The team wanted to win the championship soccer game. And then they won it!
This is a story, it’s just a very short one.
Stories are dull (or extremely succinct) without conflict. But to add conflict in effectively, let’s first look at what happens when conflict derails a story.
Google Says: “Conflict: The struggle between opposing forces."
Again, true, just not so helpful when we’re building a story from the ground up. Which opposing forces are we supposed to focus on exactly?
For instance, if the story is about how the team wants to win the championship soccer game, and then all but one of them are replaced by pod-people, that’s definitely a problem for them. Seems like an opposing force. The world is being invaded by pod-people!
If you bring that idea to a writing group – ‘There’s these people, they want to win this soccer championship, and then the pod-people show up!’ – chances are that writing group will really like the pod-people part. It’s fresh, it’s fun, so you must be going in the right direction. Suddenly you’re writing an intricate mythology about why the pod-people have come down to Earth and the soccer championship bit is just sitting there getting stale.
But unless the pod-people teammates somehow help or hinder the team in winning the championship game, this is a distraction. It doesn’t matter how exciting you make the pod people (cocoon beds, cloning technology, a tendency to eat the household pets), they will either remain a side-plot or, worse, they will accidentally change what your story is about.
In a story, conflict is the friction created when there are obstacles in the way of the protagonist getting what they want. The more obstacles there are and the bigger the obstacles are, the more friction in the story, and the more conflict there will be.
Conflicts must directly or semi-directly oppose what the protagonist is aiming for, or else you’ll suddenly find yourself telling an entirely different story.
Here’s a version of the soccer game story that has a direct conflict to winning the championship:
The team wanted to win the championship soccer game. Except, the players on the team were all terrible at soccer - not a single one had any athletic ability. Not only that, but none of them spoke the same language as one another. And they were all blind. And yet, despite all of these things standing in their way, they won the championship!
How did a team like this possibly go on to win the championship? Great question, I was wondering that too.
Through lots of actions and turns that led from:
A (Some klutzy blind people band together to win the soccer championship.)
to
Z (They won it! Or they didn’t win it. Or they stopped caring whether they won it or not, since they realized the true prize was the friends they met along the way.)
Since we as an audience know what the group wants and we believe that the obstacles will be difficult for them to overcome, we’re a lot less likely to get bored watching those actions and turns. After all, we want to understand how this team could possibly reach their goal.
That’s more-or-less the formula for crafting an engaging story.
Story = Character Want
Conflict = Character Want vs. Obstacles
When the want is done, the story is over. (Basically. I’ll get into exceptions later.)
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