Writing a Story for Dummies

Conflicts

        Conflicts are what drive a story forward. Without them, any story would be completely dull and not worth even glancing at. Nobody wants to hear about the perfectly ideal lives of a bunch of permanently happy people. Readers seek out stories where they can feel invested in the outcome of the main conflict. The question of whether or not the protagonist will triumphantly overcome the main conflict or ultimately fail to achieve his or her goal burns in the reader’s mind throughout the story. Since conflicts are both entice readers to read a story and shape the course of the story more than anything else, it is vital to understand how to write conflicts well.

        When you’re deciding what you want your main conflict to be, make sure that it is difficult enough for the protagonist and cannot be easily overcome. In order to have the desire to keep reading, the reader must be uncertain of the outcome of the story. Otherwise, the story isn’t worth their time. The main conflict doesn’t necessarily need to be complicated. It just needs to be tough enough to keep its outcome in doubt until the outcome actually happens.With that in mind, the main conflict also shouldn’t seem impossible to resolve.

        The key to creating a great conflict is fairly simple. The initial onset of the conflict is a lot like chasing a character up a tree. They will be pretty stressed, but that alone isn’t enough to use the conflict to its full potential. Once that character is stuck in that tree, you throw rocks at them to make everything more difficult for them. In this scenario, the rocks symbolize the various obstacles and smaller conflicts that the character will face as they struggle to achieve their goal. Whether the character succeeds or not, it is clear that they have faced quite a bit of hardship. This is the ideal difficulty of a conflict. If it gets too hopeless (you start chucking grenades at the defenseless character while they are stuck in that tree), then the reader will give up on the extremely unlucky character’s plight.

        Ensuring that a conflict is the proper difficulty is by no means the only thing you must do to create a good conflict. The reader should also have a sense of what’s at stake. It must be clear that the character has something to lose if they do not succeed. Let’s say you’re reading a story about a character who is on a quest to find a very rare plant. If you don’t know why that particular plant is so important to the character, then you probably care too much if the character fails. However, imagine that this plant is the only known cure for the character’s illness. If they don’t get it in time, they will die. Now you can understand the character’s motives better and are much more inclined to root for him or her.

        The consequences of failing to succeed must be bad enough for both the reader and the character to significantly care about the outcome. In the above example about the plant, you probably wouldn’t care too much about the outcome if the only thing at stake was making a soup taste slightly better to impress his or her second cousin. You also might think the character was nuts for going out of there way for so little benefit if there are other things they could have done to reach the same goal without wasting so much effort. Climbing a mountain for an ingredient for a soup sounds ridiculous. In contrast, a character who is trying to cure his own fatal illness is easy to root for. As long as you keep the stakes fit the conflict severity wise, it will make the reader more invested in your story (no, your protagonist will not die if Mr. Perfect McHotty rejects them).

        For fairly simple stories with only one character’s conflicts being dealt with, that is all you will need to know. Most stories also have minor characters who are facing their own issues. These should be created keeping the ideas discussed in previous paragraphs of this chapter in mind. Other than that, there are two more things you should remember when you are creating conflicts for anyone who is not the protagonist (or the antagonist since their conflict(s) are almost as important as those of the protagonist). 

        First of all, the conflicts of minor characters should never overshadow those of the protagonist. It’s okay to put focus on the problems on minor characters in short bursts. This provides more opportunities to flesh out minor characters and their relationships with others. It is not okay to give a minor character’s problems more attention than those of the protagonist. Don’t forget that the protagonist and his or her conflicts are supposed to be the focal point that the entire story revolves around. 

        Secondly, make sure that the conflicts of the minor characters add something valuable to the plot. Finding a way to have these conflicts entertain with the story’s main conflict as much as possible helps. Taking the example about the sick man searching for a rare plant from earlier, imagine that one of the secondary characters owns a greenhouse. They might go along on the journey to collect seeds so that the plant can be grown in a location that is more accessible to people. Scientists from the area may also be interested in the plant. For example, they might want to study it in order to better understand why it can cure that particular illness. 

        The quest for the plant seems far more important when these conflicts are added to the story because they show that there is more at stake than just one life. Not all of the conflicts of minor characters need to have the same solution as the main one. In fact, having a few which directly oppose it can make both sides of the conflict even more interesting. Above all else, the conflicts of secondary characters should add new layers of depth to the story to make people even more invested in the outcome.