Conflict Is Only One Way to Think About Stories

Some conflicting feelings on conflicts in literature

If you’ve been reading literary Twitter this week, you’ve almost certainly seen a lot of, uh, conflict over the question of conflicts in literature. Are all stories driven by conflict? Or is that claim both false and perhaps even a problematic way to think about stories? A whole lot of very smart writers have weighed in falling on one side or the other but—in the way of Twitter—the discussion also quickly spiraled into insults, bizarre misreadings, and unsupported claims.

I find the question interesting even if the discourse was a bit much. So I’m going to try and weigh in here generally without “subtweeting” anyone specifically. If you’re desperate to wade into the frothy waves of the online discourse, then just search for “conflict” and “story” on Twitter…

I’ve long been fascinated by different story structures, and even teach a class specifically about different story models from around the world. There’s no one way to write fiction. There’s no six ways either. There are infinite paths through the infinite woods of fiction. At the same time, there are general models and organizing principles that can be fruitful to think about when writing.

What Do We Mean by “Conflict”?

Much of the discourse strikes me as a somewhat uninteresting semantic debate. What actually is “conflict” in literature? The term in storytelling is not necessarily how we use it in daily life. If I go outside and chop wood for a fire while musing about if I should quit my job to become a firefighter, I wouldn’t say I’m mired in conflicts. Yet if I’m a character in a short story, suddenly I’m in an external “man vs. nature” conflict and an internal “man vs. self” one.

I wouldn’t say that’s wrong either. In a story, those really might be “conflicts” in the sense of a character have a goal and obstacles to face that goal. At the same time, the people who claim all stories must have conflicts tend to define conflict so broadly that the claim just becomes a tautology. Almost any sequence of events can be shoved into one of the 4 (or 6 or 10 or… the number always changes) “fundamental conflicts of literature” if you squint hard enough.

On the other hand, the anti-“conflict” side sometimes acts like anything that isn’t a bitter or violent disagreement isn’t a literary conflict. Most of the examples tweeted out have very overt, even classic, conflicts. The bottom line is that stories don’t have to contain conflicts (as most would define that)… but it’s also clear that the vast majority of popular narratives do.

Mostly though, I don’t think “do all stories have conflicts?” is the interesting question.

What Is Driving the Story?

Regardless of how we define “conflict,” it seems to me the more fundamental question is what is really driving a story? What is making it tick? If a story is 95% lyrical observations about city life and 5% a plot about a shitty boss, is it really useful to claim it’s a story about a work conflict?

Most popular stories tend to be centered on a central character who has goals or desires that are thwarted (at last temporarily). This is the main way that readers connect with characters. If the characters don’t have goals and desires, they’re hard to relate to. If their goals and desires aren’t thwarted initially, they’re hard to root for. Few want to read a story about a popular wealthy person who gets everything they want and is always happy, the end. Thus, we talk about conflicts.

However, it doesn’t have to be the case that a central character is the center of a story. Take a novel like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. (I reference this book a lot in this newsletter because it’s widely read, but there are countless others we could insert here.) This is a book without any real central characters. The majority of the book is descriptions of imaginary cities with no references to characters at all. Between the descriptions, there are interstitial conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo yet they function as avatars for Calvino to explore different ideas rather than traditional characters with thwarted goals and desires. If one squints very hard, I’m sure one could claim it fits one of the conflict models. But the experience of the book is certainly not one of conflict or even of character.

Stories driven by plot or character typically—though not universally—have some central conflicts. But as I’ve written about before, plot-driven stories and character-driven stories are not the only types of stories out there. Stories can be driven by voice, form, language, and basically any element of fiction. Perhaps such stories have conflicts in them, but those aren’t necessarily the focus. They aren’t what’s driving the story.

Ultimately, thinking of stories as being driven by X number of fundamental literary conflicts (“man vs. nature,” “man vs. society,” “man vs. man,” etc.) isn’t right or wrong. It’s just one way to think about things. One model to use. And it’s hardly the only model out there.

Instead of asking do stories require conflicts or not, let’s ask what are other ways to think about stories?

A Brief Defense of Aristotle and Freytag

Before diving into other story models, I’d like to take a brief moment to defend the much maligned Aristotle and Freytag. Whenever this conversation comes up, people claim that having stories with conflicts is a Western idea caused by either Aristotle or Freytag. It’s true that ideas from Aristotle and Freytag have influenced a lot of stories, especially the three-act and five-act dramatic structures popular in TV and film. But let me point out something that should be obvious: neither Aristotle (circa 335 BCE) or Freytag (1863) were talking about all possible forms of stories in all mediums and time periods.

“But Aristotle, how does the latest fragmentary plotless autofiction novel fit into your theory of theater?!”

Aristotle was talking about Greek drama and Freytag’s book was a study of Greek and Shakespearean drama. When Aristotle says that tragic plays are best when they span a single day or Freytag talks about the third act climax, neither of them were saying these are “rules” you have to apply to your speculative flash fiction, five-season prestige TV show, or interconnected short story collection!

