Daily Archives: July 26, 2010

Writing tip: conflict

In the last installment of this feature, I put forth a little paradigm about writing that started off with “Drama is conflict….” But what is conflict? Is it open hostilities between two armies? It can be. It is the harsh words a husband has for a wife? It can be that, too. It is dealing with opposing desires or wants, such as deciding between love and honor? Yes, it can be that as well.

But all three examples listed above and in a host of others there is a common thread, something unspoken, and as important as words are, it is often the unspoken or unwritten element that defines a scene in a story and sometimes the story itself.

As I said in the previous article, I learned the paradigm that begins “Drama is conflict …” in 1993. Some twelve years later, and even though I wasn’t looking, I learned from author, screen writer, and teacher Steven Womack a definition of conflict that adds depth and, dare I say, meaning to the word conflict and the entire paradigm. He credits learning it from Bob McKey, a script doctor. McKey has made a living and a small fortune fixing other people’s scripts though he often doesn’t get screen credit for it. All scripts need conflict; conflict drives the story forward. How will the protagonist react? What will she do? But conflict is not car chases, gun battles, or galaxies spiraling out of control. Conflict, McKey said, is the gap between expectation and result. That’s it.

Conflict can be as small as being overcharged a dime and how your protagonist reacts or as great as losing a battle when the protagonist fought hard to win. In both examples, there is a gap between expectations and results. How your protagonist deals with that gap and what steps he takes to close it are what drives a story forward, whether the story is a script, a short story, or a novel. The obstacles in the way preventing the protagonist from easily closing that gap are what are called tension, but that is a discussion for another time.