Episode Fourteen: Why More Conflict Isn’t Always Better
This week’s episode is all about conflict. Conflict is an essential element of every novel, but it’s also misunderstood and often leads writers astray. In fact, conflict issues have shown up in every editorial letter I’ve written for a client. In this episode, I’m discussing why more conflict isn’t always better and key ways that you can go wrong by just shoving random, unstrategic conflicts into your story.
You can listen to the full epsiode here.
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Transcript
Please Note: This is an automatically generated transcript that has not been edited.
Olivia Bedford (00:00)
Welcome to episode number 14 of the Better Writer podcast.
I am so excited to be here for this episode because most podcasts, statistically speaking, only make it to seven episodes. I heard that statistic from Jenna Kutcher. I'm not sure where she got that data, but most podcasts apparently only last for seven episodes before the host gives up, tries something new, whatever. And so I'm really proud to have doubled that number, made it to episode 14. And I am just so appreciative of everyone who has joined me for this journey, who has been listening, commenting, leaving reviews. I am just so honored to be part of your writing journey and to be part of your day. So for today, I want to talk about one of my favorite topics to talk about, and that is conflict. As a developmental editor, conflict is the number one narrative element that I see problems with in client manuscripts. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that, and I think part of it is that conflict is just so pervasive. Conflict needs to be in every scene of your manuscript. Conflict is what drives a story forward, even if we don't always talk about it that way.
And so I think because conflict is so essential, that also leaves room for things to go wrong. And that is why I think almost every editorial letter I have ever written, and I would have to go back and check to see if this is true, but I'm pretty sure that every editorial letter I have ever written has mentioned conflict issues in some way.
And today I'm not going to talk about every single conflict issue that I see in writing because there are just too many to count. If you want to get a more complete picture of the kinds of issues I see and possible fixes, you will need to take my revision course, Reader Ready Revisions, which is going to open again for enrollment in just a couple months. So stay tuned for that. But I did want to talk about a general principle that I think trips people up a lot in developing conflict.
And it's that they think that they just need more. More conflict, more things happening, bigger explosions on the page, and just adding more is not going to do the job. Yes, you need conflict, but it's not just any conflict. It has to be meaningful conflict. And like many aspects of life, more isn't always more.
If we are adding the wrong type of conflict, we can actually do more harm than good because our stories are driven by conflict. That conflict has to be driving us forward in a meaningful way. And if it's not, it can end up sending your story in a million different directions that you never wanted it to go.
So I'm going to talk about a couple of ways that that shows up specifically so you can hopefully avoid that in your manuscripts. So the first thing that I see is conflict that gets episodic when that is not the intention. A conflict gets introduced and then it's immediately dropped. A conflict is introduced and then it's immediately dropped. And the problem is that there's nothing pulling us through the story as a whole.
The conflicts aren't building on each other, it's just kind of one thing after another that isn't pulling together as a whole. It's not teaching your character anything, it is not leading toward the climax, and it's not creating a cohesive and engaging experience for readers because there's no lingering question that is pulling them through to the end. Because as soon as a conflict is introduced, the questions that come from that conflict are answered, and then we have another question and then another question and another and so we're just never actually getting hooked into the story as a whole because there's just one incident after another with no link.
And I think the place where I see this most often is with fantasy stories because the author will take us into one part of the world with one conflict, then we go into another part of the world for another conflict, and another part of the world for the other conflict, and there's no through line, no conflict uniting them all together. It's just a series of kind of independent quests and that can be fun for you as the author to explore the world that you've built, but because it is not pulling readers into the story as a whole because there is no conflict tying everything together. It's often going to fall flat for readers.
Alright, another issue that I see often is conflict that doesn't matter to the characters, or at least it doesn't matter to the characters in a way that readers can see and experience and feel for ourselves. Characters are what make the conflict meaningful. So if your character doesn't react to a conflict, if your character isn't affected by what is happening to them, then there is no reason for your reader to be affected either and we want that conflict to have an impact on the page. And that is going to show up differently for different characters. I'm not saying that your character needs to completely break down when any little problem shows up in their lives, but we do need to see the way that it is affecting their thinking, their actions, their interactions with other characters. And if that effect isn't showing up on the page, then we either have a conflict that doesn't really need to be there because it's not doing anything for us, or we have some sort of disconnect where
Maybe it is impacting your character, but it is so low key that there's nothing for readers to actually pick up on. And we would want to amplify that reaction, make sure it's showing up on the page so that conflict feels purposeful and meaningful.
The other issue that I see is conflict has nothing to do with the character arc. It has no impact on how your character is changing or growing. And by the end of the book, it feels like the character has changed in spite of what they've gone through, not because of what they've gone through.
And there are going to be varying levels of conflict in your story. Some conflicts are going be super teeny tiny and they may not have a big impact on changing your character as a person. But overall, we should see a relationship between the character arc and the conflict. Because ultimately, that's what a character arc is, it's how your character changes in response to the story, the conflict that they are experiencing. So we want to make sure that there is some sort of relationship. The conflict that your character goes through should be intimately related to the misbelief or the flaw or whatever it is internally that they need to get over. Different writing teachers, different writers call this, you know, a different thing whether you think of it as the flaw or the misbelief or the lie or whatever it is. That element of their character needs to be tested by the conflict that you create so that the conflict in the plot of your story is creating character change by the end.
Another issue that I see is conflict that completely ignores cause and effect. Novels are held to a higher bar than reality. Random things happen to us all the time in real life. You are driving down the road, it's a completely normal day until you get into a random car accident. That is just life. Unfortunately, in a novel, you are going to be held to a higher standard. You need to have more cause and effect holding your plot elements together, especially in situations where conflict is getting resolved. This is also true in terms of causing conflict, but you can get away with some randomness there. And what I mean by that is, if something randomly causes problems for your character, readers are going to question it less than if something randomly fixes things for your character. So generally speaking, we want cause and effect to be in play as much as possible. So scene A causes the events of scene B, which causes the events of scene C, so on and so forth.
