HOW TO SEPARATE CONDITION FROM CONFLICT
or CONFLICT'S GOM JABBAR
In my homebrew I separate stories of Condition from stories of Conflict. I use Condition to describe what Damon Knight calls the Natural Sequence — what happens to a character during their every day, the usual incidents in a character’s life — the standard flow, in other words.
Stories of Condition are narratives that represent a slice of the character’s every day life.
There might be all manner of conflicts (lower case) in stories of Condition, but these are not the Conflicts that traditional stories demand; these are not the unique dramatic story-shaping peripeteias that animate stories of Conflict.
Stories of Condition are what stories of Conflict would look like if the Conflict mechanic were removed. Imagine Star Wars if the droids hadn’t shown up with their message. A narrative of Luke’s every day life puttering around Tatooine. Imagine Beloved if the arrival of Paul D hadn’t precipitated the return of Beloved. A narrative of Sethe’s every day life on 124 Bluestone Road.
Most writers, like Lucas, like Morrison, seek to write stories of Conflict for the simple reason that Conflict is what makes traditional stories stories — Conflict is a dynamic engine that moves stories along and moves readers to turn pages, a dynamic engine that gives words on page the illusion of life and characters the multi-dimensionality of real people.
And yet one might be surprised how easy it is for a writer, hip deep in their drafts, to think they have written a story of Conflict only to have produced one of Condition (or worse yet a story of Nonflict)1.
(Might someone wish to write a story of Condition? Of course! But knowing the difference between Condition and Conflict will make this a choice and not a accident.)
Truth is so many of our best stories come to grief precisely because they are stories of Conflict that we have inadvertently written as stories of Condition.
In my homebrew I’ve devised a simple Gom Jabbar that helps me separate stories of Condition from stories of Conflict.