Writing Tips

Serious Conflicts [Breakdown]

[I marked the most important sections with bold titles]

-♦ ESSENCE OF CONFLICT ♦-

Conflicts are a central part everything from fantasy, crime and romance. They form large parts of the journey the characters will go through as they develop both themselves and relationships with each other.

Their size can vary greatly, between cute misunderstandings, to heated debates that eventually cause wars. Sometimes the actors in conflicts are lovers, friends, strangers or even enemies, but they all have something important in common when their conflict is hard to solve:

- Unwillingness to communicate and/or opposing goals

Usually it's a mix of those two, but let's start out by giving an example of each situation:
1: The couple both want to make each other happy, but afraid of his response, the woman is unwilling to tell the man, that she is sad/jealous that he's spending time with another woman.
2: The countries both want to communicate, but the demands they both have a too far away from each other and negotiations break down.
3: Each political parties want to lead the country, but they're unwilling to listen to opinions from other parties and insult them instead of debating properly.

Of course, unwillingness to communicate usually has a reason, but the reasons can be very different, and may not always be seen as valid. These reasons are usually based on a character's understanding of the situation. An enemy soldier might refuse to listen, because he doesn't want to think of his opponent as human, while a timid person may simply be afraid of the social consequences from listening to someone cast out.

For a conflict to be solved peacefully something must happen to remove or reduce these two things to a compromise, or the conflict will reach a standstill.

-♦ GOALS ♦-

Now, for writing there is another important factor to keep in mind here, which is the goal of the conflict.

This goal doesn't need to be grand, it just needs to have a purpose in the story. A conflict that doesn't have a purpose, can essentially be cut from the story, as it's filler and won't have consequences. A filler can still be good, but is more suitable for comedic relief than as an actual part of the plot. As a writer, making sure that the plot keeps moving is important for reader engagement.

Now, here is a list of writer goals for your conflicts:
- showing traits of a character
- as sub or main parts of the overarching plot
- character development

Ideally, you'd want to have more than only one of these as a part of a serious conflict, even more so if the trait you want to show is a positive one, as people's flaws on their own create more plot than their virtues.

I do count random fights fights as conflicts, but I usually put them under conflict of goals, as the two sides don't actually communicate.

-♦ CONFLICTS FROM UNWILLINGNESS TO LISTEN ♦-

Trigger Warning

It starts from a person that only wants to see their own narrative.

These are almost always extremely personal conflicts.

Before anything else, remember that everyone can have these kinds of conflict, and that when the conflict has gotten this intense, it can end up escalating quickly and explosively. While it's one of the most common conflicts, and the biggest source of everyday villains, these are the most truly malicious conflicts I know.