What is Conflict in a Story and How to Write One in 8 Steps

Imagine you wake up, get dressed, make breakfast, and go to work without a single inconvenience. This scenario makes for a great stress-free morning, but not so much a gripping story to tell your coworkers. Now imagine you slipped on a banana peel and scratched your nose. Worse yet, you tore your expensive shirt. Now there’s a story to tell!

Very few stories can exist without some sort of problem. This is especially true for narratives written by authors and screenwriters because stories thrive mainly on conflict. So in order to write a great piece of fiction, you need to first know the answer to the following questions: what is conflict in a story, and how do I get it right?

Image by Freepik

In this article, we will give you a comprehensive guide to the meaning and applications of conflict in fiction. So let’s dive straight in!

In this article:

• Conflict in a Story Definition
• Role of Conflicts in Stories
• Types of Conflicts in Literature
• 8 Steps of Creating Conflict in a Story
• Practical Examples of Conflict in Stories

What Is Conflict in a Story?

Simply put, a conflict is the problem that characters face which forces them to take action in order to solve it. By taking this action, they affect the outcome of the problem and the direction that the story takes.

Some works of literature, such as novels, may have one major conflict that lasts from the beginning to the end. Others may have minor conflicts that can be resolved in as little as one or two chapters. Generally, most stories have a blend of both.

A conflict can be as simple as a child wanting cookies but being forbidden from eating any. However, you’ll find that most conflicts are much larger and use higher stakes, such as battles between heroes and villains.

What Is the Role of Conflict in a Story?

When you add conflict to a scene, you challenge your characters by forcing them to solve a problem. Most of the time, characters have to grow or change in order to be able to solve that problem. That change is what your readers are invested in and what they want to see happening in your story. To that end, even the smallest of conflicts can have significant impacts on your story.

A conflict can be any, or all, of the following:

• The main driving force for progressing the plot: Conflict is a vital component of storytelling. Without it, there is no meaning to a story. To paint a clearer picture of this, let’s say your characters fight often in your book. Why do they do so, and what is the goal they fight each other for? This motivation is the source of the conflict, and the fights would be meaningless without it.
• A tool to explore themes or teach morals/lessons: If it’s relevant to your conflict, you can display themes like love, ambition, etc. through the lens of your story. Moreover, your characters gain the opportunity to learn profound lessons when you expose them to situations that challenge their beliefs or lives. In fact, even fluffy slice-of-life stories can use minor conflicts to add deeper meaning into their scenes.
• A major source of entertainment for your audience: People love drama, and the best way to deliver it in your story is by adding conflict. By integrating one skillfully into your story, you create a thrilling and emotionally engaging experience for your readers.

What Are the Four Types of Conflict in Literature?

The type of conflict you will be using in your writing will rely on four factors: your genre, character archetypes (or lack thereof), the tone and setting of the story, and the medium you are writing in (novel, screenplay, comic, etc.). These factors can also help you sort conflict into different categories depending on its source, nature, and impact on your characters.

1. Internal vs. External

We can categorize conflict based on the source of the problem into two types: internal and external. Internal conflict happens inside a character’s mind, while external conflict is forced on them by something or someone else. We can highlight the differences between the two types as follows:

• Internal conflict centers on the character’s internal struggles against their beliefs, morals, wants, and/or needs. This conflict can be a question of emotion, philosophy, or logic. For example, your character might have trouble accepting their feelings for someone. Or, they might feel torn between their old beliefs and new ones.
• External conflict comes from any outside force that doesn’t directly relate to a character’s psychology. It can be caused by an event, a person, or even the forces of nature, such as an earthquake. Another example would be a villain threatening to destroy the hero’s home, or the main character getting laid off in the middle of an economic crisis.

2. Physical vs. Philosophical

Conflict in a book can take a physical form, such as people or objects standing in the hero’s path. Alternatively, conflict can also come in an abstract form, such as misguided beliefs or unwanted feelings. Both types tell us the nature of the conflict and how it affects the story and/or the characters.

With physical conflict, you have concrete obstacles in your characters’ paths. For example, villains, doomsday devices, and even opinionated family members are sources of physical conflict. Meanwhile, philosophical or moral conflict threatens characters’ abstract beliefs, emotions, and/or state of mind. One example of a philosophical conflict is a character choosing between feeding an orphan or their own starving children.

3. Primary vs. Secondary

Primary conflicts are the major ones your characters go through in your story. Meanwhile, secondary conflicts are those that happen in between the main events or that have a loose connection to them. Generally, a struggle becomes a primary or secondary conflict according to its impact on the characters and the plot.

