"Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Rule #6 of Creative Writing
Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Berkeley Books, 1999. p. 13.
What separates narratives from other structures is the way they use fully-formed, detailed conflicts. While every structure has conflict, conflict is secondary in the other structures. Edifiers can be written without any conflict whatsoever, and those that do use conflict (rhetoric) narrow it to the realm of counterargument. Poetry values structural elements (meter and rhyme) over conflict. Myth values the moral value of a story over its conflict. Drama is the closest structurally to narrative, but still values character over conflict. Narrative, however, is the most crucial element of storytelling.
Stories cannot survive without conflict.
When stories lack conflict, they lack all sense of storytelling. Since stories begin at a point of no return into a conflict and end at the climax when the conflict is solved. Without a conflict, a story becomes a dull summary of events-- and summaries are an edifying text. Story conflicts always split into two sides: X vs. Y. And as Vonnegut expresses above, conflicts should not be nice or simple. The worse of a time the protagonist has trying to solve the conflict, the more interesting the conflict is. These conflicts fall into one of the seven broad categories below. Stories can have multiple conflicts, and one conflict can touch on more than one category, yet these categories hold true for all story conflict.
Character vs. Character
The most common conflict in narrative is character vs. character conflicts. These conflicts stem from two characters wanting the same goal that cannot be shared (Demetrius wants Hermia's hand in marriage vs. Lysander wants Hermia's hand in marriage in A Midsummer Night's Dream) or for characters having directly opposite goals (Goldfinger wants to contaminate Fort Knox vs. James Bond wants to stop him in Goldfinger). These conflicts often climax in not just the failure of one character, but often the death of a character (Erich wants to get rid of Tina vs. Tina wants to get rid of Erich climaxes in Tina winning and Erich dying in The Twilight Zone's "Living Doll").
Character vs. Group
Another reoccurring conflict is the character versus the group or society of characters. Sometimes this character is a lone violator of social norms (Hester Prynne wants to raise Pearl in peace vs. the town won't let her live down her adultery in The Scarlet Letter); in other works, the character is a member of a countercultural faction or warring group (Katniss Everdeen wants to overthrow the capital with the rebels vs. the capital under snow wants to crush the rebels in Mockingjay.) Either the character will dismantle and change society, leave or escape the society, or be crushed and assimilated into society.
Character vs. Self
Another common conflict is the character vs. self, where the character has two conflicting desires and will have to actively work against his or her own self interest. For example, John Proctor in The Crucible wants to both expose Abigail Williams' lies about being bewitched, but cannot expose her without his affair with her also being exposed-- Proctor is caught between protecting his friends and protecting his reputation. Another example is Claude Frollo's desire to cleanse Paris of gypsies vs. his secret desire for the gypsy Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Character vs. self conflicts end when an outside force puts the characters in a situation where they have to choose. For John Proctor, only after his wife's life is threatened does he sacrifice his reputation. For Frollo, Esmeralda's final rejection of him leads him to betray Esmeralda to the city guards, leading to her hanging.
Character vs. Nature
A very simple conflict is when a character or small group of characters are pitted against nature in a survival narrative. Typically, the narrative features characters that are pioneers going out into unspoiled nature, like Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild, or becoming stranded in the elements, like the boys in Lord of the Flies. Sometimes, the antagonist is not all of nature but only one animal or monster, such as the mad dog Cujo in Cujo, but make sure to pay attention to how the animals are characterized. If these animals are actual characters, with dialogue and motivation, then you are looking at character vs. character conflicts. Only when animals are acting like animals purely out of their natural drives is the conflict character vs. nature.
Character vs. Technology
So monsters are character vs. nature... what about aliens? Nature (and, in fantasy fiction, magic) are primeval forces that mankind has been struggling with since time immemorial. Yet aliens, robot uprisings, oppressive police-state governments, and HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey are the opposite: new, unknown threats to humanity. These are conflicts of character vs. technology. Technology is any non-natural force, whether it is human-crafted technology (as in Skynet from Terminator) or outside technology (like the ships and weapons from any alien invasion story). Sometimes the technology is like nature: not evil but just indifferent. In The Martian, Mark Watney's conflict is that he needs to be rescued from Mars before he runs out of resources vs. the limits of technology, both in the speed and durability of the rockets that can come from Earth to save him and in the spacesuits, rover, and other technologies on Mars keeping him alive.
Character vs. Fate (Gods)
In classic literature, one of the most common conflicts is a character versus their own fate, which is often enforced or written by the gods. This is the conflict in most myths, especially Greek myths (like the tragedy of Oedipus) and Biblical stories (like the Book of Job). A character versus fate is still often used in the fantasy genre when it comes to the idea of prophesy. This conflict rarely appears in modern and postmodern literature, where characters are thought to choose their own destiny; in these stories, the character versus fate has been replaced with the character versus existence.
