Every writer knows that a compelling story is not just a series of things that happen, but the conflict and the meaning behind the events that makes it in-put-down-able.

How can we better add conflict to our own writing, by understanding and manipulating the stakes for the characters involved.

All Characters Have Goals

Some goals are things they moving towards. Other goals are thing they are moving away from. A character might have a goal to go to college. They might either want to go to college to earn a degree and get a job that interests them. But they may also want to go to college to get away from a rough situation in their home town.

Goals that involve avoiding unwanted consequences are more powerful in fiction. That’s because that unwanted consequence is what is at stake.

Think about it: when we’re moving towards something, the consequence of failure is that our life does not change. But if we fail in our goal of moving away from or avoiding something, the consequence is that our life gets worse.

Goals Compete Against Each Other for Priority

Goals are simple when we think of them individually. However, most people have more than one goal.

Fot example a character looking to move away to college might also have goals of looking after their mother or siblings, or dating a pretty girl who lives in their hometown.

So which one will they choose?

Sometimes a decision is simple, but more often we need to give up one thing in order to get something else. We need to choose our priorities.

Goals and Priorities Conflict

If we think about conflict in fiction, whether it’s internal or external, it’s all about conflicting goals and priorities.

When a villain clashes with the hero, it’s because their goals (the outcome they are working towards) conflict.

(Interstingly, heroes and villains usually have very similar high-level goals, like world peace, but the way they believe it should be achieved is very different, like enslaving the population or encouraging free choice and fairness.)

Obstacles = Conflict Too

It’s easy to visualize how two goals might clash between two people, or even two goals belonging to the same person, but what about when challenges get in the way.

Consider our character moving away from home. He’s on the road, headed to college… maybe there is some kind of time crunch, he has to meet the scholarship guy in an hour and he’s already late…. when he gets a flat tire.

Firstly, nothing should ever happen randomly, so the flat tire should be the result of lapsed maintenance or taking a short cut…. Each of those situations is the result of clashing goals (save money on maintenance, save time on a short cut versus ensure he gets there safely and on time). Now, the tire popping is the escalation of this conflict.

But let’s say we forgot about all of that, and the tire popped randomly from sheer bad luck. We have options:

We can have him pull out his spare, change the tire, and drive like stink on that little thing to make his meeting in time, all the while worried that he’s driving too fast for this tire and if it also goes flat, there is no way he’s making his meeting. The conflict here doesn’t come from the flat tire itself, but comes from his conflicting goals as he drives away: make the meeting on time versus don’t pop the spare tire. But ultimately, once we hint at worst case scenario, it basically has to happen, or else the reader will be disappointed (this has to do with tension and expectation).

Maybe we put him in a situation where he has no spare, and now he has to either hitchike or be late. We’re going to set up a conflict again of get there on time versus get there safely, or better yet, don’t be late and lose the scholarship versus possible danger and unknowns associated with hitchhiking. Depending on our genre we can take this any number of diferent ways.

What’s important is that things get worse.

Upping The Stakes

In fiction, only trouble and struggle are interesting. Consequences are the name of the game.

Basically, the worse day your character is having, the more your readers will enjoy it (so long as your character keeps trying and pushing forwards).

It is not interesting if your character drives to college without a glitch. It is not interesting if your character switches to their spare and drives away without an issue. These things can happen (people drive places every day without problems), but it shouldn’t be part of the narrative — you might just show your character getting out of their car and meeting the scholarship guy. No words should be wasted on things that go according to plan.

Instead, we want to focus on the things that go wrong. Remember, whatever can go wrong, will (and should) go wrong.

That is conflict.

We also want to ensure things are getting progressively worse (progressive complication). Meaning that the obstacles we throw at them are not minor issues. We are talking flat spare tire, engine smoking on the side of the road, cell phone dead, and running late to meet with a guy who already doens’t like you but he is your one and only chance at achieving your dreams-level issues.

Writing Better Conflict

There are essentially 3 key things you need to do to really nail the conflict in your novel:

1. Know your character’s goals. They should always be working towards something. (A character without a goal or a motivation is an unrealistic, flat, boring, and ultimately passive character that no one wants to read.)
2. Don’t let them succeed. Get really mean about their failures or the unforeseen consequences of success. If they do succeed at something (like driving their car from A to B) don’t waste words showing them do it; either tell us they did it or keep it out and let it be implied.
3. Keep upping the stakes by making it harder and harder to reach their goals. Be sure there is a serious consequence of failure. (You can up the stakes by making the obstacles harder to overcome, or by making the consequences worse, or both…)

When you’re showing the conflict, don’t be afraid to get messy. We can have multiple sources of conflict going on at the same time, both internal and external. Characters can be working towards multiple goals at one time with different conflicts in the way.

Conflict is really about the challenges your character faces on the way to achieving their goal, and what those challenges mean for them.

Like all the writing, the key to nailing your conflict is to know your character and show how they interact with the world around them, both emotionally and physically.

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