Conflict should not be something you create and impose upon your story. I would never tell a writer to sprinkle in some conflict here, or add more drama there. Conflict is not just people fighting, arguing, or disagreeing. Conflict is not characters being moody or dissatisfied with their lives. In a properly structured, well-written screenplay, conflict arises naturally when the hero, pursuing a goal, faces opposition, in the form of a person, a circumstance or a situation. When conflict is created this way, it is believable as it is organic to the very nature of the story. Conflict is an essential part of the story. If your hero has a goal, and if there is something in the way of him achieving it, conflict arises.

In stories devoid of conflict, there is either a lack of a concrete goal, a lack of obstacles, or both. The hero doesn’t know what they want, and is just meandering through the story, letting things happen. If the hero wants nothing, pursues nothing, and thereby does nothing, then conflict cannot exist. If your hero does not know what they want but is instead swept along by the tide of other people telling him or her what to do where to go and who to be, then they are not going to run into any opposition or conflict. If the hero wants nothing, than there is nothing in the way of him achieving this.

If the hero encounters no opposition, then no conflict can exist. Even if you have a compelling goal and a hero pursuing it, you will not have conflict if you do not have obstacles and opposition. A conflict laden story can be created out of a hero trying to do something as simple as delivering a letter, if there are obstacles and circumstances that make accomplishing this task nearly impossible. On the other hand, a story could be completely dull and lack conflict even if the hero’s goal is monumental.

A story about a hero whose goal is to fly to the moon can have less conflict than the story about delivering the letter. If our wannabe astronaut is instantly accepted into the flight program at NASA, passes all the tests and immediately gets put on a mission to the moon and has a smooth ride there where everything goes as planned, the story will have absolutely no conflict, even though the goal was there and seemed impossible to achieve. If the hero trying to deliver the letter can’t find a nearby post office because he lives in a rural area that doesn’t get regular mail pick up, so he locates one miles away and drives there, but his truck breaks down on the way, and when he hitches a ride he leaves the letter in the car, and then by the time he finds the car and the letter and makes his way back to the post office to find that it is closed for the day, his story will have much more conflict than our astronaut because he encountered obstacles that created conflict.

The moral of the story is that goal + obstacles = conflict. Take away a goal or obstacles and you are left with a neutral, boring flat story.

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-Ginger Earle