The table below summarizes the differences between these two types:

	Primary Conflict	Secondary Conflict
Definition	The biggest overarching struggles that become the main focus of the story.	Smaller, less impactful conflicts that are usually resolved much more quickly.
Duration	At least a few chapters up to an entire series.	A few chapters but not more than half the story.
Purpose	Moves the whole story forward.	Adds depth to the characters, sets up new plot events, or purely for entertainment/reducing tension.
Number per story	1 or 2 at most	Can be 3 or 4

4. Resolved vs. Open-Ended

One final decision to make is whether or not you want to resolve the conflict of your story. You can leave your conflict open-ended if you focus on discussing the themes of the story rather than deciding the characters’ fates. On the other hand, resolving conflicts leaves your audience satisfied with knowing the ending of your story.

Making this decision will rely to a great extent on the genre that you’re writing your book in. If you are writing a cozy mystery, for example, it’s common practice to settle your main conflict and solve the mystery. This helps bring closure to the narrative and offers readers the gratification of seeing the detective’s efforts pay off.

However, many genres, such as horror, can benefit from an open-ended resolution to the story’s climax. This is because an unresolved ending keeps the audience guessing about the characters’ fates. If the story is interesting enough, your readers might even create their own theories about the aftermath of the ending.

How to Create Conflict in a Story in 8 Steps

Now that you know how conflicts appear in fiction, we can move on to writing them. But creating conflict isn’t always easy. After all, you need to make your conflict believable, effective, and tailored to your characters. Once you understand the basics, you can then combine different types of conflict to flesh out your story.

Here is an 8–step guide to creating good conflict in your story:

1. Researching Your Genre

The first step in creating a believable conflict is to check out how existing works in your genre do it. No two books are the same, of course, but there might be some broad patterns and trends to note down for inspiration.

For example, mystery books tend to rely on suspense and lots of tension. Alternatively, fantasy stories usually have complex world-building that allows for rich and immersive conflicts.

2. Picking the Theme(s), Tone, and Setting

Just like your genre, the themes, setting, and tone of your story will greatly impact how you outline your conflict. For instance, a light-hearted comedy will probably have a completely different conflict from a dark, gritty tragedy because of how it’s written.

Let’s go over a few of the key storytelling components that affect the conflict:

• Themes: Themes are abstract concepts that the writer wants to communicate through their story. They can lead to conflict in ideas, philosophies, actions, etc. Themes like familial love and ambition, for example, might lead to conflicts such as a struggle for power over ruling a kingdom.
• Tone: The tone of a story is determined by your own attitude and perspective on the themes you are writing about. You can be sympathetic to a cause, critical, judgemental, ironic, and so on. Since your attitude shapes your style, your writing will convey a particular mood or message on its own.
• Setting: The setting is the physical place and time period in which the events of your story are occurring. You can have several settings if you want, but make sure to establish each of them so your readers don’t get confused. By choosing a particular setting, you are also defining the nature of your conflict and its implications on your characters. For example, a modern-day working woman will have completely different experiences and challenges from a poor maiden in the Medieval period.eriod.
• Mood: The story’s mood is the general atmosphere and feeling that the setting conveys. Determining the mood of your story will influence how light or dark your writing will be. For example, a Victorian-era manor may give off a romantic but gloomy mood. This can help you set the tone for a tragic romance.
• Point of view: Another point you want to think about is choosing the point of view of your story. Generally, the first-person point of view helps your audience connect to the narrator (usually the protagonist) of the story. The third-person point of view, on the other hand, is better suited for following the plot. By placing distance between the audience and the story, you allow them to focus on more than one character or setting.

3. Determining Character Flaws

Since the conflict has to challenge your characters in some way, you have to know your characters’ strengths and weaknesses. In other words, you should determine their flaws so that the conflict challenges them successfully. So, the question now is, how do you design flaws for a character?

When writers reach this part in the outlining process, they make a common mistake: writing quirks as flaws. As you will see below, there is a big difference between the two:

• Flaws are fundamental aspects of your characters’ personalities that can have a negative impact on themselves or their surroundings. These can include narcissism, greed, anger management issues, and insecurities. These flaws are essential to building a complex and believable character. Because of this, many authors write their conflicts based on them.
• Quirks are unusual or strange things your characters say, do, or think about differently from others. For instance, they might have a catchphrase, eat ice cream with a fork, or refer to themselves using the third person. Quirks can be positive, negative, or neutral. Just be aware that they are shallow representations of your character’s behavior and don’t give characters depth on their own.

Quirks are the icing on the cake that truly brings a character to life and can make them more memorable. However, the conflict must challenge flaws in order for the story to have high stakes. This means that a character with many quirks but no real flaws does not contribute to the stakes of the plot. So, a good story usually has a good mix of flaws and quirks.

4. Giving Your Character(s) an Initial Goal

Now that you have your main character(s) figured out, now is the time to give them a goal to chase at the start of the story. For instance, your character might want to start over in a different career before they find out that they’re having a baby (conflict). Here, the initial goal is the desire to switch careers. Whether or not the character continues pursuing it depends on how they react to the conflict.

