Conflict

I have several friends (some professional writers, some not) who consider themselves conflict-averse. Faced with the near-universal insistence on conflict as the primary factor in plotting, they either hunch down, grumbling, and attempt to provide enough murders, fights, and battles to fill this presumed need, or they throw up their hands in despair and produce plotless descriptions of happy occasions.

For years, I tried to help people get around this difficulty by pointing out that physical fights aren’t the only sort of conflict there is. “A tea party can be just as tense and exciting as a sword fight,” I’d say. And they’d look at me and nod half-heartedly, and go off and keep doing what they’d always done.

More recently, I’ve had better luck pointing out that the conflict doesn’t have to be between people at all. In a classic plot skeleton, the main character needs to overcome obstacles in order to reach his/her ultimate goal, but a washed-out bridge can be as much of an obstacle as a thug with a shotgun. The “Man vs. Nature” plot isn’t as popular now as it used to be because there are fewer and fewer places on the planet where it really is Man vs. Nature, without help from the mountain rescue team summoned by the GPS tracker sewn into the collar of the man’s climbing jacket. Plus, the fact that so many people have migrated permanently to cities means that a good many folks don’t really appreciate how dangerous Nature can be, or how fast it can kill you if you’re not careful, even if you have all the modern gadgets you can lift.

Still, it’s possible to write a modern-day or near-future story with a Man vs. Nature conflict at its heart, and if you’re writing fantasy set wholly or partially in an earlier time, or SF set on another world, it’s downright easy. (One of my favorite examples is Janet Kagan’s Mirabile, a fix-up novel where the central problem in each episode has something to do with the settlers struggle with the alien ecology and/or the damaging or dangerous mutations and hybrids that have resulted from the mixing of Earth plants and animals with those native to the new planet they’re trying to settle.)

But I’ve finally come to the conclusion that all those people who tout conflict as the engine of a good plot are just not taking things back far enough. Conflict, of whatever kind, isn’t the real driver behind the plot. It’s one of the steps on the way to building a good plot, but it’s not the real springboard. Conflict is a result, not a cause.

Well, then, what causes conflict?

For writing purposes, I think it comes down to different beliefs about the world, what’s important in it, and what place the characters hold in it. For instance, take two brothers who have inherited the family farm. One believes that the property is a sacred legacy; keeping the land and continuing to farm it is a duty and the only true way to honor the decades of work his parents put into building and developing a thriving farm. The other believes that returning to the farm would waste the years of sacrifice and support that his parents gave to their sons’ education and subsequent corporate careers, that it would be foolish to try to continue running the farm with only the little experience they remember from childhood, and that honoring his parents means moving forward into the future, as they did – taking the funds they’ve left and using them to build something new, something of his own.

Are these two men going to agree about whether to sell the farm? Doubtful. Given the strength of their beliefs and the emotional value they put on them, will they end up in conflict? I’d say that’s likely, though it’s not clear whether the conflict would be a shouting match, a sword fight, or lawyers at twenty paces. Would the situation generate an interesting plot? Quite probably, especially if neither brother is in a position to buy the other out.

Even a Man vs. Nature plot starts from a character’s belief about the world – because if the character believed that nature was going to cause that much trouble, they’d have been better prepared, or they’d have avoided the situation altogether.

So the next time I talk to my conflict-averse writer friends, I’m not going to talk about the conflict. I’m going to ask about the way different characters look at the world, and why. Because unless they’re all the same person, with exactly the same worldview and agenda, there’s likely to be something they have opposite views about. Once one knows that, all one has to do is throw them into a situation where they both have to deal with that something and with each other, and the conflict will show up on its own. And so will the plot.