A story of Conflict

Remember when I criticized Writing 21st Century Fiction for its obsession with tension (and especially “micro-tension”)?  The underlying issue with that approach is that it elevates tension to the status of sole story motivator, the only reason that a reader would continue to turn the pages.  I started thinking about that again recently when I started reflecting on the role of conflict in a story.  As early as the third grade I recall being taught that all stories are built on conflict, and in fact that you don’t have a story to tell if there is no conflict involved.  That’s when we would go through and categorize stories by their conflict types: man versus nature, man versus man, man versus self, et cetera.  I’m sure those categories are terribly passé by now, but the central argument that conflict is at the heart of all stories remains prevalent.  Being me, I started to ask myself whether you could write a good story without conflict.

Back in high school, when I was just starting to do more with storytelling than telling unoriginal fantasy tales full of generic elemental magic systems and too many fight scenes without enough character, I caught a bad case of world-builder’s disease.  If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to writers who spend so long doing their world-building steps, whatever that looks like for them, that they never get around to writing the story they set out to write.  In my case, I spent about two years creating a world with unique geography, flora and fauna, and a thousand years of history.  It had magic, politics, semi-sentient predatory fungi, telepathic dragonets and monkeys, empires that rose and fell, and an orange ocean from the iron content in the water.  What it did not have was a story.  Nothing.  Aside from a vague idea of wanting to explore what happened to the archmages, I didn’t have characters, and I didn’t have a story to tell.

After a few false starts, I put that world aside and turned my attention to writing other stories, but I saved all of my notes about that world and the failed attempts I made at writing in it.  In part, the issue was one of ability, as I now believe that I’d created a world far beyond my contemporaneous abilities as a storyteller.  I’m getting closer to being able to tell a story in that world, and I think the start that I made with the ‘frankenstory’ I posted about a couple years ago has a lot of promise, but I’m not quite there.  However, I do have a conflict now – why are there no more archmages – which is why I was able to get even a decent start written.  So, is conflict necessary for a story to exist?

This world-building example is not the only time I’ve had a story idea that sputtered for want of conflict.  It happens to me quite frequently, actually, and I’ve begun to notice it in a more consistent and procedural way as I’ve been percolating more story ideas for Elegant Literature competitions.  Many of those stories begin with an idea along the lines of ‘wouldn’t it be neat to write a story with blank?’  Whether that’s a magically symbiotic lizard that can store luck, or an invocation of probability waves and charm quarks, ideas like that form the genesis and heart of most stories I conceive and write, but a lot of them struggle at the outset for want of conflict.  My magically symbiotic lucky lizards story, for instance, went nowhere until I set the protagonist at odds with other wielders of the fortunate glowing geckos.  It wasn’t a grand conflict, but it was enough to get the story moving and let me show off the idea I had for reality-bending reptiles.

When I try to write stories and they don’t work, I’m increasingly seeing that the common thread is that they lack a sufficient, permeating conflict.  Rogue Star, which I keep saying I’m going to finish, is largely stalled because I diverted the protagonist from his worries about a star breaking the crystalline spheres.  More importantly, I realized that I didn’t know what exactly would happen when the star broke a sphere, and until I figure that out, I can’t write the story.  In that case, I have a conflict, but the conflict isn’t fully functional.  All of this led me back around to thinking about whether you could have a story without conflict.

Story impetus is described in a lot of ways: conflict, tension, digression from equilibrium, even character motivations.  All of these return, though, to conflict.  At first, I wanted to say that stories are composed of a nexus of character motivation, conflict, and pacing, which together create story and can be used to create tension when desired.  That is somewhat true, except that when I tried to conceive a story consisting purely of manipulation of character motivation and pacing, I realized that character motivation is just another facet of conflict.  The most dynamic characters are dynamic because of conflict, probably internal, or an interplay between internal and external conflicts.

I don’t think this is a common problem.  The few writers I speak with seem to most often start their stories with a conflict, and build out from there, so I guess this can be added to the long list of things I do backwards (it’s a bit of a theme for me).  That might be a more direct way of doing it, but to return to the MICE quotient, my emphasis is almost always on the idea component (especially in short stories).  These reflections are still useful to me, because I can now more rapidly diagnose what’s going wrong with a story or a story seed – it’s probably a problem with the lack of conflict.  I’m not going to tell you it’s impossible to write a story without conflict, since there are assuredly authors of far greater skill and imagination than I who could perhaps attempt such a thing.  For now, though, I think I’ll need to remember to find a conflict for my stories.