Character vs. Existence
Modernist literature all hinges, at least in part, on the exploration of what the meaning of one's existence and life are. For example, Frederick Henry's adventures in A Farewell to Arms question the reasons the character has for making both love and war. Postmodernism takes this a step further, claiming that, as Camus says in The Stranger, there is no point to existence and that maturity is dealing with this idea. Some texts deal with this conflict head on, as the narrator does in Cat's Cradle, while other characters break the forth wall and meet their author, like when the comic character Animal Man met his author Grant Morrison. Unlike a character vs. fate conflict, where character's are fighting a solid, written fate or active, caring god, the character vs. existence is fighting for someone to care and direct their life, yet no help or plan ever emerges.
The Heart of Conflict: Story vs. Summary
Beginning writers tend to approach stories as a summary of a character's day. Here is a list of events of one of my student's stories (let's call her "Delia"):
- Delia wakes up
- Delia eats breakfast
- Delia gets in her car to go to the airport
- Delia flies to Arizona
- Delia gets off the plane
- Delia's luggage is lost
- Delia is picked up by her cousin Jessie
- Jesse embarrasses Delia at dinner, spilling soda on her
- Jessie takes Delia to her trash-filled trailer
- Delia has to wear Jessie's dirty clothes
- Delia and Jessie talk about family for a while
- Delia has to share a bed with Jessie and gets no sleep
- Delia makes her and Jessie eggs for breakfast
- Delia takes a shower
- Jessie drives Delia to the Grand Canyon
- Delia meets a cute guy at the Canyon, but Jessie drives him away
- Jessie burns Delia with her cigarette
- Delia calls an Uber and leaves
- Delia has lunch
- Delia gets a hotel room to stay in
- Delia's luggage sent to Jessie's house
- Airline calls Delia
- Delia takes Uber to go pick up her luggage
- Jessie calls her white trash
- Delia bawls out Jessie
- Delia goes back to the hotel
- Delia has dinner
- Delia gets a ride to the airport the next morning
- Delia flies home
Notice that this story sucks--there's simply too much in it. The conflict is between Delia and Jessie, yet there are several events that do not contribute to the main conflict whatsoever. These should be cut, even though they are logically part of normal life. Stories aren't summaries--readers don't need to see characters waking up, eating, traveling, sleeping, or using the restroom unless these events have something to do with the conflict. Summaries start at the beginning of a day; stories begin at the beginning of the conflict.
I had Delia rewrite her story, and we narrowed her story down to these events:
Notice that, since not every minute of the day is described, there are time gaps dividing the four sections of the story: Delia first meeting with Jessie and getting dinner, Delia dressing for bed in dirty clothes and not getting sleep, Delia and Jessie at the Grand Canyon, and Delia getting her luggage back. The story is stripped down to just the essential action. While this is just essential action, it is not all the essential information: in the first chunk of the story, Delia will need to explain why she came to Arizona and how her luggage was lost; in the second chunk, Delia needs to describe the trash-filled apartment; in the third part, Delia must explain how she and Jessie got from sharing a bed to the Grand Canyon; and in the final chunk, Delia needs to explain how the airline called her and told her they sent her luggage to Jessie's place. This is called prior action, and is needed for the logic of a story. Yet all of this information can be conveyed in one or two sentences--scenes and paragraphs, for a story to work, must revolve solely around conflict.
I had Delia rewrite her story, and we narrowed her story down to these events:
- Delia is picked up by her cousin Jessie
- Jesse embarrasses Delia at dinner, spilling soda on her
- Delia has to wear Jessie's dirty clothes
- Delia has to share a bed with Jessie and gets no sleep
- Delia meets a cute guy at the Canyon, but Jessie drives him away
- Jessie burns Delia with her cigarette
- Delia calls an Uber and leaves
- Delia takes Uber to go pick up her luggage
- Jessie calls her white trash
- Delia bawls out Jessie
Notice that, since not every minute of the day is described, there are time gaps dividing the four sections of the story: Delia first meeting with Jessie and getting dinner, Delia dressing for bed in dirty clothes and not getting sleep, Delia and Jessie at the Grand Canyon, and Delia getting her luggage back. The story is stripped down to just the essential action. While this is just essential action, it is not all the essential information: in the first chunk of the story, Delia will need to explain why she came to Arizona and how her luggage was lost; in the second chunk, Delia needs to describe the trash-filled apartment; in the third part, Delia must explain how she and Jessie got from sharing a bed to the Grand Canyon; and in the final chunk, Delia needs to explain how the airline called her and told her they sent her luggage to Jessie's place. This is called prior action, and is needed for the logic of a story. Yet all of this information can be conveyed in one or two sentences--scenes and paragraphs, for a story to work, must revolve solely around conflict.