Sometimes the initial desires your character has will stay the same. Other times, the character will adjust or even completely change them because of the conflict they are facing. By adapting this idea to your story, you are making your character more believable and raising the stakes of your conflict at the same time.

5. Assigning External Obstacles

An obstacle is anything that stands in the way of characters solving a problem or achieving a goal. Obstacles are essential for a good story conflict because they tend to directly affect the characters’ lives. If a person, object, or event makes your characters pause to think of a solution, they count as an obstacle that causes conflict.

As a result of that, there is a vast amount of potential obstacles that even experienced writers might not always think about. One good example is using simple inconveniences as powerful catalysts for a greater conflict. For instance, your main character might run out of milk and get kidnapped on their way to the store.

In that example, the obstacle was running out of milk, and the conflict was getting kidnapped. The end result is an impactful conflict that feels more realistic or relatable to readers.

6. Aligning the Main Challenge to Character(s)’ Flaws

Characters often experience growth when their flaws are challenged in an unavoidable way that forces them to think or act differently. More importantly, the conflict must relate to your character profile. Let’s say your character has insecurities about their appearance. Here, the conflict can come from participating in beauty contests or having a cruel parent who is obsessed with vanity.

When matching conflicts with character flaws, you have a number of routes you can take. Most authors like to change some aspects of their main characters’ personalities over time. However, this is not a strict requirement for resolving story conflict. Some authors use what is known as a “flat character arc”—where the main character does not change fundamentally, but they do create such changes in the people around them. But even then, the conflict still has to challenge the characters in a way that impacts them and their environment.

7. Using Atmosphere and Writing Style to Liven Up Conflict

Now that you have your main conflict outlined, why not add some flair to it? This is where you take advantage of language, style, and character dialogue to fully immerse your audience in the story. Your ultimate goal is to transport readers to your fictional world, making them feel as if they’re experiencing the characters’ struggles and triumphs firsthand.

Here’s how you can use atmosphere and writing style to enrich your conflict:

• Atmosphere: As you’re writing your story, you should create an atmosphere that matches your conflict. This atmosphere can be dull or somber, for example, or comedic and light-hearted. You can build atmosphere by describing the areas your characters visit, the weather, and other aspects of the setting. For instance, you can set up a dark, scary atmosphere by using stormy weather and an abandoned cemetery. Another way to do it is to have character dialogue reflect their environment and setting. For example, your characters could be whispering fearfully as they walk through a dark, quiet forest at night, creating a tense and suspenseful atmosphere.
• Writing style: Through certain words or phrases, a bland argument can turn into witty banter, funny dialogue, or an epic showdown. Short sentences and simple words add more punch to your writing. Meanwhile, longer sentences and poetic vocabulary can paint pretty pictures in your audience’s minds. As such, your writing style will greatly influence how your audience feels about the events of the conflict.

8. Resolving Conflict vs. Leaving It Open-Ended

Most stories resolve their main conflict. It’s simply the best way to bring relief to your characters and your audience after a long struggle. And yet, many writers take the risk of leaving conflict unresolved or open to interpretation.

There is no clear answer or method of instruction for resolving conflict. With that said, you might see some genres leaning towards one or the other due to their unique tropes. For example:

• Cozy mysteries, high fantasy, and other genres that require detailed worldbuilding might favor resolving the main conflict. An elaborate world and story tend to result in many loose ends being left over after the story’s climax. Leaving too many of those loose ends unresolved might leave many readers dissatisfied with how you ended the story.
• Literary fiction, slice-of-life stories, and other genres that rely less on worldbuilding might benefit from an unresolved ending. Some of these genres focus less on the nature of the conflict, instead describing characters’ reactions to it. This can make for a writing style that leaves room for the readers to interpret the story ending in their own way.

That is not to say that fantasy stories must have satisfying endings, or that you cannot resolve conflicts in literary fiction. At the end of the day, whether or not you settle your conflict will depend on how you write the rest of your story.

Need to print out this checklist? Download it here!

Examples of Conflict in a Story

Now that we know how to write good conflict, let’s examine how different types of media make use of it. Here are some examples of popular stories making use of conflict and what you can learn from them in practice.

1. Short Stories/Novellas

Short stories and novellas usually limit conflict to one main struggle and maybe another minor one that is resolved quickly or does not affect the main plot. Let’s take A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens as an example of a novella.