And I want to be clear that your characters don't necessarily need to know that cause and effect is connecting the events they're experiencing, but you as the author should be able to see that on the back end. So for example, character A makes a decision in scene one, and then character two is reacting to that decision when they do something in scene B.
Character A may not realize that they caused Character B's actions, but readers will know that, you as the author know that, or maybe readers won't know that, it really depends on how many perspectives we're privy to, but we want one to cause the other, that your story feels really cohesive so that your character's actions are driving the plot.
And so it doesn't feel random and like you're cheating because that can often be the effect when something really random happens and sends the plot in a different direction, especially if it's something that is going to help your characters. That can throw readers out of the story because it just doesn't feel realistic. Again, it might be realistic because that's how real life often works, but it is not going to work in fiction in the same way.
All right, and then the last issue that I see is conflict that actually slows things down because it has nothing to do with the main story you're trying to tell. And I think this one is going to be a little bit controversial because we often think of conflict as something that makes your plot move faster. It speeds up pacing, it keeps readers engaged, and you have probably been told 10 million times that conflict is essential for keeping readers hooked because it is, but that conflict has to feel purposeful.
And I think that this problem really shows up when there is just something completely random that has nothing to do with anything else in the story.
And I want to be clear, subplots can work. Subplots are important. What I'm talking about here is when a conflict shows up at a random point in the story that pulls readers and the characters away from the main story we're telling. So it doesn't feel like this is something happening adjacent to the main plot. It feels like something that is happening instead of the main plot in a way that makes us want to go back to the story that we were already being told and already promised. Usually it is a conflict that is lower stakes than the original conflict, so maybe it is a romance subplot that gets developed very extensively but only in one part of the book. When that romance plot could work if it was spread out throughout the story, but if we stop everything for five chapters just to explore the romance plot when the rest of the story was an action adventure fantasy novel, that's not going to work. So we really want to be careful that if you are introducing a subplot or a secondary conflict or anything like that, it needs to exist alongside the main plot and not take it over or distract from it. And that really comes down to figuring out how are we going to seed it in so that it flows with the whole and it doesn't just become five chapters of static conflict that is just focused on the relationship when readers were promised an adventure.
And to be clear, that is entirely genre dependent because if you're writing romance, then the love plot is the whole story. So don't think that I'm saying your romance specifically is the problem. If you were writing a romance and suddenly you interrupted the romance plot to have your characters go on an adventure that didn't develop the romance at all, that would also create the same problem. So it's not specifically romance that is the problem.
It could happen with any subplot that takes over your story for an extended period of time, stopping the main conflict and essentially becoming a distraction to your main plot. I'm not picking on romance subplots specifically. It has to do with the story you were telling, the story you promised. If we are interrupting that for an extended period of time, even if you're adding conflict, even if other conflicts happen in that side quest part, if they are not proportional to the original conflict if they are not what you promised readers in your blurb, then that is going to be a problem in your story.
Alright, like I said at the beginning, conflict is so important to your stories. It is essential to get right. We need conflict in our novels. And unfortunately, it is something that writers often get wrong. And that's why it consistently shows up in almost every, if not every editorial letter that I have ever written for a client. It is so easy to stop thinking about the experience our novel creates as a whole and kind of get siloed into, I need to create conflict, so I'm going to throw in this random thing and throw in this other thing and throw in this other thing, and we just really need to take a step back, focus on how your novel is working as a whole, and figure out how you can create conflict that builds, that escalates, that pulls your reader through an experience that is going to keep them engaged from beginning to end because that's ultimately what we want. We want a story that engages our readers, that makes them want to read more from us. And we are not just trying to check off a bunch of boxes. This is not a situation where we can just say I added conflict, box is checked, it's done. We need meaningful conflict that our readers are interested in that is going to keep them hooked on our character's story and that is harder to do than you might think because we think that we just need to create problems for our characters, but we need to be intentional about the types of problems that we're creating and how we are developing them on the page. So if you are in a situation where you're not sure if your conflict is doing what you need it to do, then I highly encourage you to come work with me. I love finding conflict issues and helping writers solve them in their manuscripts. I am currently booked six months out.
Yes, six months out for editing services, which is amazing and crazy. And I am so grateful to every client on that calendar. But I also offer other services that do not have a wait list as of right now. You can buy an outline critique. So I will look at an outline of your story and critique your plot. We can have a revision strategy session where I will look at your outline and your manuscript and we'll spend up to two hours just talking about your story and figuring out what you need to do next to fix it.
So if you are in need of help with the conflict of your story, with any other element of your story, and you write genre fiction, especially fantasy and fantasy romance, I would love to help you. You can find a link to my services in the show notes and I mentioned this earlier in the
I am also opening up the next cohort of reader-reader revisions in May and if you want to be the first to know when that happens, then please join my newsletter and I will be emailing you as soon as enrollment is open and you'll also have the chance to enroll early and maybe get some bonuses. So check out the link in the show notes. I would love to help you write the best book possible and I offer many, many ways that you can work with me and find out how to improve your story. So thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Better Writer podcast. I cannot believe that we are already at episode 14. Like I said, I've doubled that seven episode milestone and I'm excited to keep creating episodes, keep sharing writing advice and more. I am currently in New England where we are getting buried in snow.
If you are also somewhere that is super snowy, I hope you are staying safe, staying warm, and I will see you in the next episode. Thank you again for listening. Keep writing, keep getting better, one word at a time. See ya.
