WHEN discussing fiction and how to write it, certain subjects seem kind of overdone and boring. Like conflict, for example. You’d be forgiven for assuming that every writer knows their story needs conflict in order to be interesting — it’s kind of fundamental. At its most basic and inaccurate, everyone knows a story needs a hero and a villain, right?
(sure, the hero/villain dynamic isn’t the only way to deal with conflict, but let’s keep it simple)
And yet, I’ve read three novels recently that seem to have totally missed this fundamental. One was an amiable story about a guy living his life, one was a sci-fi story out young folks fighting to save the world, and one was another amiable story about setting up a business (I’m vaguebooking a bit here). What all these stories had in common was no sense of what the characters were struggling against. They did stuff. Sometimes it was even interesting. But as a story it was weak tea because stuff just happened, with no focus.
More Than a Feeling
Now, conflict doesn’t require Sauron to show up and make a big speech about how your characters will never achieve their goals. You don’t even need a villain — the world itself can be the bad guy. Time can be the bad guy. A character’s own flaws can be the bad guy. But you do need your characters to struggle against something in order to achieve something. If you have one without the other, you may have some nice writing but you don’t really have a story. In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, there’s no villain. Gregor is fighting against the fact that he’s a goddamn cockroach — but that’s conflict.
I’m not sure why I’m suddenly seeing so many conflict-less stories. For some writers, their tendency to pull everything from their own lived experience may to blame. If you don’t have much conflict in your own life you might imagine that stories don’t need it either. For others, I think they started writing without a plan (as I do myself most times) but when they’d crafted some interesting characters and done some good world-building and other backbench writing they didn’t go back and re-work it into a real story.
Stories lacking conflict can be enjoyable, which is the other problem. You can enjoy hanging out with the characters, or learning about a world you’ve never seen before (real or imagined). It can be enjoyable, but it’s not really a story. For that you need some sense of conflict. Dark Lords work fine, as do inconvenient transformations into an insect. But just following your characters around while they deal with minor irritations isn’t a story. It’s an anecdote.
Then again, I’m writing this after drinking 6 Tennessee Whiskey Fanny Bangers. Everything is wobbly.