Conflict is what keeps your readers and characters on their toes. Conflict moves your plot forward and pushes your characters to explore new depths of their personalities. Will your protagonist overcome all the obstacles and solve the mystery and still get the girl, or will your protagonist give in to the pressure and take his own life?
The conflict can be as simple as a young teenager struggling with her inner emotions as she grapples with her quest to find love as in Twilight or it can be vicious and sinister like having everyone turn on each other in a castle to take the throne like in Ghormenghast.
Internal conflicts
What are some conflicts that you and your friends and colleagues face on a regular basis? Loneliness? Love? Fear? Anger? Hurry? Emotions can blind people and keep them from reaching their goals.
An internal conflict is an emotional conflict that your character(s) experiences within their own mind. In the film Se7en Starring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow, Brad Pitt’s character experiences an inner conflict of anger and arrogance while Gwyneth Paltrow suffers from loneliness.
An internal conflict may prevent your detective from rescuing the kidnapped girl in the basement because she is deathly afraid of the dark. Fear is a very powerful internal conflict. In the Kevin Williamson movie do not look down, a murderer is murdering the protagonist’s friends and her fear of heights prevents her from overcoming the death of her sister. Fear of heartbreak or rejection can prevent someone from asking out their secret crush. Joyce and Jim Lavene give an excellent example of how strong fear can be: Fear of rejection can keep a woman from inviting a man to her office for coffee. She thinks about it for so long that it reaches epic proportions in her mind. Ultimately, that fear causes her to stalk him. Another plot plot!
External Conflicts
External conflicts can be big and small. In action movies, external conflict can be as devastating as the supervolcanoes and superstorms that threaten to destroy the planet. But the conflict can also be small, adding detail and tension to each scene. Even in the opening sequence of Se7en, the storm is inconvenient for the characters. For the audience, however, the rain provides an uncomfortable and gritty visual display.
It is important to add conflict to each scene when writing your novel or movie script. The conflict must forever be present either externally or internally. Many times, writers add internal conflict in a scene, followed by a scene focused on external conflict, and then continue to write in this pattern until the middle of the story where both internal and external collide.
Mixing the Conflicts
Books and movies require both internal and external conflict. One will challenge the emotions of the hero while the other will challenge the “physical” side of the protagonist’s plot. for example in The Hunger GamesKatniss is dealing with many internal conflicts: dealing with the loss of her father and sorting out her feelings towards Gale and Peter, while her external conflict is the events leading up to (and including) the upheaval of the district.
The goals, wants, and needs of your characters are not random. They need to be plotted carefully for your novel or movie script to make any sense. However, there are certain instances where a writer can get away with not spending as much time and effort developing certain types of conflicts.
In the action and adventure of men dominates the external conflict that eclipses the internal conflict. The heroic characters of these men do not need to go through soul-searching due to the demands of the specific target audience as well as the genre. Simply put, action movies are full of action.
As a writer, how you choose to reveal your character’s internal and external conflicts will reflect their strengths, weaknesses, abilities, and capabilities. Whatever conflicts you put your characters through, make sure it challenges them enough that it eventually brings them to a breaking point.
