Conflict Isn’t Necessary

I keep running across people who think conflict is the root of all plot. Google “conflict in fiction” and you get 155 million hits. One of the first began with a definition: “Character + want + obstacle = conflict.” Variations of that formula occur over and over in posts on plotting. “Conflict is at the heart of all stories,” trumpets another, and “Literature would be a little boring without conflict” asserts a third.

Now, it is undeniably true that most stories about happy people happily being happy aren’t terribly interesting to most readers. And it is also true that most stories about people unhappily sunk in misery and doing nothing about it are likewise not terribly interesting to most readers. (In both cases, there are “slice of life” stories, twist stories, and various other types of stories that do manage to be interesting, but they are usually the exception, or at the least a niche market.)

However, there is nothing that says that people have to be “in conflict” with something or someone in order to be unhappy, or even that they have to be unhappy in order to try to change their circumstances. In fact, I submit that the only way to make “Conflict is at the heart of all stories” work for all stories is to redefine “conflict” so broadly that the term becomes essentially meaningless.

Shirley Jackson’s marvelous short story “One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts” does not contain anything that I would define as “conflict”; instead, it presents the reader with a mystery – why is this man going around doing good deeds? – which is only made stranger by the revelations at the end of the story (which never do answer the question). There are stories that revolve around puzzles (treasure hunts of various sorts), competitions (winning the big game), survival in the wilderness, or achieving a worthy but difficult goal, which can contain conflict, but which often don’t (and certainly don’t require it, at least not the way I define conflict).

On the flip side, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men doesn’t fit the above definitions, because there aren’t any characters or wants, though there is plenty of conflict as he describes billions of years of “future history” and evolution.

To me, conflict implies some kind of struggle between two opposites – an argument or a disagreement between two people, a war between nations, a struggle between two people or groups with incompatible goals, or an internal struggle between two courses of action or beliefs (most commonly “I want both A and B, but I can’t have both”; for instance “I want to make my parents happy and I want to be happy; they won’t be happy unless I become a lawyer, but I won’t be happy unless I become a musician” or “I want to believe I am a good person, and I want to have a lot of money right now; I can steal that wad of cash and have money, but then I won’t be a good person, or I can leave it be and be a good person, but not have money”).

Without that duality, I don’t see conflict. I see goals and problems and obstacles, which make for a fine, interesting stories, but I don’t see conflict. Of course, you can define all of Jack London’s wilderness survival stories as “a conflict between Man and Nature” – and a good many people do – but to me, Nature is just sitting there, doing its thing. London’s protagonists are certainly struggling against their circumstances, but it’s like me struggling to run up a hill – I don’t think of that as me being “in conflict” with the hill, just me doing something that’s difficult because the hill is steep and I’m out of shape.

I think that many people see conflict this way, and as a result, asserting that “conflict is the heart of stories” and “literature would be boring without it” makes many writers worry unnecessarily about whether they’re doing good work or not. In extreme cases, they add unnecessary arguments, subplots, and antagonists in an attempt to “add conflict,” and then wonder why their story isn’t working.

“Conflict” is, in my opinion, an overrated subcategory of “problems,” which is, also in my opinion, what one actually wants in order to end up with an interesting story. “I am really hungry” is a problem; so is “This porridge is too hot to eat.” Neither one of them puts Goldilocks in conflict with anything or anyone, but “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” is still a perfectly good story. “I am going to become a better artist than X” can be a conflict, if X is the character’s sister who is equally determined to beat them, or it could just as easily be the character’s motivation/inspiration/goal, if X is Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso – no conflict involved, just a really hard thing to accomplish.

I think conflict gets so much emphasis because it is relatively easy to identify in its dictionary-definition version (“serious disagreement; argument; armed struggle; clash of opposing wishes or needs; incompatibility between opinions, principles, or interests”), and also an easy term to stretch to cover some of the things that obviously make for good stories, but that don’t quite fit into the “us vs. them” that’s implied by the word “conflict.” (See “Man vs. Nature, above…) Writing – and characterization, and plotting – isn’t easy, though, and trying to boil it down into something that is rarely is as helpful as it looks at first glance.