In our ongoing exploration of tension, the time has come to examine conflict. It can be shaped and delivered in numerous ways, but you have to know the core conflict before you can make anybody feel tense about it.

Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Conflict, fights, disagreements, or other struggles, are often easy to teach. They are usually external, with beats. Set up, try-fail cycles, consequences, resolution. But, how do you make them interesting, and ramp up the tension? Make sure the reader is invested in the characters. Sometimes the conflict is because they have different plans to get the same thing. Action scenes, fights, wars, car chases, can be boring because we know who is going to win. So, show us something that we’ve never seen before, use the action to explore character, or make sure there’s some real uncertainty. Don’t forget that conflict can be fun! To make it satisfying, add something new and exciting. Consider the emotional need of the character, the superobjective or tragic character flaw. Watch for the underlying rules or agreement behind the conflict about how to solve things. Or for the gaps in that agreement. Consider having your characters question their motives before, during, or after a fight. You may make the world better.

[Season 18, Episode 13]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Finding the Core Conflict.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you’re in a hurry.

[Howard] And we’re not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I’m DongWon.

[Erin] I’m Erin.

[Dan] I’m Dan.

[Howard] And I’m Howard.

[Mary Robinette] No, you’re not!

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We’re going to be talking about conflict.

[Howard] I was about to try to quote the argument sketch from Monty Python…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And I just didn’t have the piece I needed, so…

[DongWon] See, my mind went to I demand that he may or may not be Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That is correct.

[Erin] I was just going to say World Star, but…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, when we’re talking about conflict, it can come in a bunch of different ways, but it is the form that most people think about. It can be fights or disagreements or struggles. These are all easy to teach because they’re usually external and you have a clear set of beats. You’ve got the setting up of the conflict, you’ve got the try-fail cycles, you have the consequences. Then you have the resolution, where the character gets or does not get the thing that they’re looking for. But when we’re thinking about that, like, how are the ways that we can build conflicts that are more interesting, that are doing a good job of ramping tension up and as… To quote Erin from much earlier… That readers… Or to paraphrase Erin… That readers experience tension and only characters experience conflict, so how do we get the readers to feel tense about the characters’ conflict?

[Dan] So, I want to start by reiterating something we touched on early on, which is that tension, and in our case now conflict, only really matters to you if you’re invested in the characters who are a part of it. This is why a solid 60 to 70% of every horror novel is just slice of life of this person and what they’re doing and what they care about and what’s important to them. Because if we don’t have that grounding we don’t love them and we’re not invested in their survival, then whatever conflicts they experience won’t mean anything to us.

[Howard] As a tension tool, conflict… If we can see the conflict coming before they can… The old math problems about a train leaves Chicago at this time, a train leaves Nashville at this time, going this speed, where will they meet? Oh, by the way, both trains are on the same track and can’t stop. Well, now suddenly, the math problem has tension in it because we want to find out how to stop trains, or what’s going to happen when they collide. We have these two conflicting… Irresistible force versus immovable object, and they’re going to meet.

[DongWon] This is what drives a ton of westerns. Right? You know at some point that the gunslinger and the sheriff are going to drawdown. Right? The question is when’s that happening? When… How are we going to get to that point? So, knowing that that conflict is there and building up the terms of why are they going to fight, what is at stake here, is so much… What drives a great Western is knowing all the back story, all the trauma, all the history between these characters that is going to lead to the standoff. I mean, samurai films, same structure. Yeah.

[Erin] I also think that having like an emotional weight and some depth to the conflict is really important. What are the reasons that this particular person wants this thing? It’s not just that it’s a thing and it’s cool, but maybe they have some emotional tie to it, or it fills some need that they don’t even realize that they have. It’s another reason that I really like it when two opposing parties are in conflict not because they just want to oppose each other, but because they want the same thing for different legitimate emotional reasons. That’s what really drives their conflict. So it doesn’t feel like conflict for conflict’s sake, it feels like you’re invested in their emotional journey, and therefore you’re invested in what they want out of it.

[Mary Robinette] Or, taking out another way, is when they both want the same thing, but have totally different plans for how to get there. Right? That sometimes is driven by their own emotional state. Sometimes it’s just that. Like, I tend to solve things by saying, “Let’s turn it into a show. Can we theater our way out of this?” Someone else is going to look at it and say, “Well, that’s silly. Let’s math our way out of it.”

