Conflicts in Stories

We may avoid conflicts in real life, but in our stories we should embrace them as our best friends, because without conflicts we do not have a story!

In this pocast episode we get deeper into conflicts, so grab your writing journal and get ready to take your story to the next level.

Oh, and there are a couple of exercised for you to do!

Enjoy!

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello and welcome to the Write for a Reason podcast. My name is Janet Wilson. I'm a publisher of Christian fiction for young people with Dernier Publishing. If you're a Christian and new to writing stories for kids and teens, stay tuned for encouragement, creative writing tips, and actionable strategies you can implement immediately to become a better writer and get your books out into the world. Today we're going to be looking at the whole subject of conflict. We may avoid conflicts in real life, but in our stories we should embrace them as our best friends. Because without conflicts, we do not have a story. So let's look first at what conflict is in a story. So conflict contains the idea of opposition. Something or someone is seeking to stop your protagonist from reaching his or her final goal. There are two types of conflict: external and internal. External conflicts have to do with opposition outside of the protagonist, and internal conflicts obviously are within the protagonist themselves and have to do with their own thoughts and feelings. Let's look at a really simple Cinderella style example. Suppose a girl's greatest wish is to meet the prince, and to fulfil this wish, she needs to go to the palace ball. An example of an external conflict might be a wicked stepmother locking her up so she can't go. Another might be a blizzard preventing her transport from arriving. An example of an internal conflict might be the girl feeling she's not attractive enough, she's not the one for the prince, and decides herself not to go. So you see the difference. If there are no conflicts, the girl would cheerfully get ready for the ball, the stepmother would wave goodbye and off she'd go to meet her redeemer. But that wouldn't exactly be riveting reading, would it? Each conflict needs to be resolved, of course, along the way, at least to a certain extent. So if you want to build suspense and tension in your story, you need conflicts. Most stories are a mixture of both external and internal conflicts. In the example above, the girl will have to get out of her locked bedroom and will need something to happen to raise her self-esteem for her to reach the final goal. This mixture of physical and action and emotional psychological tension makes for the best stories. If your stories have a Christian element, there may also be a spiritual struggle. Conflicts there too. The type of conflicts you will major on will vary according to your genre and your style. If you're writing sci-fi, your conflicts may be mainly with technology or aliens, perhaps. If your book is set during wartime, your struggles may be mostly against a human enemy, although of course you will be struggling with doubt and fear there too. If you write romantic fiction, the conflicts may be chiefly emotional and so on and so on. Your protagonist may be fighting against a dangerous beast, a jealous friend, an unknown spy in the camp, or a teenager escaping from an abusive family. The possibilities for conflicts are of course endless. So what we need in stories is a series of unfortunate conflicts. Your protagonist needs to have one ultimate goal, for example, meeting the prince at the ball, and all the conflicts are there to stop him or her from reaching it. Unless you're writing a very short story, your plot will consist of a series of conflicts. For example, if three teenagers need to make their way to safety following a natural disaster, some of the following you might want to include, and you've probably got lots of extra ideas of your own. So external conflicts. There may be illness, somebody is not well, or perhaps somebody's broken a bone, uh or in pain for some reason. There may be danger from savage beasts or insects even. Thieves might steal their belongings, they may have unsuitable footwear or clothing for the terrain. They may have to cross natural barriers like a desert or a fast flowing river, perhaps over a rickety bridge. That would be exciting, wouldn't it? You get the picture. There are so many external conflicts that you could bring into this adventure story. And even while I'm saying it, you're probably thinking of stories that you've read or films that you have watched with some of these things in it. And then internal conflicts for the same group. Let's think about these group of teenagers making their way to safety after some kind of disaster. There may be rows between the group about the fair use of perhaps water and food. There may be uncertainty regarding the route. There be that fear of perhaps the darkness or the beasts or the insects or the snakes or whatever it happens to be. There may be arguments when the group gets lost, perhaps it's somebody's fault. Maybe the protagonist feels guilty at leading the group into difficulties in some way, perhaps it's their fault that they've got into this trouble in the first place. Or maybe somebody will fear that the others will get left behind, or that they will be left behind. There may even be a kind of sense of hopelessness that what will they find when they reach safety? Depends of course on what your conflict is and your whole story. If one of the group is a Christian, there could be conflict arising from the choices that are made by the rest of the group. And if faith could waver, if the group wonders how God could allow this to happen. So there's a cut just kind of some ideas that I'm throwing out there for internal conflicts of the story, and again I'm sure you will have lots of your own. So I have an exercise for you. If you haven't already got out your writing journal and been making notes, grab it now, put me on pause, and do this exercise before we go any further. So a small child has been kidnapped and locked in a cellar, let's call it a cellar, a basement. Two older siblings have to get him out. Make a rough list of internal and external conflicts the siblings may have to face before reaching their ultimate goal and how they will resolve this conflict. For example, the siblings have to find where the key is hidden without the kidnappers knowing, so they secretly watch from a safe place. You don't have to put the conflicts in chronological order for this exercise. Just feel free to make up a story as you go along, set your imagination free, and just write a list of conflicts. Okay, I hope that was useful. Now we're going to go into a little bit of a deeper dive into getting the balance right with your conflicts. So we've seen the importance of trials and troubles in a story, but you do need to get the balance of conflicts right, and the trick is to have just the right number of conflicts. There's no way