In this week’s episode, we take a look at four different types of story conflict, and explore three different ways to add them to your stories.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 222 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October the 11th, 2024 and today we are discussing four kinds of story conflict and three ways you can bring conflict into your books. Before we get into that, we will have an update on my current writing and audiobook projects and then do Question of the Week.
The good news is that I am done with the first pass of editing on Ghost in the Tombs and I’m ready to start on the second. This is Episode 222 and if all goes well, I think Ghost in the Tombs will be out shortly around the time Episode 223 comes out. So second-half of October, we’re on track for that. I am 28,000 words into Cloak of Illusion and that will be my main project once Ghost in the Tombs is published. I’m also 8,000 words into Orc Hoard, the fourth Rivah book, and that’ll be the main project once the Cloak of Illusion is done.
In audiobook news, Shield of Darkness is now out. You can get on Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Chirp, Kobo, Payhip, and all the other major audiobook stores. That is excellently narrated by Brad Wills. Recording is underway for Cloak of Spears and that should hopefully be out before the end of the year. So that’s where I’m at with my current writing projects.
00:01:22 Question of the Week
Let’s move on to the Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week’s question: if you listen to audiobooks, where do you listen to them? While cooking or driving, commuting, or perhaps walking? The inspiration for this question was that I was looking at some old sales spreadsheets from 2020 (that was a fun year, wasn’t it?) and I was sure the start of COVID was going to wipe out the audiobook market because a lot of commuting was temporarily going away. Except this turned out not to be the case, and audiobook sales overall actually went up during COVID. So clearly I was wrong about how most audiobook listening took place while commuting. We had a few answers to this question.
David said: Mostly while I’m home prepping and eating a meal, sometimes I’m in my vehicle enjoying a coffee while I drive somewhere. Sometimes when I go out to eat by myself, I’ll listen on headphones. So it’s when my hands are otherwise busy and it beats listening to music or TV.
JLH says: I pretty much only listen to audiobooks while driving. While home, I prefer to read. I’ll listen to music when I’m at the gym.
Tom says: Anywhere and everywhere. Driving car and tractor, at work, when walking (single earpiece only), and when at the gym.
MW says: Usually while driving. I prefer reading and drawing to listening, but those aren’t an option when driving my car, so a podcast is usually it.
For myself, these days I usually listen to audiobooks when making long road trips by myself where I don’t need the GPS to navigate. That’s because if I’m going someplace I’ve never been before and need the GPS to navigate, it is highly distracting to have the audiobook and the GPS cutting back and forth between each other while you’re trying to figure out where you’re going. That said, long drives to places where I know I’m going happen less than it did, so I generally listen to audiobooks less than I than I did before COVID. That said, in 2023 through 2024 I listened to the new audiobooks Andy Serkis recorded for the Lord of the Rings and was blown away by how good they were. Definitely recommended. So that is Question of the Week.
00:03:21 Main Topic of the Week: Story Conflicts
So now on to this week’s main topic: four types of story conflict and three ways you can add those conflicts to your story. So as we all know and as I’ve mentioned many times before on this podcast and on my blog, a story is nothing without conflict. Conflict is what drives the story. There’s a story that when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien probably would have wound up with a 1200 page description of a Hobbit dinner party if C.S. Lewis hadn’t kind of gently urged him to add more conflict and have things happen to the story. I’m not entirely sure if that’s true or not, but the point is quite valid that if you want to have an interesting story, you need a conflict. You need the characters to act and respond to that conflict, and that will help drive your story.
Most stories also have more than one type of conflict. You can have internal conflict and external conflict and different kinds of internal versus external conflicts. For example, my novel Half-Elven Thief contains three of the four types of conflict we will discuss. I will mention those when I get to them. So let’s look at four classic types of story conflict.
#1: Person versus internal conflicts. What does that mean? That means the protagonist is facing challenges that test their core values and beliefs and must face their character flaws in order to move forward. There are numerous different types: midlife crisis, a character who has to overcome self-doubt, or a character who is confronted with a strong temptation or an otherwise moral test. There are numerous good examples from fiction. A relatively recent example would be the movie Inside Out, which shows a child trying to handle major changes in her life. She tries to face them by shutting out Sadness in favor of Joy, but finds that accepting all of her emotions is actually what’s healthy and the internal conflict in that movie is the character in question learning to accept all of her emotions rather than trying to suppress sadness, and you know, live with sort of false joy.
Another very classic example would be Lord of the Rings, where several different characters have internal conflicts. Perhaps the biggest one, of course, is Frodo trying to resist the power of the ring throughout the trilogy. Another big one that decides, of course, the book is at the end when Sam really, really wants to kill Gollum. As the narration in the text suggests, killing Gollum is probably the smartest thing he could do in that moment, but he can’t within himself bring himself to strike Gollum. So he lets him go, which turns out of course to be very decisive to the plot. We mentioned before that Half-Elven Thief contains three of the four conflicts types below. Half-Elven Thief does have an internal conflict for Rivah where she has to balance her desire for financial stability and security with her conscience, because, though she’s a thief, there are many more ruthless and immoral ways she can make money. She thinks about this throughout the book and the sequels, but never can quite bring herself to do that.
