Does a story really need conflict to work?

Reflections on the so-called 'golden rule’ of narrative

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash

If there’s one golden ‘rule’ of writing, apart from Show Don’t Tell (and I might ruminate on that one at some point) it is that there needs to be conflict. We’re told that conflict is the key to successful storytelling, that there’s no character arc, no deeper meaning, no satisfying ending, no relatability, or narrative propulsion, without it.

But I struggle with this. In part, because it is often taken too literally, and because if someone tells me something is a rule, my instant reaction is to question that assumption.

Conflict as a concept, especially when it comes to short fiction, doesn’t seem a subtle enough word – it’s too sledgehammer, too direct and aggressive, it lacks variation. I’d also argue it pushes the writer to ‘go big’, compelling them to create something overly dramatic.

When the word ‘conflict’ pops up in relation to writing, I immediately think of classic thriller-type tropes – there is a protagonist and an antagonist, the narrative arc has to have a certain shape, a battle of sorts must ensue between two opposing forces. But that’s all a bit too prescriptive, isn’t it?

Even when types of conflict in storytelling are broken down, the emphasise is couched in terms of a dispute of some kind. Generally, there tends to be about six versions of conflict:

• Protagonist versus antagonist(s) – often your classic overcoming an enemy kind of gig.

• Protagonist versus supernatural – a fight against monsters, aliens, gods, ghosts and the like, sometimes tied in with a struggle to fulfil a destiny.

• Protagonist versus nature – Think Jaws. Think Moby Dick. Think The Old Man and the Sea.

• Protagonist versus Technology – Battling robots or invasive surveillance, perhaps.

• Protagonist versus Society – Great for outsider types of character, or to explore the confines of certain religious or government oppression.

• Protagonist versus Self – An internal conflict, against self-doubt or moral struggles to make a right choice.

There’s nothing wrong with knowing and understanding these ideas. And you can achieve depth and interest by creating narratives around them, or even better through using several of them. But I would argue that the conflict in these contexts channels a writer into a narrow way of thinking.

The author Ursula Le Guin had some thoughts on this:

Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life: relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.

– Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-first Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

For me, a little nuance wouldn’t go amiss. One way of doing that is by thinking about alternative words. It helps to expand our creativity away from the idea of one thing pitted against another, to a place of experimentation and exploration.

Here’s a list of alternative words which we could consider when thinking about the idea of what keeps a narrative moving forward. Words that reflect more of life’s complexity and uncertainty:

• Change

• Complication

• Struggle

• Disruption

• Incongruity

• Divergence

• Discord/Disharmony

• Difference

• Dissonance

• Friction

• Disturbance

Take, as an example, two family members in strife – partners or a parent and a child. If we think simply in terms of conflict, then an argument would be the obvious way forward. But what if we expand that by thinking about complication, disruption or difference? We might, for example, have two people simply unable to argue, and how the difficulties of communication is the real struggle here. Or we could consider how internal friction within each character weighs on this relationship.

The potential here moves away from simple conflict, in the sense of direct opposition or battle, and is more reflective of the complex nature of relationships, the way they shift and change and diverge.

And what about the reader in all of this? What about those stories which may not have any well-defined ‘conflict’ but work through inference and suggestion and invocation, giving the reader much more room for interpretation.  This is perhaps typical of a form like mosaic or segmented stories, often quite short, sometimes impressionistic, rarely giving up their mysteries easily.  

Examples of these stories include:

• Five Fictions by Scott Garson

• Housewife by Amy Hempel

• Curriculum by Sejal Shah.    

I could go deeper here, into literary or critical theory territory, where there are arguments for the core driver of a story being something else – morality perhaps, or the representation of feelings through emotionality. That’s a bit hardcore, frankly.

I’m just trying to make a simple point about creative writing - and that is to let go of that stiff, literal definition of conflict, free your mind and let it roam around the complexity and ever-changing nature of life.

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I have a new flash fiction story out at Flash Fiction Magazine. It’s called In The Absence Of Light. Weirdly, the setting is the world of caving (or spelunking as its also known). I say weirdly because caving is something I know very little about (so I had to do some research) and because the thought of squeezing through tiny spaces gives my claustrophobia a real triggering. But, of course, the story is not really about caving at all… You can read the story via this link: In The Absence Of Light

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