you're going to be using all of those conflicts that I had in my story if you're writing for five to eights. But you will need more obviously if you're writing for older children. And you also need to get them to the right intensity for your readership. And of course, you need to resolve these conflicts one by one, using your characters, gifts, talents, skills, their patience, perhaps, their faith, um, and their strength and their courage, their boldness, whatever. So if you have too many major conflicts, too many kind of big conflicts near the beginning, the story will become unbelievable and possibly even get a bit tedious. Conversely, if you don't have enough conflicts, your story could end up being a bit dull and slow. So you need to think about the number of conflicts, but also the intensity of the conflicts. So your conflicts need to worsen as the plot unfolds. For example, at the beginning of the story you might have a group of bullies tripping up your protagonist or kicking them in the ankle or something like that, and by the end they may have locked him up in a dark cupboard miles from anywhere and thrown away the key. Oh, and probably the weather will be atrocious, the road impassable and the terrain dangerous. You know the kind of thing. But you will need to build up from the tripping up to the locking away one conflict at a time. So if your conflicts do not increase in intensity, you won't hook your readers emotionally. It's got to kind of appear real, and as the conflicts go on it will seem like this is really happening, and they will be really concerned for your protagonist. We have all read flat type of stories where this happened and then that happened. Instead of rises and falls in the story, you've got a kind of a much of a muchness, and you need to try to avoid this pitfall. You could lose your readers if they get bored. You need to thrill them and engage them and want their hearts to beat faster as the problems get worse. This final conflict must be the very worst thing that could happen to your protagonists. We're talking the climax of your story right at the very end. At this point all hope seems to be lost. Your readers will be wondering if the protagonist can possibly win through, and if so, how? Then of course there will be an almighty struggle of some kind, which will include lots of action and lots of emotion and drama, so external and internal conflicts, and the ultimate goal will be reached. Or something similar, you know what your conclusion needs to be. The girl will get her man, the aliens will be destroyed, the spy will be uncovered, the destination reached, or the prisoner released, or whatever it happens to be. Even if you do not have what we might call a happy ending, if you're writing to encourage and inspire from a Christian perspective, do make it a hopeful one. I think that is so, so important. Our young people so need hope right now. So that's the basic idea of how conflict in stories work. In theory, of course, every rule is meant to be broken, but like every other aspect of life, it's wise to stick to tried and tested methods, at least to start with in your first story. And of course, a quick aside, it's really important to make your conflicts age appropriate. You need to know your readers really well and what they can manage, what they can cope with, what is suitable for their age group. If you're writing for eight to elevens, you will not want to include things like death threats, sexual abuse or self-harm, for example. But if you're writing young adult fiction instead of a child story, you are free to choose darker themes and nastier conflicts. If in doubt as to what's suitable, ask a local teacher or your youth minister for advice and make sure you get that right. And of course it is really, really important that you know your read as well. Okay, I have another exercise for you. This is the best kind of work, and you may want to go away and do this after you finish the podcast, but read a novel or watch a film and jot down the conflicts as they arise. Internal ones and external ones. Do try to include at least one story your target readers might enjoy. Start with that one. Take some notes about the conflicts for future reference. Anything you can learn from this? How did the author bring in the conflicts? Was it well done? How drawn in were you as the conflicts came in and then were resolved? So a quick thought about resolving these conflicts as you go along. As the conflicts are going to start really small, the resolution is going to be really small too. So if your bully is tripped up in the playground or whatever, there will be some kind of resolution and perhaps an uneasy kind of shrews there. And then if your group is crossing a dangerous river on a rickety bridge, obviously they're going to get there over to the other side. So bit by bit by bit your conflicts need to be resolved. Make it a little bit like an increasing curve. It's difficult to explain this on a podcast, isn't it? Rather than doing it with my hand. But what I'm doing is going up and down but gradually rising at the same time. So your conflicts will start off and you can be conflict and then there's a bit of a resolution for that one. And then you have a a nastier conflict, and a little bit of a resolution of that one. Until your final conflict. And that great massive climax of your story, when all seems to be lost, but of course it won't be. Okay, I've got a just a final thought for you. I hope you find that useful, but the Bible contains the greatest story that has ever existed, and conflicts rage between the fall of man in Genesis to the end of Revelation, when Satan is finally defeated. Although the main conflict is between God and Satan, this battle works itself out through the lives of people all the way through. Still happening today, of course. Many of the stories Jesus told also contain conflict. A woman lost her coin and then she found it. The traveller got beaten up, but a Samaritan took him to safety. The prodigal son lost everything but came home. So you see how essential conflict is to a good story. And you know what? Darkness will not overcome. While we are waiting for the fulfilment of all things, your story can make a difference. And nobody else can write it but you, so don't give up. Keep writing. Get those conflicts in and get them resolved. If you'd like lots more free creative writing tips, hop on over to writeforareason.com. You'll find lots more resources and encouragement to help you write excellent, relevant, fun novels and get them into your readers' hands. If you haven't yet done my free course, Gripping Beginnings, you can sign up and start immediately. This will help you grip your readers from the very first page of the story. This is part of a bigger writing course which you can also join. And we have a membership group. We'd love you to join us there. Don't put it off, folks! Today is a gift to use wisely. Only you can write your book. And if you have been called to write, someone is waiting for it.