FUNDAMENTALS OF CONFLICT: A CONCATENATION OF CONFLICT

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Before anything I wish to underscore two common Conflict types that I omitted from my Forms post. 

REVELATION

I spoke previously of traditional Conflicts having an Apocalyptic function, in that they disrupt and reveal.  Depending on the story, sometimes these disrupt / reveal facets are balanced — but sometimes one facet is far more dominant than the other.  This is especially the case in classic mystery / detective tales and in many ghost stories where the central conflict is explicitly organized around revealing the truth behind a crime or a haunting. 

These genres are best characterized by tweaking our story formula: rather than a story being an emplaced narrative in which a sympathetic character is forced by a disruptive conflict to make a consequential choice — a better formula for this genre would be an emplaced narrative in which a sympathetic character is forced by a disruptive conflict to uncover a consequential insight. 

IMPRESSION

And then there are the fictions, often very short, that seemingly have no central Conflict.  These stories or anecdotes might have Conflictuality (the every day struggles and strife of every day life) but not an organizing capital C Conflict.

Sandra Cisnero’s There Was A Man, There Was A Woman is a perfect example. These fictions do not attempt to tell an entire tale or satisfy the standard pleasures of storytelling.  Instead they seem intent on giving readers glimpses of lives, of characters, or imparting a mood or vibe, a glimmer of what it means to be alive in a particular time/space.  These fictions often seek to pluck a single emotional cord (or three) without resorting to a structuring obstacle or flash of trouble.

Cool in and of themselves, these types of fictions, when spliced into a story collection or a novel-in-stories, can work beautifully as transition zones, liminal chambers that deepen, shift, or re-direct the narrative current.

Now onto the main topic of our post…

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Up to now, I’ve talked about Conflict as though these are singular mechanics but the truth is most narratives, especially longer ones (novellas, novels, ongoing comic book series, video games, tv shows) deploy multiple Conflicts.  The Science Fiction-minded among you might imagine these denser or longer narratives as rockets that are propelled by multiple Conflicts — not only by the rocket-story’s primary Conflict (its Core Booster engines), but also by auxiliary Conflict (lesser boosters) and even minor Conflict (thruster jets). 

I like the rocket analogy because rockets, like stories, cannot survive on Core Booster engines (primary Conflicts) alone — both rockets and tales are also kept in flight (and on course) by less grand but equally important secondary propulsers. 

Wack analogies aside, when plotting a longer narrative, I like to start with a basic Conflict frame that I can adjust as the story develops¹.   

ONE                Primary Conflicts: the Conflicts that propel the novel and around which it is organized. 

TWO               Character Conflicts or Wants: Conflicts that challenge the protagonist (and often originate within them) but that are not the novel’s central or organizing conflict.  This difference—between Character Conflict and Primary Conflict—is sometimes hard to parse—and in many cases, where the Character Conflict is the Primary Conflict, not even necessary.  Nevertheless, just thinking in these terms can be helpful.   

THREE           Secondary Conflicts: simply put smaller less overriding conflicts.  Again these are not always easy to parse — sometimes these conflicts are Secondary Structuring Conflicts; sometimes they are Secondary Character Conflicts.  

FOUR             The Way the World Works or Consequentiality: make sure that the storyworld resembles the real world in that it always pushes against the characters, has gravity, is vexatious, and such fidelity helps to convince the reader that the writer knows how the world works.  (See Change and Consequence for more on this topic).      

Let’s review these via a personal example: my novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has multiple protagonist but for the sake of brevity and clarity I’ll focus on Oscar.

ONE                Oscar’s Primary Conflicts:

1               Oscar’s desperate search for love (intimacy).

TWO                Oscar’s Secondary Conflicts:

1               The De León Family’s struggle against the family curse.

2               The Ambient Conflict of immigration and African diaspora’s search for home/belonging. 

THREE               Oscar’s Character Conflicts:

1               Oscar Wants love — an example of Character Conflict being the Primary Conflict.  

2               His relationship with his mother and his sister.

3               Oscar wants to be a famous genre writer. 

4               Oscar struggles against normative, dominant expectations of what a Dominican man should be—his relationship with Yunior.

FOUR             The Way the World Works — Change, Consequentiality — is something I kept an eye on throughout the writing.

I used weather, minor characters, dialogue, misunderstandings, opportunities missed — anything that might produce narrative friction or narrative gravity, to signal to reader (even if only at an unconscious level) that the Real World which resists us always and dynamically is a real presence in this narrative.                   

This concatenation of conflicts might seem like a lot of stuff to juggle but most long narratives won’t fly unless you fill them with, well, a lot of stuff.  Fortunately, you don’t have to figure everything out at the beginning— the process of writing will be your best guide, will show you what works and what doesn’t.  And don’t worry if you constantly change things around.  That’s absolutely normal.  Unless you’re blessed, you discover the novel you’re writing while you’re writing.  Believe me, the Conflict Frame I begin with is rarely the Conflict Frame I end with. 

Truth is, when you’re tackling a long narrative it won’t hurt you to have some kind of outline or guiding apparatus, and a Conflict Frame has always served me well since it's loose enough for improvisation but also structured enough to keep me from feeling completely lost.   

That’s it for now.  As always I hope this helps. 

1. Please be aware: for the sake of comprehension I’m dividing the Conflict Frame into four discreet layers but in truth these Conflicts are rarely so tidily distinct, will often overlap and reach through and across each other.