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, this is like Black Panther and Killmonger. Right? They both want the same thing for the future, but they have such different visions of how to get there. So it becomes a question of methodology, it becomes a question of how you execute those things, your ethics there, also, hashtag Killmonger was right. But, it is…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Like, interesting questions. Sometimes that leads to the most interesting conflicts. Not do we think this obviously moral things should happen, it’s how do we actually do that? How do we get there? Right? How do we get from this future or this present to that future? Those are the conflicts that I, on a bigger scale, not necessarily on a personal emotional scale, get much more interested in intellectually and emotionally.

[Dan] So, this conversation is much wider than just action scenes. But I want to talk a little bit about action scenes, whether it’s a fight or a war or a car chase or whatever. Because most of the time, I find those to be incredibly boring. The reason is because I know who’s going to win. It’s rare that a fight scene will justify itself as more than just a display of people punching or shooting at each other. Because the outcome is rarely ever actually in question. So, if you’re going to do some kind of action scene, I find it really useful to do a) show me something that I’ve never seen before. This is why, like a Jackie Chan or a Tony Jaa fight scene is so much more compelling than a lot of the other ones. Because they are doing something I’ve never seen in a way I’ve never seen. Or b) use that action scene as a way to explore character. To demonstrate something intrinsic about these people that I wouldn’t be able to see in any other way. Or b) just make sure that there’s some actual uncertainty. That maybe the characters involved might actually die even though they’re on the poster. Or however you do it so that there’s still some tension, some uncertainty, and some investment in what is otherwise a fairly wrote exercise.

[Mary Robinette] Wes Chu, when we had him on, talked about fight scenes as being a conversation. That the conversation is basically, “I want this thing. You want a different thing. How do we work that out? Which of us is going to get the thing?” I’ve always felt like that was a really… A useful way to think about it structurally, because conversations have an arc, and fight scenes can have an arc, the really well constructed ones have an arc, and that conflict is… That… Is that exchange between them.

[Mary Robinette] So, let’s take a moment and pause for our thing of the week.

[Howard] The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This is nonfiction and huge and brilliant. I’m going to go ahead and read the blurb that one of my other favorite nonfiction authors wrote about it, Nassim Taleb. 

“This is not a book. It is an intellectual feast. There’s not a single chapter that does not playfully disrupt well seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read. This is… It begins with a deconstruction of the 19th or 18th century question, what are the origins of societal inequality. It takes that question and says, why were they even asking that? A better question is what is the origin of the question what are the origins of societal inequality. What they arrived at, in a nutshell, is 18th-century, 17 through 19th century Europe, colored our perceptions of human history in such a way that we’ve been misinterpreting pre-human history, pre-history of humans badly. Most of the book is devoted to looking at the new research and telling new stories about primitive peoples in ways that make way more sense than the ones that Rousseau and the others were looking at.”

[Howard] I know that sounds kind of heavy and heady and maybe not fun, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb is right. It is pleasurable, it is glorious, it is humorous, it is eye-opening, it is fun. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

[DongWon] One thing I wanted to talk about as we’re talking about conflict that I don’t want to lose sight of. I generally agree with everybody that character development, all those things are incredibly important, and that’s what generally you need around conflict, but I also don’t want to lose sight of the fact that conflict itself can be really fun. Right? A scene involving conflict is often the meat of certain types of stories. Right? I really love action movies. I love kung fu movies, things like that, and executing an action scene incredibly well should be revealing of character. You should learn stuff about the world. There should be advancement of story. But also, just executing on the thing itself is its own joy. Seeing a good argument unfold on screen between two characters… One example I think of is Hereditary. The most thrilling scene in that very upsetting movie, to me, is just Toni Collette at the dinner table yelling at her family. It’s this moment of just pure like terror and excitement as she finally lets loose. It is this conflict that’s happening in this moment. But it’s just hearing, seeing her face and hearing her language. Or, I think a very effect… Like, all the John Wick movies. Right? The conflict in those… The tension in those movies is incredibly basic, which is, will John Wick get revenge on the people who killed his dog? I’m not spoiling anything, that’s the plot of the whole first movie.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And sort of the plot for three more movies. Right? The joy of those movies is watching this guy beautifully, athletically, murder a billion people over the course of several hours. So, do you guys have thoughts in terms of how to make sure your conflict, whether it’s a physical conflict or argument, whatever it is, is satisfying in its own right, beat for beat, style for style?

[Howard] I do, and I think we’re going to talk about it in the next episode where we talk about micro-tension.

[DongWon] Yeah, it does overlap with that. I can live with that.

