This month, I’ve been thinking a lot about conflict.
Conflict is enduring. In some periods, conflict is more enduring than others.
In this contemporary period, conflict seems to be everywhere, at least from my terribly limited perspective.
It’s hard to tell.
On a global scale, a war of aggression is taking place in Ukraine. Conflict continues between Israel and Palestine. Who next? And when?
Close to home, friends seemed to be struggling more than ever. The isolation of the pandemic has led to the tangle that comes with re-emergence, of metamorphosis, of coming to terms. The wealth divide is growing larger by the day, and some I know are struggling to keep up. And those who might be able to help that situation seem more distant, more individualistic, and uncaring.
The fall season also brings conflict. Shortened days. Less sun and more to do. The confines of four walls and their closing in. A battle with the elements to stay warm.
Also, the fall semester has begun. There are student papers to give feedback on. Friends, with whom I trade stories, send me their missives into the conflict that is the slush pile. Will I, as a writer, gain the acceptance of this invisible editor to quiet the conflict within? Am I good enough? Do I belong?
A bright side in the gloom is that these shortened days bring more time at home with loved ones (thankfully) and more time to read (hallelujah—otherwise one might succumb to despair completely).
More reading means thoughts about conflict too—but more specifically, how they take form in fictional spaces.
The types of conflicts we face in fiction
Fiction is a grand forum for conflict; it is a place to have discussions about what drives suffering, a landscape to wage the battles we have in real life, and in the best stories, it is also a garden in which to discover possible pathways towards resolution.
We can break down the types of conflicts that arise in the fictional form into three main categories:
Internal—in which the conflict takes place in the mind.
Interpersonal—in which conflict takes place between an individual and another character, or characters.
Societal—in which conflict takes place between an individual and the cultural and societal forces around them.
Excuse the oversimplification here, but I think this covers the bases. Naturally, there are variations that can occur between these three broad categories. More often than not, in the traditional story, there are also crossovers by design.
For example, external forces become the origin of internal conflicts, and these external forces, if not interpersonal, can also be societal in nature. For example, a person who desires to be a superstar musician is constantly denied membership by the industry in which they want to work, but this desire is not theirs to begin with; it’s one programmed by the society they live in.
In this simplistic, traditional way of thinking, it’s when the internal desire meets with an antagonistic force from outside, or when two people with their conflicting points of view butt against one another, that conflict arises.
I think this is the most common, the classic, ideation of how conflict is conceptualized in fictional spaces. It’s one we see over and over. It’s expected. And maybe for some of you writers out there, it might just feel played out.
And that creates a true conflict for the writer who is interested in keeping their work fresh: how does one develop a conflict using these categories, but without the need for that expected clash?
I mean, Venn diagrams can be so boring!
An alternative approach: the power of difference and similarities
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