The second major type of conflict is person versus others. And what it is a person’s goals are being thwarted by another person. This is easily the most common kind of conflict, because in many ways it’s the easiest to write. You can have anything ranging from a superhero fighting a super villain, you know, Iron Man versus Thanos. Most of us in our lives aren’t going to hopefully experience conflict on that scale, but that is essentially person versus others in the form of Ironman versus Thanos. It could be not such a severe or violent conflict but a rivalry between, say, two sales reps or two City Council people where they will never come to blows, but they’re both competing for the same goals or trying to promote harmony or trying to get someone to collaborate.
Examples are numerous. Sherlock Holmes versus Professor Moriarty. Conan the Barbarian versus Thulsa Doom. Batman and The Joker and many other range of potential conflicts ranging from like we said before, super villains fighting each other to smaller and more intimate conflicts where two people are competing for the same goal in a way that won’t result in, you know, violence or supervillainy, but is then nonetheless emotionally significant for both of them.
And once again, we can use an example from Half-Elven Thief here and in Half-Elven Thief, Rivah’s main adversary in the book is Marandis, who is the sort of official of the thieves’ guild that she reports to who hates her and wants to find any excuse to sell her into slavery. She’s managed to avoid that so far. So that is another example from Half-Elven Thief of person versus others.
#3: The third common type of conflict is person versus environment. And what does that mean? It means the person is facing a conflict based on something that’s happening in the environment. Types can include tornadoes, floods, hurricanes (which we are sadly seeing in real life right now), a pandemic, or getting stranded on desert island or a remote alien planet, that kind of thing. A famous example would be the 1995 movie Twister about surviving tornadoes. Twister is a little bit of a ridiculous movie, though I am looking forward to seeing the sequel Twisters, which I actually rented and will watch tonight. In my own books, I have not used conflict based on the environment too often, since I tend to prefer person versus others or person versus internal conflict. Probably the closest thing I have done would be some of the dungeon crawls, like in Frostborn: The Broken Mage where surviving a dungeon is a part of the plot, but in Ghost in the Tombs, there will be some person versus environment and what it will be we shall have to read and find out.
#4: The fourth type of conflict is person versus supernatural and what that is, where the protagonist of the story must face a god or supernatural force of evil. Obviously, a fantasy book where someone fights an evil wizard is one of those. It also turns up in horror novels pretty frequently, where the protagonist is haunted by ghosts or haunted by vampires or werewolves, or Cthulhu or something like that. Examples are abundant. Maybe one of the oldest ones is The Odyssey, where Odysseus battles supernatural forces attempting to keep him from returning home. In Half-Elven Thief, once again we have a supernatural threat where Rivah is compelled to steal an item from a powerful wizard, and she has to face that wizard’s powers and find a way to survive them. So with four types of conflict, let’s see if we take a look at three different ways to add those types of conflict to your stories.
#1: Put your characters in an unfamiliar or hostile environment. For example in my books, in Frostborn, Calliande in Frostborn: The Gray Knight wakes up in a world far different from the one she has known and must act to protect herself and her original quest. There are many different ways you can do that. If you are writing a mystery novel, for example, you could have your protagonist be transferred to another police precinct where no one likes him or her. If you’re writing science fiction, the options for hostile environments are abundant, considering that most of space is lethal to humans. There are other genre suitable ways you could do that.
#2: Force your characters into making decisions, and if you really want conflict, have them start off by making the wrong ones. This can be a good way to do that, so long as you don’t make your character out to be an idiot. People make bad decisions all the time for what they think are good reasons, and if you can convincingly convey that, that is a good source of conflict. An example from my own books in the Dragonskull series, Gareth faces conflict with his parents over his rather ill-considered romantic relationship with Lady Iseult Toraemus. Then he has further conflict when that ends very badly.
#3: Have your characters face an external conflict in different ways, which then creates an additional conflict. When two different people face an external conflict, they may undergo a different internal conflict over the problem and decide to react to it in different ways that create additional conflict. For example, in Stealth and Spells Online: Creation in the back story, the protagonist Noah Carver finds out that the game he was working on, Sevenfold Sword Online, was being used for illegal activities. He wanted to blow the whistle on it, but his wife didn’t want to lose her job over it, so she immediately divorced him. That led to a new external conflict between the two of them, since they both wanted to deal with the problem in different ways and more internal conflicts for Noah since of course, he is our protagonist.
So those are four different types of conflict and three ways you can apply them to the story and hopefully you will find that helpful as you think about writing your own stories and books. So that’s it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. I reminder that you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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