[Howard] Because you’ve got that whole big conflict, and there can be smaller conflicts that are being explored, resolved, as we are going forward with the big obvious one.

[Dan] A short answer I can give right now is kind of what I said earlier. What you’re talking about is my point about showing me something I’ve never seen. I’ve seen a million car chases. But until Fast and Furious Five, I think, I don’t think I’d ever seen a car chase where they were dragging a bank vault behind them on the street. There’s always ways to add something new and dynamic that really takes it to another level.

[Mary Robinette] For me it gets to… Goes back to that emotional thing or… I say that it gets… As if there’s a single answer. There’s multiple of them. But a lot of times, what I find myself reverting to is the idea of objective and super objective. That there’s this big deep character want or need that’s in the middle of them, and that the conflicts that they’re going through are a series of objectives, each of which is targeted to try and solve… To try and fill that super objective in them. So a super objective is a very large thing, like safety, security, love. Revenge. Then the objective is the specific action that you’re going after. Sometimes I will see conflicts and they don’t seem to emotionally link back to whatever gaping hole the character has… Sometimes we call this the tragic character flaw. But I find that if I can link it back to that… Can draw a link between the objective/super objective, that allows me to have a series of conflicts that are also linked and also escalating in a way that is interesting.

[Erin] This is not going to answer that question at all… Not to cause conflict on our conflict discussion…

[Laughter]

[Erin] It’s something that I just find really fascinating about conflict, is the inherent agreement in it. So think back to what Killmonger and Black Panther, they may disagree about a lot of things, but they definitely agree that single hand-to-hand combat is the way that one should determine who gets to rule your kingdom. Like, they… There’s a certain baseline in a lot of conflict, like this is something we should solve by violence, or these are, like, a well-placed bon motte is the way to get under the skin of your opponent, like, maybe more of a Jane Austen type novel. What I think is really interesting is thinking about where do the people involved in the conflict agree at least on the ground rules, and what that conflict should be composed of. Then either leaning into that, so showing it at its most extreme, Fast and Furious level, or, that can also be a way of keeping it interesting if they kind of disagree on what the ground rules are. If somebody gets the rug pulled out from under them because the way the conflict was happening turns in a way that they weren’t expecting.

[Mary Robinette] You just made me think of a thing, Erin, which is something we talk about so frequently in other episodes, which is the consequences of something. So if it’s the… If you’ve got someone who’s coming in and they believe that it’s… That the way to deal with something is with the crushing bon motte, but they are facing someone who believes that the way you deal with it is by pulling out a rapier, that that’s a consequence. Then, me and the M.I.C.E. quotient, frequently, conflicts are built around events, it’s a disruption of status quo. So, often if you can have… If you can have the conclusion of conflict A be creating the problem, creating the status quo disruption that becomes the problem that conflict B must solve, that you again have that linking. I think an interesting way to do it would be to bring to people who do not agree on the rules of engagement together. It’s not the only way, but I’m like, “Oh, that’s an interesting thing to play with.”

[Howard] When we prepared for this episode, Erin asked the question, “What are the emotional needs that are underlying a person’s investment in the conflict?” I keep coming back to that, because… Just in my own life, when I’m feeling a thing, when I’m angry or conflicted about a thing, the first step I take… Okay. I’m 54. I’ve been living inside this skull, this meat frame, for quite a while. Maybe this is 400 level stuff. But the first thing I do is ask myself, what am I really angry about? What is the underlying emotional state here? Am I reacting nonlinearly? Am I going ballistic over something that should be perhaps a little less hyperbolic in nature? The characters in our stories… It’s probably not super interesting if they all do that before getting in a fight, because then maybe there wouldn’t be a fight at all. But then again, if they have those discussions with themselves after the fight, if they have those discussions with themselves during the fight, so that we are exploring those emotional states, exploring the changes to those states, exploring how the consequences of the fight might alter those states, now we’re invested. Because that’s the thing… I mean, I’ve said this before. Fiction is a tool by which we can make the world better. If your action scene accidentally teaches people to question their motives before getting in a fight, I think you performed a public service.

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of performing, it is time to perform some homework. So, for our homework assignment…

[Howard] I think Erin’s got this one.

[Mary Robinette] Erin’s got this one.

[Erin] Oh, look at that. I do have this one. In this one, it is… It’s a perfect segue from what Howard was just talking about, which is to write a conflict twice. Each time, change the POV character’s underlying emotional need. So, have them need one thing in the first version of the scene, and something completely different, emotionally, in the second version. See how that scene changes for you.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.