“No village of the happy people!”
~Richard Walter
When people ask, “What is the story about?” they usually want to know what the story’s conflict is. So, what is the conflict in your story? It is on you to ensure that some form of conflict is present in every moment of your tale. Every moment!
Understanding Conflict in Storytelling
Audiences ultimately care only about seeing unique characters in conflict with other unique characters. Many people want to see gunfights, car chases, explosions, wars being fought, alien spaceships decimating the landscape, etc., but without characters in conflict with other characters in the middle of a ripping yarn they won’t hang around for very long. And they certainly aren’t likely to come back for a second look. This applies to all stories be they large or small, comedies, dramas, tragedies, melodramas, etc.
Conflict is what makes stories great
Unforgettable stories are almost always about two or more characters at odds, but it can certainly be about a single character attempting to attain some goal against the elements. For proof of this, see a little gem of a Robert Redford movie called “All is Lost.”
Great stories are usually about desire, especially what characters do to overcome conflict to achieve the thing they desire most. All you need to know about conflict is this: A character pursues a goal and something or someone prevents him from reaching it. Again, this must be true for every moment of the entire story.
The nature of each character is formed through conflict and how he or she confronts and deals with those conflicts when encountered. What a character does and how he or she reacts to the world is, in part, how conflict is created, overcome, and created again.
Conflict is about a character’s needs and wants being not easily met.
Most conflict in screen stories revolves around an issue of real importance to your principal character(s) that must be confronted and resolved.
Conflict creates tension.
All worthy screen stories are filled with both conflict and its resulting tension. Dialogue and action require tension, meaning both require conflict. If you have enough conflict, or the right kind of conflict, tension in your story will rise.
Conflict is what drives us to care because it creates empathy and likeability.
Why? We have all suffered through our own moments of conflict in life and so we relate to the struggle to overcome such challenges. This helps us to pull for a protagonist’s success.
Conflict can be, but is not limited to: shouting, armed confrontation, arguments of all kinds, protagonist against antagonist, son against father, mother against daughter, husband against wife, lover against lover, brother against brother, man against society, man against nature, man against alien, and endlessly on and on. Again, the only requirement is for a character to want something only to find that something or someone is in the way.
Creating Dimensional Characters Through Conflict
Conflict creates fully dimensional characters because when we see a character struggling to overcome difficult obstacles, we get to see the true essence of an individual shining through.
Character is rarely revealed only through dialogue. Much conflict is revealed through action. In fact, action as a vehicle to revealing character is preferred in motion picture storytelling. These things are called “movies” not “talkies.”
Remember the adage: show, don’t tell.
Conflict expresses the story’s meaning. Through conflict resolution is found. In that resolution we find catharsis and the meaning of the work. Reaching a cathartic resolution almost always winds up being part and parcel of the story’s theme. So, it can be argued that conflict is required to fulfill the story’s theme.
The terrific writer, and one of my UCLA screenwriting professors, Hal Ackerman, teaches two formulae that apply wonderfully well to determining conflict in every moment of every scene. All you need to know are: 1) C = D + O, which means Conflict equals Desire plus an Obstacle, and 2) Conflict equals a goal, an obstacle, and an unwillingness to compromise. Ask yourself if either of those formulae apply to every scene in your script.
Exploring Six Types of Conflict
Generally speaking, conflict can be categorized into the following six categories:
- Inner Conflict
- Relational Conflict
- Societal Conflict
- Situational Conflict
- Universal or Cosmic Conflict
- Us vs. Them (Group vs. Group)
Inner Conflict
- Emotional, interior, highly personal
- Examples: Annie Hall, A Beautiful Mind, Psycho, The Graduate, Barbie
“A Beautiful Mind” with Russell Crowe
Relational Conflict
- Between one or more characters
- Examples: Chinatown, The Godfather, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, American Graffiti, Citizen Kane, John Wick, Ticket to Paradise
“Ticket to Paradise” with George Clooney and Julia Roberts
Societal Conflict
- Between a character and a group
- Examples: Unforgiven, Serpico, North by Northwest, Being There, Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” starring Cillian Murphy
Situational Conflict
- Disaster (stuff happens), ticking clock
- Examples: Armageddon, The Perfect Storm, Titanic, The Towering Inferno, Volcano, Mission Impossible
Tom Cruise in “Mission Impossible”
Universal or Cosmic Conflict
- Character vs. God or the devil
- Examples: The Wizard of Oz, Raiders of the Lost Ark, It’s a Wonderful Life, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Godzilla Minus One
Harrison Ford in “Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark”
Us vs. Them
- Group vs. Group
- Examples: The Pittsburgh Steelers vs. The Dallas Cowboys. All the President’s Men, The Bridge on the River Kwai, E.T., Lawrence of Arabia, Dungeons and Dragons
Stephen Spielberg’s “ET The Extra-Terrestrial” starring Henry Thomas
Conflict is essential.
Without conflict there can be no movie. Period. So, fill your story to the brim with conflict of all kinds.
“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”
~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I favor conflict in which a character’s actions are somewhat forced upon them by epic/historic events. Or in which a character has to react to epochal events/changes, as part of the story — even though this might not be the main interpersonal conflict. A personal story set against the sweep of history, with meaningful interactions between the two.
So based on your article above (thanks! helpful!), I think this would be more “societal” conflict, rather than “universal” conflict. (That’s because the historic events don’t have to be DIRECTED AT the character, or the character doesn’t have to be direcly attempting to influence the historic events — which is how I interpret your “universal” conflict.)
An example of what I am talking about is The Sound of Music. The internal conflict of Maria’s desire for adventure/independence/romance happens with WWII and the Anschluss rumbling in the background. It is only when Captain VonTrapp decides to desert his duty that this history starts to influence the story — but it creates not only a great/strong sense of antagonism (a very powerful obstacle) but also a feeling of inevitability — the story has been heading toward this “background conflict” that has been part of the narrative all along. And the SCOPE/SCALE of the conflict also broadens.
Lately, I have been struggling with an historic sports-themed script that incorporates this element, as the lead character encounters the rise of television broadcasting, plus civic/social unrest in the 1960s/70s, on the way to achieving his goals.
Incorporating these societal/historic elements also has the added benefits of making the story more realistic/grounded and giving the audience something they can relate to personally — or at least about which they might have general knowledge/familiarity.