Where the Untrained Eye Sees Conflict, a Writer Sees a Story

This week let’s create a playground for your heart by examining both sides of the story coin: conflict and significance.  If we don’t care about something and it disappears, there’s no problem, no tension. There has to be some underlying care, love, want, or desire in order to make something meaningful. Life is like that. So is your creative project.

Where the untrained eye sees conflict, a writer sees a story.

If you worry that your plot is boring or your ideas won’t resonate, slow yourself down a notch and get really deliberate about these tools. In the search for meaning, this is where we put on our trench coats and whip out our magnifying glasses. Let’s get to work.

Drawing out the conflict through obstacles make up the vast territory where readers bond with your characters. We find out things we never would have known about these people, both the transcendent and the terrible. Conflict pushes you to examine your beliefs at a deeper level thereby making them more specific in what happens, yet more universal in the resonance. I may not have been through exactly what you’ve been through, but I can understand the depth of emotion that struggling creates and meet you there. That’s what people mean by the phrase building character.

There may be tangled passions festering inside a character, but it can be difficult to get the readers to feel it. Cast a wide net and get creative, always opt to storm the castle.

One great example of bringing the internal conflict outward is in the movie The Notebook. In that movie, a boy really wants to go out with a girl. That’s an internal conflict, so how would we know? Through a detailed description of his thoughts? No. He grabs onto the outer rim of a Ferriss wheel as she’s ascending twenty or thirty feet above the asphalt and dangles there until she agrees to a date.

That brings the internal conflict out where we can see it. When you’re applying this to your own work overwrite it first and cut back later. It’s much easier to do it that way. Play with a non sequitur. Look around and get inspired by real events. If you’re having trouble bringing out the obstacles in a tangible way, it can help to scribble down the abstract forces behind the conflict first, i.e. greed, lust, guilt, grief, hope or hopelessness, etc. When something’s important you’re willing to go through those trials by fire. There wouldn’t be struggle, nor tragedy, without significance.

Eventually your characters will have far more breadth and depth than can be contained by words on the page. However, you don’t have to know everything all at once. You will get to know them through the process of writing your story. At this point, all you need to do is plant the seed.