The Conflict Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles Volume 1

A story without conflict is a description. That’s the premise of The Conflict Thesaurus, Volume 1, and of the eleven books the series produced, this is the one I’d put in the hands of a writer whose drafts keep going slack. It points the method at what drives every narrative: the trouble that pressures a character into revealing who they are.

Most craft advice treats conflict as a vague imperative, raise the stakes, add tension, as if a writer who’s stuck simply forgot to want those things. This book is the opposite. It’s a catalog of specific, concrete conflict scenarios you can drop into a slack scene, each one broken down so you can see exactly how it works.

What a conflict entry maps

Take a scenario like being forced to choose between two people you love.

The entry examines the nature of that conflict, the way it traps a character so that any choice is a loss. It lists the emotions it forces to the surface, guilt, resentment, the particular grief of betraying someone for someone else. It maps the difficult choices and possible outcomes, and the ways the situation can escalate as the pressure builds.

It frames the conflict as a pressure that exposes a character, instead of an event that happens to one. Who they choose, and how, tells the reader who they are more powerfully than any amount of description.

The fix for a slack scene

When a chapter goes limp, the problem is almost always that nothing is at stake in it. People talk, the writer describes things, the plot inches forward, and the reader’s attention drifts because no one is under pressure. The entries help me find the friction that should be there, the obstacle blocking a want, the cost looming over the character, the choice with no clean answer. It turns vague trouble into specific, story-shaped pressure. That’s most of what a draft repair involves.

I’ve used this book to diagnose a dead chapter more times than I can count, and the diagnosis is nearly always the same: no real conflict, and here’s the one that belongs.

Internal as much as external

The book’s range is one of its strengths. It doesn’t just catalog external obstacles and adversaries, the villains and disasters and locked doors.

It gives equal weight to inner struggles, the moral dilemmas, the crises of belief, the conflicts a character has with their own values and fears. The strongest scenes usually braid both, an external problem that forces an internal reckoning, and the book is built to help you find that combination instead of settling for a fistfight.

Why is The Conflict Thesaurus split into two volumes?

The subject is large enough that the authors split it across two books. Volume 1 stands entirely on its own as a working reference, and for many writers it’s the single most practical entry in the series, because conflict is the element a struggling draft most often lacks.

If your scenes have people and places and pretty sentences but no pulse, the missing ingredient is usually conflict, and this is the reference that helps you build it on purpose. A strong, focused tool aimed squarely at the heart of storytelling.

Frequently Asked Questions