Start Your Popular Fiction Novel: Conflict
By: Nicole Peeler
Tags: Novel Writing, Fiction Writing, Creative Writing, Conflict, Writing Tips

Start Your Popular Fiction Novel: Conflict

Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash

You’ve already done a deep dive into your genre, and you’ve thought about the kind of scenes your genre needs to fulfill reader expectations. Now you can start developing your characters.

In elementary and high school, if we did any creative writing, we were often encouraged to start with a character. What do they look like, or what do they do for an occupation? We might answer something like, “I want to write about a pink-haired princess who wants to marry a prince!” or “I want to write about a detective who solves mysteries because he hates criminals.”

In other words, we started with character, to create the character. Which makes sense…except it often doesn’t work. A more effective way to create a really engaging protagonist is to focus on conflict, first.

Indeed, if you’ve ever had a great idea that didn’t get past the first few chapters, it’s probably because you didn’t have enough inherent conflict.

And you are not alone! This is my own personal bugbear as a writer. I have a PhD. in literature and I taught modernism — storylines famous for Nothing Happening. Think Waiting for Godot. So I love a story ripe with character development in which people feel things and then discuss their feelings and then betray their feelings and then have feelings about betraying their feelings, all of which they discuss.

Unfortunately for me, and for a lot of the students I work with, popular fiction does not run on feelings. It’s not that an internal story arc isn’t crucial, but external conflict needs to be in your face to achieve a dynamic plot.

The best way to understand this dynamic is to read Debra Dixon’s classic GMC: Goal, Motivation Conflict (affiliate link). In this book, Dixon summarizes the creation of a dynamic protagonist as requiring a thorough understanding of both the internal and external goals, motivation, and conflict (often better understood as obstacles) for that character.

This seems straightforward when we think about it. We know that characters have to have goals and motivations in order to want things badly enough to come into conflict with the people who either don’t want them to have what they want, or think they need something else. But where I see writers (including myself) go wrong is that we don’t make our external conflict tangible and therefore effective, because we conflate or confuse external and internal conflicts.

Goals, Motivation, Conflict

What Dixon encourages her readers to do is start with a simple table, although she uses “conflict” rather than “obstacle,” and I’ve changed that for reasons I’ll get to later:

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One way to understand the difference between external and internal goals is that the external goal is often what the character thinks they need (or wants) and the internal goal is what the character actually needs (sometimes unbeknownst to themselves). But otherwise, this seems fairly straightforward. A goal is what a character wants or needs, and the motivation is why they want it. Finally, the obstacle is what is getting in the way of them having it.

This seems straightforward, but where I see my students get hung up is that they don’t truly understand the difference between internal and external. And what they end up with is something like this:

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To the novice eye, this looks fine. In books, Pretty, Pretty Princesses often want to find love, and love is great, and a book about a woman learning to love herself rather than be crippled by insecurity is eminently worthy. Similarly, the external goal of many a princess is to marry a prince! And it makes sense she’d want a big wedding, as a princess, and that she’d have to overcome her feelings to trust her prince. So what’s wrong with this?

1) Never use “universal” goals

“Everyone wants ______” is the number one thing I see wrong with internal goals. The _____ here is often love or revenge. So they say, “My hero wants revenge for his clan/family/BFF being murdered.” And I ask, “why?” And they respond, “Because everyone wants revenge when their clan/family/bff is murdered.”

This might sound logical, but it’s not specific enough, not to mention it’s the plot of a thousand million stories. And on that note:

2) Saving the world is boring

This is often where trouble starts in genres like fantasy, SF, and thriller.

Me: “Why does your hero/ine have to _____?”

Student: “To save the world.”

Okay, yes, that is often the ultimate stakes of a thriller, fantasy, or SF novel: to save a nation or a world or an agency or a platoon or whatever. But, again, it’s not interesting or unique, and it tells neither the reader nor you, as the person who has to write this thing, what is actually happening in this story.

