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.

Plutchik & Plotting The Emotions of Inner Conflicts

If you've ever felt a little verklempt, you too have internal conflicts. Jeffe and James gave great guidance for finding internal conflict in the real world that easily translates into characters' internal conflicts.

Now that you know what the internal conflicts are, how do you Show (not Tell) them to your reader? Navel Gazing? No.

Ever hear of Plutchik's Wheel of Emotion?  Plutchik was a psychologist (among other things) who said all emotions and motivations evolve from eight primary and contrasting emotions. You can learn more about it from The Education Portal.

The thing I like most about the layout of Plutchik's Wheel is that it acts as a plotter's map for internal conflict.

• Arc 1: spiraling out of control or repressing/tightening the coil
• Arc 2: hitting the low point and/or exploding in the emotional root
• Arc 3: embracing the initiator of change, which shifts "spokes" on the wheel and causes the rewinding/unwinding of a changed character

Oh! And next week's blog topic is...Flash Fiction Ad Libs. Help me out, dear readers, and leave a few words in the Comments that you'd like to see me incorporate into a work of super-short fiction.

Emotional Mining - Using Your Friends to Build Inner Conflict

March came into Santa Fe this morning like a slightly drunken lion - rain fell at dawn, melting our six inches of snow and bringing a double rainbow. The birds are clamoring like it's spring. Who knows what the lamb will be like?

Before I go further... NEXT WEEK in the Bordello is Flash Fiction Week. We will riff off the words you give us, so please leave a word or two in the comments. We'll pick five and use those for stories next week. God save the queen, and all that.

For this week, we're examining development of character inner motivation and inner conflict. Frankly, I'm feeling like having a chat with our Calendar Nazi, K.A. Krantz. THESE TOPICS ARE TOO MUCH ALIKE CRAMMED THIS CLOSE TOGETHER, KRISTINE!!

*ahem*

Marcella did a nice job of discussing internal conflict last week, in context of external conflict. (HA!  WHAT WILL YOU DO *THIS* WEEK, CHICA??)

Marcella, who is one of my steadfast and long-term crit partners, shares my fascination for internal conflict. Though neither of us are psychologists or sociologists, we both love exploring people's internal lives and how that affects they way they interact with the world. I'm a writer in part because I love exploring people's inner worlds and how they grow and change. If I'm asked to identify one of my major themes, I pick Transformation. From my early fascination with mythology, to studying spiritual transformation via comparative religious studies in college, to years of martial arts study, I've always been drawn to the concept of change, of overcoming flaws and becoming something MORE.

A lot of people get annoyed at the concept that could or should strive to be a better person. I see comments about that a lot around the new year and setting of resolutions. And there is something to be said for accepting and loving ourselves as we are. This is where storytelling comes in. Through stories we can step back and see the flaws in others - and love the character despite those flaws. We can then zoom in, step into the characters' shoes and try on their emotional journeys. If we're lucky, we learn something about ourselves from that.

Let me share a little secret with you. When interviewers ask me if I ever base characters on real people, I usually say no. This is actually a lie. I do base characters on real people all the time, just not on the whole person. Instead I draw from the emotional struggles I see in people around me. Especially those issues that create emotional barriers that keep people from doing the things they want to do.

This is the richness in the world around us, that's sitting there, waiting to be mined for characters. People who've never moved past grief. Ones unable to break away from controlling families. Women struggling with scars from sexual abuse. Men dealing with old rage. Inner conflict comes from slamming up against these barriers.

What are they barriers to?

Why, to what the person wants most.

My best advice for learning to develop inner conflict and motivation in characters is to listen to the people around you. Listen for those moments when they tell you what they want. People do this all the time.

"I would love to travel more."
"I hate winter - I wish I lived somewhere warmer."
"I want to be a writer."
"If only I could find someone to love, who'd love me in return."

Then suss out - by asking careful questions, observing or making up your own story - exactly what is stopping the person from having what they want. Don't pay attention to the excuses they offer - not enough money, not enough time, the job, the family - those are the cover stories. Useful ones, as you can give those to your characters also. But dig deeper for the real, emotional knots. Maybe they don't travel because they feel unsafe away from home, or are pathologically incapable of saving money. Perhaps they'll never move somewhere warmer because their controlling family would never forgive them. That person who has no time to write might have a husband who demands all of her attention - or maybe she lets him have it, because her fear of failure is too strong. That person who never finds love might keep picking the same people to date, ones who will never come through.

Don't worry about people recognizing themselves in your books. First of all, they should be so lucky, to see themselves that clearly, and second, the characters will take over and make it their own.

So get out those conversational pick-axes and mine away at your family and friends' feelings. You'll be doing the double-duty of actually, actively listening to their problems, while filling your little ore cart full of lovely emotional conflict.

Remember to leave words for Flash Fictionizing!

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.