The Root of Internal Conflict

Self-doubts, insecurities, fears, and faulty beliefs are the root of internal conflict. They are the wounds that every human being carries.

Internal conflicts are deep, unexamined beliefs like:

• If I tell someone I love how I feel, I'll be punished for it.
• Daddy was a police officer killed in the line of duty, if I love a police officer, I'll end up burying him or her and I'll be alone.
• If I make more money than my parents/loved ones, I've betrayed them by surpassing them.

Or the nagging fears and insecurities like:

• Never good enough
• Not strong enough
• Not smart enough

But what's the point of internal conflict? Why do we even care about having it in a story? Because it is the backbone for character development. In order for your story to have an arc, a character must change. That implies a starting point and an very different end point.* Where is your character? What is he/she doing? Why? And don't settle for 'getting a paycheck to pay the bills' that's a surface answer. Maybe your character is working fast food because she's desperate to catch up with her little sister's medical bills? Or he's breaking his back carrying hod because he refuses to let anyone know he's two months behind on rent.

From each of those examples, if you look closely, you can identify the belief underpinning the situation. In the first one, the heroine believes she is responsible for her sister - maybe she is. But the belief goes further - if her sister isn't cured or if she dies, the heroine has no worth or is the worst sort of failure. In the second, the hero believes he can't ask for help or admit any kind of momentary weakness. Any decisions these characters make in the beginning of their stories are going to come from their faulty belief systems. At the beginning of the story, though, a character is going to make a decision based on the faulty belief system and it's going to turn out NOTHING like they thought it would.

This is where external conflict comes in to force these people to shake out their unconscious belief systems and change. External events must force characters to realize (on some level) that their beliefs, fears, doubts, etc are actively stabbing them in the back. That doesn't have to mean tons of navel-gazing and angst. If you're into that, great. I prefer explosions and lots of laser fire. You, as the creator, get to decide. Do you rip that bandage off the character's wound in one swift tear? Or do you pry it up an agonizing piece at a time?

But, like I said last week, no matter what, it's your job to rip those bandages AND scabs right off your characters' wounds. Identify their deepest, darkest fears (internal conflict). Use your external conflict to dump them straight into those fears. This is why it's almost impossible for me to talk about just one kind of conflict. For me, they are inextricably linked.

How does it work for you?


*Unless you're writing literary fiction which in general doesn't believe people can or do change. It's more interested in illuminating some aspect of the human condition.

External Conflict - Picking At Scabs

Conflict generally comes in two flavors: Internal and External. They're easily defined. External conflict is guys with guns chasing you and trying to kill you. Internal conflict is your belief that you're trash and not worth saving - think of it as the psychological and emotional baggage that comes prepackaged with a character.

You already know I'm going to say that ANY conflict arises from character. Here's what I mean by that. In order to come up with plausible, interesting external conflict, I need to know exactly what kind of emotional and psychological issues my characters are carrying around. Why? Simple. External conflict exists to reflect and exacerbate internal conflict. Whatever you believe you cannot do, I, as author, must challenge you to do - and I have to make it terrible.

Example: you don't believe you can face a room full of zombie babies because you lost your baby to crazed, three-toed sloths six months ago. Guess where I'm going to drop you. I might also light that room full of rotting infants on fire with you in it - while you listen to all those raspy baby zombie voices whimpering in the gathering smoke. This is probably going to trigger you over the lose of your child and you'll have to make a horrifying decision. Kill all those creepy, crawly zombie ankle biters yourself to spare them the flames? Or run and let them all go up in the fire? You'll have to listen to their cries if you pick that last one. Or is that *your* baby's cry you hear?

External conflict should pick the scabs off the internal conflict sores. It should make characters bleed and leave them (at the black moment of the story) lying in a puddle of comingled blood and tears. Even if those are figurative.

By knowing what self-doubts, insecurities, fears and faulty beliefs linger within my characters, I know what kinds of external conflicts they have to face - anything that exposes those self-doubts, insecurities, fears and beliefs. Bonus points in plotting if the external conflict pushes a character past what she believes herself capable of withstanding. Such hard, implacable, external forces are necessary in fiction because novels compress the time it takes most mere mortals to change. Instinct tells us that without some pretty solid motivation, the hero is not going to just up and admit the error of his ways, resolve to be a better person and wander off into the sunset, no fuss, no muss. We have to rub his nose in his wrongheadedness. External conflict does that.

When I was planning and writing my first book, I knew the heroine had PTSD from having been a prisoner of war. Initially, it was a device that gave the hero some inroads into her psyche. In no way had I intended to hand that heroine back to the creature that had kept her prisoner. Yet. When I got blocked three quarters of the way through the book, it became clear that had to happen. It was her greatest fear and the greatest test that proved whether she'd learned her lessons from every other external conflict that had come before. (I hadn't wanted to give her back to the alien because in no way did I want the story to suggest that kind of thing could cure a complex issue like PTSD.) But hopefully, it's a reasonable example for how a character's own internal issues point up interesting external conflicts that will heighten those internal conflicts and make everything much, much worse.

External Conflict & Public Stakes

Because I have some kind of snot monster hard at work inside my head, I'm totally going to go slim on this week's post. Forgive me my wee effort, but these short and sweet points have correlating questions at the bottom that could spark some ideas in your own work.

Since the topic is being covered, as always, in fine style by my cohorts, allow me to tweak it a bit to address how the external conflict and the public stakes go hand in hand.

First a word on external conflict: All those things that oppose the main character are the external conflict. Could be the shark, the twister or the zombies (to reference my posts of the last two Wednesdays).

1.) The shark is a pretty specific external conflict, he's in the water and he's eating townspeople. On land your hero is safe. So you have to make him go into the water to have a story. Why would he do that, knowing there is a monster out there? Public stakes could be a handy way to force him into this action. In Jaws, reward money sent some folks out fishing; Sheriff Brody went because he was a good man, but it was also his job and he was an elected official so if he wanted to continue being Sheriff he had to go out and do his job.

2.) With a tornado, you're not really safe on land, but certain areas (Hello, Oklahoma) are more prone to twisters and you may need to have your hero in that area. (And yes I'm going to resist the urge to make any but this single Sharknado reference...you are welcome.) Public stakes in Twister consisted of the hero purposely getting in the path of the tornado in order to have it lift the radio transmitters that would give data back that could increase our knowledge of the big storms and help save lives. Not only was the hero's life on the line, but the information for public safety that could be gleaned from the experiment.

3.) Zombies are different from the former examples as their numbers are typically vast and they are essentially everywhere. The threat they represent is far from singular though that happens on occasion. The bigger picture is what has already been lost --every normal daily activity now has the potential to be made dangerous because of zombies...and then "every normal daily activity" doesn't exist anymore. The people left have all lost their lives as they used to be. Public stakes here are typically survival every day. Often added in are the possibility of finding a cure to stop it from happening any more, and/or finding a surefire means to eradicate all the zombies for the sake of safety going forward.

So...ask these questions and see if there are any applicable answers for your story:

1.) What is publicly at stake for your antagonist and how can you use that to force him into the fray?

2.) What is it that your hero is in the position to learn that could make a difference to or effect many other people's lives? For good or bad? What would bad guys do to keep him quiet? Who else would then be at risk?

3.)What has already been lost to disaster (small scale/personal or large scale/global) in your story? How does that increase the external conflict for your viewpoint character(s)?