Writing: All About Conflict

You may have a great idea for a story, and you may have the deepest and most profound characters at your disposal, but what are you supposed to do with them? When it comes to creating a plot, it needs something to drive the characters from one plot point to another, until a climax of some kind is reached. Typically, that driving force is conflict. Conflict can come in many different forms, but it’s usually the biggest thing that motivates characters and creates the necessary actions and reactions to move plotlines. It is possible to make stories without conflicts; you could have stories driven purely by mystery or discovery, but sometimes I find stories without conflict to be frustrating, because nothing really seems to happen in them.

Conflict is defined as a clash, or incompatibility between two or more characters or forces. As far back as ancient Greece, conflict (otherwise known as the agon) was found to be the necessary element of a story, especially to hold the audience’s interest. In those days, conflict was generated between a protagonist and an antagonist. The outcome of conflict could not be known in advance, to generate suspense, and the hero’s struggle would ultimately be ennobling. To this day, the agon is identified as the central unit of a plot.

When it comes to conflict, the following should be kept in mind:

• Conflict can be either external – such as having characters fighting one another – or it can be internal, within a character’s mind.
• A given story can have many conflicts running through it; the more conflicts it has, the more complicated it gets, so some fine balancing is needed. 
• The easier it is for a protagonist to win, the less value there is in the drama. Invincibility doesn’t necessarily make for an interesting struggle.
• The antagonist must act upon the protagonist, and must seem at first to outmatch him/her. This can give the protagonist something to work towards.
• For godlike characters, a great villain, or a natural weakness, should be invented to create drama. Or scenarios developed to constrain powers (such as a moral code) in either the protagonist or antagonist.
• Conflict should be resolved by a story’s end. It’s pretty frustrating if it isn’t.
• Ultimately, all conflict is driven by character motivation. Ask yourself, what do these characters want? 
• Naturally, things should also be believable/creditable. Avoid gaps in logic, especially regarding character motivation. It’s also advisable to avoid predictability.

Conflict can come in the following forms:

• Man vs Man: External conflict, one character physically engaging another. Could be a direct opposition (fist fight, gun fight, sword fight, kung-fu fight, lightsaber fight, car chase, all of the above in one crazy scene) or something more subtle (a battle of wits, a romantic dilemma, a debate, a family feud, etc).
• Man vs Society: External conflict, in which one character stands up against a man-made institution. Characters may be forced to make moral choices, or are frustrated by social rules which may interfere with their own goals.
• Man vs Nature: External struggle between a character and animals or forces of nature. It is argued that this may not be considered a real conflict, since nature itself has no free will and can’t make choices.
• Man vs Self: Internal, a character must overcome his own nature and make a choice between one or two paths (good vs evil, logic vs emotion, etc). 
• Other identified conflicts that you may find but aren’t usually taught about for some odd reason:
• Man vs Machine
• Man vs Fate
• Man vs the Supernatural
• Man vs God

Most writers come across the problem of not generating enough conflict to carry a story. If you’re stuck, you might have to ask yourself, what could happen next? What’s the worst possible thing that could happen? Raising stakes (asking what these characters could lose) in a story will also make it more engaging. Will it be facing another opponent? Will the main character become caught in a thunderstorm or something? Is the government after him? Or is he having trouble coping with his own guilt? Any number of conflicts can be used to make a story more dynamic and engaging.

If you need some examples of conflict, consider the following. The film Deliverance actually embodies all manner of conflicts. There’s the Man-vs-Man conflict, first with the epic Banjo showdown, and later as the characters have a bad run-in with mountain men. There’s a definite Man-vs-Nature conflict, as everybody contends with the raging river, and later, one of the characters scales a steep cliff face (before engaging in yet another Man-vs-Man moment). After everything, there’s a Man-vs-Society conflict, as the characters come out of everything and are grilled by the police, who happen to be good friends with the people who previously attacked all these characters. In the film’s last shots, there’s a final Man-vs-Self scene that pops up, for even though the protagonist escaped everything, he’s still haunted by the nightmares of the men he murdered for the sake of survival.

