External Character Conflicts
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
When most authors talk about the need for “conflict” to drive a story, they’re talking about external character conflicts. Most often, this is distilled down even further to a protagonist vs. an antagonist. And while that’s certainly one way to generate conflict to drive a story, it’s not the only option!
External character conflicts can really be anything outside of the character, including things like non-humanoid creatures (a bear who would very much like a protagonist-sized snack, for example), events (the protagonist wrecking their car in the woods), or even the environment (natural disasters like severe storms or earthquakes). And authors can layer these into longer stories, giving their protagonists a wide array of options for external character conflicts.
It’s also possible to get even broader with options for external character conflicts, by looking at things outside of the character that aren’t normally antagonistic. Inanimate objects can be great for this–you could easily write a story about a protagonist trying to climb a mountain, casting the mountain in the role of the antagonist with the physical challenges it presents to the protagonist. And how many times have you wanted to beat your head against your computer when it was giving you trouble? You can take this a step further (and make it weirder) by personifying these inanimate objects, giving them more active roles in driving the story. Whether the antagonistic forces are actually sentient or not is up to you, but I feel like having a protagonist who believes that an inanimate object is actively trying to oppose the protagonist could be interesting.
Of course, that dips a little bit into interior character conflicts, which I’ll talk more about next week!
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