• Overview: The main character, a gnarly old man named Scrooge, hates Christmas and mocks anyone who celebrates it. However, the ghost of his late business partner, Marley, visits him on Christmas Eve and explains how his greed and selfishness have turned him into a chained spirit. After each Christmas spirit takes him on a journey, Scrooge realizes that his perspective of life is very different from reality..
• Conflict analysis: Scrooge is a lonely man who lives in fear of unpredictable human interaction. However, the other characters thrive on it and live happily. They believe that the best way to live is to share your life with others. In the end, Scrooge’s journey motivates him to make a conscious effort to honor Christmas and share his wealth with those who need it.
• Types of conflict: The novella’s main conflict is split into two categories: internal and external. Scrooge’s external struggles with Christmas celebrations and the spirits reflect his internal conflict and his fearful outlook on life.

What makes this story truly successful is how well the conflict aligns with Scrooge’s personality and his flaws. This character suffers through many world-shattering realizations that force him to reevaluate his outlook on life and grow as a character.

2. Novels

Novels have the privilege of being lengthy, which helps authors explore conflict and characters in more detail. After all, a novel’s minimum length is 50,000 words, making it easier to flesh out conflict and expand character arcs. We will take a deeper look at conflict in novels by examining Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows.

• Overview: Throughout the novel, a group of thieves called the Dregs band together to break into a foreign fortress. Along the way, they face external conflict in the form of physical enemies, such as the soldiers of the fortress. They also face an internal conflict between their innermost desires for love and redemption and their cynical beliefs.
• Conflict analysis: At the end of the novel, each character has undergone some form of growth. While it doesn’t affect their morals, this maturity does give them the incentive to take down the corrupt merchant and save their captured friend, Inej. Kaz Brekker, the protagonist, appears to have changed the most, going as far as to strike a deal with his arch-nemesis in order to save Inej.
• Types of conflict: There are several types of conflict present in the novel. While the whole gang shares a common goal of obtaining money, each individual has their own thoughts and beliefs that clash with their true desires. This inner clash generates a significant degree of internal conflict among them. For example, Kaz’s harsh upbringing has made him emotionally distant and unable to accept his feelings for Inej. Plus, infiltrating an enemy fortress is a good example of physical external conflict.

3. Screenplays/Movies

Conflicts with more structure shine best in screenplays as most of them are segmented into three acts, each with its own side conflict. Most screenwriters will structure their main and side conflicts very clearly so that the script translates well on the screen. Let’s take a look at the first Hunger Games movie to see an example of a screenplay conflict in action.

• Overview: The protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, volunteers in her sister’s place to join a barbaric televised competition where people fight each other to survive. While fending off other contestants, Katniss also has to defend herself from natural hazards, such as predatory animals, and search for food and water.
• Conflict analysis: Katniss faces conflict every step of the way, from her fear of violence to fights against people from other districts. She must also try to survive without compromising her morals. By the final arc of the movie, she does win the competition alongside another contestant from her district. However, she had to make up a love story with another contestant to win TV viewers’ sympathy.
• Types of conflict: Throughout the movie, you see external conflict in the characters fighting for their lives (character vs character) and a dystopian governing system (character vs society). Even if Katniss’s main focus is on staying alive during the Hunger Games, she is also fighting for the freedom of her nation. Plus, she is internally torn between her hatred for violence and her will to survive.

4. In Comics

Finally, comics strike the middle ground between novels and screenplays when it comes to conflict. While they do follow structural plot arcs like the Three-Act model, these arcs can vary in length from a few pages to several volumes. Additionally, conflicts in comics can be conveyed through images, dialogue, and world-building footnotes. To illustrate those points, we will look at the plot of Death Note, a Japanese manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata.

• Overview: A genius high school student named Light Yagami finds a strange notebook called the Death Note. By writing a person’s name in it while imagining their face, Light can kill anyone he pleases. With this notebook, he strives to rid the world of criminals and create a utopia in which he will rule supreme. Eventually, the authorities catch on, and the world’s greatest detective, L, takes on the case. From there, Light and L run in circles around one another, each trying and failing to uncover the other’s identity.
• Conflict analysis: The main emphasis of the manga is on the physical conflict between L and Light as they each try to catch the other. However, both of them do experience internal conflict throughout the manga.
• Conflict types: In terms of internal conflict, Light initially doubts himself and his actions because those actions contradict traditional ideals of human life. On the other hand, the more involved L gets with the case and with Light, the more conflicted he feels. He struggles to balance his duty as a detective with his own morals and beliefs about justice.

Final Thoughts

Conflict is a vital part of any story no matter the genre. But a truly impactful one is created when you align your characters’ traits with the struggles they face. With that said, if you have a hard time writing conflicts, then you can use the tips in this article to make the process easier. Writing conflict can be a loaded task, but it can also be fun!

.

Read More

Keeping the Suspense Alive: 5 Tips to Write a Perfect Cliffhanger

How to Write a Compelling Story Outline: A Step-by-Step Guide

Elements of Fiction: A Quick Guide to Writing the Perfect Story