Here are some other, more specific examples:

Man vs Man:

• In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels, there are the continuing confrontations between Sherlock Holmes vs Professor Moriarty. What makes this really interesting is that it’s not always a physical conflict, but sometimes a battle of wits.
• James Bond always confronts a host of wicked villains and, like, a billion henchmen. Ian Fleming’s novels play these conflicts in a rather straightforward manner, but the movies usually make the villains out to mirror Bond in a lot of ways, as “foil characters.” Another interesting thing to consider is Casino Royale: Bond’s conflict with Le Chiffre is 100% a card game (the movie went on to tack on some fights, Bond getting poisoned, and other cool stuff).
• Harry Potter vs Voldemort. This is also a bit of a Man-vs-Self conflict, because a part of Voldemort was put into Harry, and vice-versa. It’s even trickier when hurting one resulted in hurting the other, and the two characters’ minds were sometimes connected.
• My personal favorite story is Kentaro Miura’s manga, Berserk. There is a ton of conflict involved with this story, as the characters go to war and confront vicious demons. The series starts out with a one-armed swordsman wreaking havoc in a town, and ultimately slaying a demon lord. The whole series, however, chronicles how Guts and Griffith came to be enemies; their friendship, and inevitable conflict, drives the whole saga. The fact they went from being friends to being enemies is one of the things that makes it more profound and emotionally investing.

Man vs Nature:

• Ernest Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea, the old man struggles with a big fish and all the forces of the sea.
• Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, is all about a little girl lost in the woods. She winds up fighting against a bear, but in her weakened state, just about everything comes off as a threat.
• Peter Benchley’s Jaws uses a shark as the main villain. The shark is even personified to an extent, and the narrative actually did describe how the shark hunted and devoured its victims.

Man vs Society:

• Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Montag winds up rebelling against the system and defecting. This same thing gets repeated in films like Equilibrium.
• George Orwell’s 1984, characters try so hard to just do their thing, but wind up contending with Big Brother.
• John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family struggles to find work, winds up facing adversity in every town they visit.
• In Suzanne Collin's Hunger Games series, Katniss Everdeen starts off going through the various deathmatch games, making bold and subtle gestures of rebellion against the Capitol.  By the final book, she inevitably becomes a symbol of the rebellion, and becomes directly involved in the fighting.

Man vs Self:

• William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet practically spends the entire play battling himself, questioning the morality of murdering his uncle, and even going so far as to contemplating suicide instead.
• JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, Frodo suffers from the One Ring’s corruption, and is constantly struggling to save himself from succumbing to its evil. I don’t remember if the book went this same way, but the movie shows Frodo giving into the Ring’s evil in the end. The character Gollum ultimately mirrors Frodo to a large degree, and Gollum himself presents another Man-vs-Self conflict, because he literally argues with himself (split personality).
• Just as Gollum presented a theme of addiction, the characters in Hubert Selby Jr’s Requiem for a Dream also deals a lot with addiction. In this novel, the characters’ dreams often clashed with the characters’ substance abuse, generating a vicious cycle that they couldn’t get out of.

Man vs Machine

• The Terminator films are an obvious example. All the films feature human characters fighting and running from mechanized assassins.
• The Matrix films represent even more confrontations between the human race and a legion of sentient machines hellbent on punishing mankind. What makes this interesting is that the war of the Matrix is spread across two different levels of reality (the real world and a virtual world), and the machines utilized devious means to effectively enslave the human race (going so far as to creating Zion and guiding The One to the Architect’s office, to perpetuate the vicious cycle of enslavement).
• All the Iron Man films subtly emphasize a running theme of man fighting machine, as there are moments where Tony Stark questions whether or not he is still a man, or if the suit is taking him over. This is very much an internal conflict, but in the second film, the suit was literally poisoning him.

Man vs Fate

• I don’t actually have a good example of this, but per Wikipedia, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five handles this conflict. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve read that it handles some strong themes of free will and fate; if the film is any indication, then you could assert that the main character spends his time defying his own fate.

Man vs the Supernatural

• Any time you have a story about ghosts, vampires, werewolves, or other creatures, you’ll likely deal with this conflict. Stephen King does this all the time, in books like The Shining or Christine, where ghosts pose a deadly threat, and the characters have to find a way to deal with them or dispel them completely. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is all about a vampire wreaking havoc in London, so the characters band together to hunt it. The Amityville Horror deals with poltergeists.  Just about all of HP Lovecraft's stories dealt with crazy otherworldly monsters.

Man vs God

• I honestly don’t have a good example of this either. It makes sense to me though that you could write about characters having a spiritual crisis, and may mentally question or confront God. Characters losing faith can be a very strong and powerful conflict. It could even be literal if you so desire (the video game Bayonetta ultimately did end with the main character fighting God).