look less like coincidence and more like weak writing.

Because even coincidences have a reason behind them. Why this person showed up early. Why that battery isn’t charged. Why Dot forgot to bring the incredibly important goober that this entire mission hinges on.

Even when it’s less coincidence and more an active thing—if it’s the same mugger chasing my protagonist across the city and popping up again and again—I have to ask why. Why is Phoebe so obsessed with mugging Yakko? Why does she keep doing this? Or how does she keep ending up just where he is again and again and again. or why does Yakko keep ending up in places where he’s going to get mugged when it just happened to him the other day.

Get your character up that tree and throw stones at them. Throw boulders at them. And handfuls of loose gravel. But know, within the story, why they’re all getting thrown. Is there a real reason for it?

Or is the only person the reader sees throwing stones… me?

In other news, in case you missed it, the A2Q now has a table of contents, so you can find all of it quick and easy. Also, with everything going on in the world I made my usual Black Friday offer a little early this year, so if you’re someone who could use it, please get in touch with me.

Next time here on the ranty blog…

Holy crap, it’s Thanksgiving. How is this year moving so slow and so fast at the same time? The barriers have been shattered! All time is existing at once!

Seriously, though, unless someone’s got a specific, pressing question I’ll probably take the day off and maybe throw some Cyber-Monday gift ideas at you. And next time I’ll talk about binding agreements…

Until then, go write.

And throw some stones.