3) The “Punch it, F*** it, or Steal it” test

External things need to be external, but it’s so easy to hang your plot on something that feels external, but is really internal. That’s the reason I like using “obstacle” instead of “conflict”: conflict is an abstract result, but obstacle is something you trip over. So the best way to test your external goals, motivations, and conflict is to make sure it’s something your protagonist can punch, steal, or f***, etc. It has to tangible. So in the above example, not believing her prince will love her for who she really is might seem external — after all, it’s about her looks or her body and an actual prince. But it’s really a feeling: the feeling of insecurity. Basically, what is supposed to be external merely reiterates the internal obstacle.

This can happen at all levels of the external column: you can have a goal that, when you test it, is really a feeling. Same with motivation. If you can’t punch it, f*** it, or steal it, it’s not external.

4) The sentence test

Finally, a great way to test your GMC (or GMO, really) is to try to make a sentence or sentences that string your ideas together (usually 1–3 sentences). Your external and internal plots should combine to reveal an interesting plot in which there are clear stakes and a suggestion of dynamism (the plot has legs). Pro tip: basically, you’re writing a pitch of your novel before you finish your novel.

If we look at our example grid, we can see it’s gonna be hard to make this interesting, but here’s one possible sentence: “Pretty Pretty Princess wants to find true love by marrying a prince, because she’s always wanted to find true love and have a big wedding. But she worries she’s not pretty enough and she doesn’t believe her prince will love her as she is.”

This is okay, sort of, right? We have some indication of what the story is about: a romance, in which a woman finds must learn to love herself to find romantic love.

But it’s also very generic and could be hundreds of other books. More problematically, think about that sentence, as a writer. How are you actually going to get her from hating herself to loving herself? Is she going to sit in front of a mirror and think about herself for an entire novel? You haven’t given yourself anything to hang a plot on.

How to make the stagnant more dynamic (and get yourself a plot)

A good GMO chart is going to make you think about concrete elements of plot, not just feelings: such as who that character is going to punch or kiss, what they’re going to steal or learn, or whatever else your genre requires.

So let’s tweak our model, above.

I would start with the idea that Pretty Pretty Princess “wants to find true love,” and I’d question it. Is that really what she needs? No. Love is great, but, as Millay admits, “love is not all.” She won’t die without love, but she’ll be unhappy if she hates herself her whole life, and you’re not very lovable if you hate yourself, either. So what she really needs is to learn to love herself, before she can love another, or attract the kind of man she’d want to marry.

And why does she need that? It can’t be universal, it should be specific to Pretty Pretty Princess. What if PPP had a “perfect” older sister? Or a “perfect” mother, who died giving birth to her? Both of these are great, and I should make lists like this for every entry, but even longer. And then I can pick the one that MOST TORTURES MY CHARACTER. Your goal is always to torture your characters — art is not watching nice people treated nicely by a nice world. So a perfect older sister is good, but a dead mom our protag feels like she killed by being born? OUCH. That’s torture! Let’s go with that. That in turn helps me fill in what’s really going on with PPP. I can imagine her internal motivation, making a sentence that reads: “Pretty Pretty Princess needs to learn to love herself in order to find romantic love with her prince, but she’s haunted by the idea that she can never be as lovable as her ‘perfect’ mother, who died giving birth to her, proving that even the truest love can be deadly.”

Your goal is always to torture your characters — art is not watching nice people treated nicely by a nice world.

Similarly, we can dig into the external GMO. If she needs to love herself to find true love, she should want, basically, the wrong thing. So “marry a prince” here is great. She conflates marriage with love. Meanwhile, as a princess, love might be the last thing her kingdom wants for her — they’d prefer things like trade agreements and peace treaties. So that’s actually a great start. She wants to marry a prince, but our motivation is weak. “Because she wants to have a big wedding” is silly, when you think about it. It’s easy to pay for a big wedding as a princess, right? And she won’t even hang her own bunting. So part of what we’re missing here is…a person, right? That’s the biggest weakness of the model I gave you, and I often see it in student product. It’s missing a villain! Or in the case, a love interest, who serves as the antagonist in romance. I haven’t given her something to punch or f*** or steal. So let’s do that.

