Different Kinds of Conflict

Every story needs a conflict. This is a wisdom which quite some writers misunderstand. They take it as a rule saying that every story needs fights and action and explosions and things like that, which is plain wrong. ‘Conflict’ in this case can be any kind of hindrance between the main character and their goal. So this is a post about the different kinds of conflicts you can use in a story.

First of all, there’s personal and global conflicts. A global conflict would be a villain with an ice beam who can bring a new ice age to earth. Here, stakes are high and so is the probability that the conflict will involve action and fighting. A personal conflict can be to get to work in time when the busses are on strike and the roads are jammed. Both sorts of conflicts can have an antagonist, but can also work well without one. A global conflict can be about a natural disaster and a personal conflict can include someone who makes life hell for the protagonist.

Every story needs a conflict - it bears repeating. In a romance story, the conflict often comes from two people both courting a third one. In a mystery story, the conflict comes from the mystery as a such. In a horror story, the conflict comes from whatever makes it horror, be it a monster or something else. Sometimes, the horror lies within us, sometimes it’s an outside force. Sometimes, the biggest challenge is to find the out who did it, sometimes it’s to face the fear that the someone who did it might be the someone you love and want to protect. Sometimes, none of the people courting you is the person you want and you will have to find a way to get that person to notice you. Conflict can be unexpected.

Conflict is what drives the story, that is the point of it. In a story, something should happen and that means something will disturb the main character’s life. That disturbance can be small - such as the busses on strike - or huge - such as someone trying to freeze the world solid. This conflict demands that the main character should do something - this is very important. A main character is a main character, because they have agency. They want something (whether they get it and whether they should is a different matter) and they can’t get it easily. That is where conflict is born. Will person A choose suitor X or suitor Y? Will the detective find out who did Mr. Body in? (It was Miss Scarlet with the rope in the library, if you ask me…) Will our young couple escape the horrible monsters in the woods? That is the conflict and the end of the story is when it’s resolved.

Of course, in a longer story, such as a novel, you will not only have one conflict. You will have several threads in your story and all of those need their own conflict to work. Detective X will try to court person A while finding the murderer of Mr. Body and then they’ll have to escape with person A from the monsters who killed Mr. Body. Not really, such wild crossovers are rare. However, a detective often also has to deal with interpersonal conflicts, either some they’re involved in or some they just discover while searching for the truth. Romance stories on the other hand are often filled with additional conflicts coming from family members (such as ‘you’re not going out with someone like them!’ or ‘I’ll make a much better partner for them than you ever could!’) or from the world around the possible couple. A lot of stories deliver both on personal and on more global conflicts, because several plot threads also mean several conflicts and so there’s place for both.

The first thing you should ask yourself when you’re choosing a conflict for your story is what kind of story you’re writing. Is it on a small scale? Then you should choose a personal conflict for the main plot line, because that works much better than trying for something more global. Is the story on a large scale, though, a global conflict is more likely to serve you well for the main plot, because it comes with higher stakes. A short, fluffy, or funny story doesn’t need high stakes, but if you want something filled with action and thrills, low stakes won’t work in your favour. Global conflicts come with higher stakes, because the stakes matter to more people. Personal conflicts come with lower stakes, even though those might feel higher to the people involved than the global ones. However, global conflicts can look like personal ones and the other way around. It’s much easier to worry about the possible promotion at work than about the next president of the country - even though the president has much more power and can do much more horrible things.

In addition, in a story which is centred around a person, personal conflicts work much better, because they add to the story. If the story is centred around a whole group of characters, the main plot should have a more global conflict, while every character should have at least one plotline with a personal conflict. In that case, the higher stakes should be in the global conflict, because it influences all main characters while their personal conflicts only influence their own arcs. Even a reader who doesn’t care for character A will be invested in the plotline which influences the lives of all main characters (and, perhaps, a lot of other people, too).

Choosing the right kinds of conflict for your story is important, so it pays to think this through in advance and build your characters and plots on the conflicts you’ve chosen - or, if you start out with characters, to identify the best conflicts for these characters to get into. Again: the conflict doesn’t have to be anything action-oriented, but it has to be a problem the character has to work on in order to get what they want and/or need.