In terms of conflict, even the Wikipedia entry says Freytag “argued for tension created through contrasting emotions, but didn't actively argue for conflict.” Freytag’s five-act structure uses the terms exposition/introduction, rise, climax (or turning point), return/fall, catastrophe.

Aristotle did talk about having a single conflict (as well as a single span of time—ideally one day—and other unifying principles), but again this is in the specific context of ancient Greek plays not all possible types of stories.

Our conceptions of how stories work and what can count as a story have changed dramatically over time. A good example of “no conflict” stories I saw mentioned was Lydia Davis’s meditative flash fictions. I agree. But those are also stories that might not be considered “stories” at all 200 years ago much less 2,000. Hell, many readers don’t think they count as stories today.

So let’s go a little easy on Aristotle and Freytag. It’s not their fault their ideas are taken out of context and applied to works they weren’t talking about.

Other Ways to Think About Stories

Okay, so “conflict” is a model for thinking about stories. It’s a useful one, I believe, but not the only one. If the conflict hammer is your only tool, all stories look like nails, etc. So what are some other tools to wield?

Change

In my experience, “conflict” is more how stories are analyzed in high school English classes than how creative writing is taught. In most MFA programs at least, I think “change” is the more common focus. You have a character and they need to undergo some change, internal or external, by the end of the story. This can be a dramatic conflict of course, but it might be a subtle change of attitude or a momentary epiphany. (God, some writers love epiphanies…)

I often think of Robert McKee’s advice that stories should have a central “story value”—in his terms—that is an axis the story moves along. Examples are life/death, love/hate, hope/despair, etc. Each scene in a story should move the characters and plot along the axis. The story is changing the entire time, shifting back and forth along an axis.

Change doesn’t have to just apply to plots arcs and character arcs. A story could have merely a shift in perception, a change in atmosphere, a remodeling of language, etc. But the idea is that some change needs to occur or the story is static and dull.

Kishōtenketsu

This story structure is used in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese art and it a bit different than the three-act and five-act models common in America. This four-act structure has these parts: introduction, development, twist, and conclusion.

You can think of it as starting with an idea, developing that idea, then introducing a new idea (a twist) with a conclusion that resolves both ideas. This structure is quite flexible. It’s used to think about short poems and single-page comic strips, for example. The model itself doesn’t center on conflict per se, although sometimes Americans talk about it in a bit of a Western gaze way as this magical “conflict free” structure. Japanese scholars have told me it’s really just a general model that they use to think about all types of stories, including battle-filled anime shows and superhero blockbusters in the same way that Westerners will apply three and five act structures to Korean cinema or Japanese novels. (It doesn’t have the word conflict in it, but then neither does Freytag’s Pyramid.)

I personally like thinking about this model in terms of ideas. What is a new idea—perhaps even a conflicting one?—that can be introduced ~3/4ths of the way into a story to inject new energy? It’s a more flexible way to think about stories than “turning point” or “climax” even if in practice the model can look similar. Here’s a longer video explanation of the structure.

Character fortunes

Kurt Vonnegut famously talked about story arcs in terms of character fortunes. Stories, he said, have elegant shapes that follow the rise and fall of a character’s fortunes.

For a character driven story, this is a useful way to think about the shape of your story because it focuses on one of the most important (imho) story principles: movement. Typically, you don’t want a story to simply move in one direction. (The joke about Kafka excepted.) You want a back and forth movement with successes and failures. This back and forth movement powers your story.

Here’s another story model that I find even more useful, from Janet Burroway:

I like this model because it combines two really important principles: back and forth movement and overall escalation. You want the push and pull of changing fortune, but you also want the overall stakes of the story to keep escalating in some way. With perhaps a bit of dénouement / resolution at the end.

Le Guin’s Carrier Bag

Someone on Twitter reminded me of Le Guin’s story model of a bag. In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Le Guin offers this model as opposed to the hero-centric conflict model:

I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

Etc.

This is only the beginning of course. One can think of stories as a series of waves, as a spiral, or as a solar system in which a central sun (idea/question/theme) pulls everything else in it’s orbit. In one of my classes this week, a student asked how I modeled my novel and I came up with a somewhat bizarre metaphor about a crystal that refracts light at different angles. (In the metaphor, the crystal was the central theme or question of the novel and I was attempting to show different angles or “answers” to that question.)

I imagine many authors have their own quirky models in their heads. And if the idea of thinking about stories in different shapes excites you, take a look at Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode.

The point here is these are all different metaphors, different models, to think about stories. None of them are “right” or “wrong.” None of them are universally applicable to all types of text that one might call “a story.” At the same time, these models are frequently overlapping and a single story can be mapped onto a dozen different models. A story like Cinderella can be talked about with an inverted checkmark, Freytag’s Pyramid, kishōtenketsu, rising and falling character fortunes, and countless other ways.

No model is right or wrong. But by thinking about stories with different models than just “conflict,” we can see even more story possibilities.

---

As always, If you like this newsletter, please consider subscribing or checking out my recently released science fiction novel The Body Scout, which The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent” and Boing Boing declared “a modern cyberpunk masterpiece.”