She wants to marry her prince because…what if he swore he’d never marry her? What if she needs to marry him because it will cement a precarious treaty and stop a war? The first is good, but the second implies the first AND it contains a threat against her nation. That’s called stakes! And what’s the obstacle, then? What if he wants to keep fighting the war? What if he believes her people are barbarians who should be wiped off the planet, because his beloved older brother was killed in the war?

This is where you start creating your other major character’s GMC’s, and lacing them through one another. So let’s redo what we had:

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Compare our earlier sentences, mostly solipsistic generalizations about love and wanting love (worst offender: the bit highlighted in blue) to the following:

“Pretty Pretty Princess has never trusted love: she doesn’t think she can compare to her perfect mother, who died giving birth to her. But now she needs to marry Prince A, in order to seal a treaty that will end a bloody conflict between their two countries. How will PPP convince Prince A — who lost his brother to the conflict, and vowed to wipe her nation off the map — to love her, when she doesn’t even love herself?”

As a sentence, the above would have more allure to an agent, a publisher, and a reader. But, more importantly, it gives its writer a roadmap.

We can envision our heroine not just sitting around pining — we can envision her doing things. We can imagine her meeting her prince: She’s hopeful. He’s a jerk. She’s devastated. We can imagine her visiting her mother’s crypt, where we learn her painful backstory. We can imagine a scenario in which she and her prince are thrown together. We can imagine Prince A being charmed by her, even though he doesn’t want to be. We can imagine the Princess giving up, and accepting that she was right along — she’s not lovable (her dark night of the soul), and we can start to noodle what may have precipitated it (maybe there’s a skirmish on the border, and one of his beloved generals dies, and he’s like “SHE IS THE ENEMY” and publicly rejects her??), and then we can imagine them finally realizing what they need to realize. He needs to realize that it’s kings like his father who really started the war, and our prince can finally stop the killing. And she can realize she’s actually lovable, because she’s a princess who’s managed to stay a real person, etc.

You can start creating scenes, hung off these pegs of plot you’ve built through understanding your character’s goals and motivations, and the obstacles that stand in their way.

Some takeaways:

Don’t start with what your protag looks like or does for a living. Start with what they want or need, why they want/need it, and why they can’t have it. Then use that to fill in the details so you have individual characters that are going to be easy to torture and that work together to torture each other as much as possible (your goal as a writer). Your external goals needs to be tangible. It needs to be something that can be picked up, or a person another character can kill or kiss. It’s a ring I have to take to Mordor, or the strangely attractive suspected arsonist I have to investigate because I’m a firefighter. Same with the motivations and the conflict. If I don’t throw the ring in the lava, my friends will die in an epic battle, but it’s hard because the mountain is, well, a mountain, plus there’s a vile creature trying to kill me, plus I’m being poisoned by the ring. So if I don’t get this done, I will kill my best friend, fail my other friends, and become a monster in a world where evil reigns. Your internal goals give the external goals their mojo. It’s bad enough being stuck on a mountain, harassed by the physical incarnation of what you’ll become if you don’t get rid of the ring that’s poisoning you and encouraging you to murder your bestie, all while knowing your other best friends are probably being slaughtered by orcs…but you’re someone who only wants to go back to the Shire. What I’ve described would be bad enough for an experienced nomadic mercenary — but it’s so much more powerful happening to a tender-hearted being who has only read of adventure and wants to get back to his armchair. (Exercise: think through how our “revised” chart for PPP, above, hooks internal and external together. Could it hook it even more? Are we missing opportunities? Go ahead and revise my revision, to make it even stronger!) Give your GMOs a whack, using a chart like this one. Look at them and challenge them. Realize they’re “all wrong,” because this is hard!, and rework them. Keep questioning and revising until you have something you can work with. They still won’t really be finished. You’ll keep tweaking as you draft, but having a strong set of GMOs is a great starting point.

Give yourself a good week or so to do this, if you’ve never done it before. Read Dixon! Take your favorite books off the shelf and chart how their authors used GMC. Noodle your own chart, when you feel ready, and keep questioning and revising till you like what you have.

Then, in week four, you can start putting these three weeks of brainstorming into action.