Conflict in Writing | How Tension Drives Story, Character, and Reader Engagement

The most common problem in the manuscripts I see is nice people agreeing with each other for three hundred pages. Nobody wants to read that. Somebody has to want something, and somebody else has to stand in the way. It frustrates me because the writers doing it are usually talented. They love their characters too much to hurt them, and the book pays for that kindness with a reader who stops turning pages.

When a manuscript reaches me with no tension in it, I go looking for the conflict first, because it’s almost always missing, too weak, or over too quickly. For more, see The Emotion Thesaurus.

What Does Conflict Do in a Story?

Conflict runs deeper than an argument between characters. It’s any force that prevents a character from getting what they want.

That force can be another person, a system, nature, circumstance, or the character’s own psychology. What matters is that something stands between the character and their goal, and the reader wants to see how it resolves. For more, see a powerful guide to character development and humor in writing.

Conflict creates forward momentum. Every scene should introduce conflict, escalate it, or resolve it in a way that creates new conflict. A scene doing none of those isn’t pulling its weight, and I cut those scenes out of my own drafts more often than any other kind.

Conflict also reveals character. People show who they really are when they’re under pressure, forced to choose, or confronted with something they fear. A character described as brave is less convincing than a character who acts bravely when the cost is high. Conflict provides the pressure that makes character visible.

Watch: Writing Conflict Isn't Complicated, The Second Story

What are the types of conflict in writing?

The traditional categories still hold up because they describe different kinds of pressure on a character.

Character against character is the most visible form. Two people want incompatible things. This drives most thriller plots, courtroom dramas, and relationship stories. (See also a crime writer’s guide to the courts) The strength of this conflict depends on making both sides understandable. I can’t stand an antagonist who’s purely evil with no comprehensible motivation, because the conflict flattens into good versus bad, and that’s less interesting than it sounds.

Internal conflict is character against self: guilt, fear, addiction, self-doubt, competing desires.

This is the hardest type to write well because it happens inside the character’s head. That means the writer has to externalize it through behavior, dialogue, and decisions. A character who thinks about their guilt for three pages is less absorbing than a character whose guilt causes them to make a terrible decision.

In character against society, an individual goes up against a system, institution, or cultural norm. This works when the system feels real and the stakes for defying it feel concrete.

The danger is making the system a faceless abstraction. The best versions of this conflict give the system human representatives, specific people who enforce the rules the character is fighting against.

Character against nature covers survival stories, environmental threats, and any situation where the obstacle is the physical world. The challenge is that nature has no motivation, so the writer has to create tension through the character’s resourcefulness, fear, and physical limits instead of through an antagonist’s choices.

Character against the unknown covers supernatural, science fiction, and horror conflicts where the character faces something they don’t understand. The tension comes from uncertainty. The rules are unclear, the threat isn’t fully defined, and the character must act with incomplete information.

Most strong books layer multiple types. A character fighting an unjust system while also battling their own self-doubt is more interesting than either conflict alone.

Why does weak conflict kill a manuscript?

The most common conflict problem is conflict that costs the character nothing. If your character can walk away from the problem and lose nothing they care about, the stakes are too low, and no amount of good prose will make a reader care how it ends.

The second most common problem is conflict that resolves too easily. A character faces a major obstacle in chapter six and overcomes it in chapter seven with minimal difficulty. The reader needed that conflict to build across multiple chapters, escalating the tension and forcing the character into increasingly difficult choices.

The third is false conflict: arguments, misunderstandings, or obstacles that exist only because the author needs something to happen.

They don’t grow from the characters or the situation. If the entire conflict would evaporate after one honest conversation between two characters, the reader will notice and resent it. This one is a cheap trick. It’s the author cheating, and the reader is the one being cheated.

Real conflict grows out of the character. What they want, what frightens them, what they will and won’t do: that’s what makes conflict feel earned and not assembled. Everything else is the author moving furniture.

Conflict in Dialogue

From Author Talks

Jo Ullah is a dyslexic author who didn’t read a book for herself until she was thirteen, and now researches her characters’ parents before writing them. She explained the method on Author Talks.

Conflict becomes visible in dialogue, when two characters with incompatible goals compete for control of the conversation and say one thing while meaning another. Subtext does the work. Characters in real conflict rarely state their positions directly. They deflect, redirect, imply, and test. The surface conversation is about one thing while the actual conflict works underneath. A married couple arguing about who forgot to buy groceries is rarely arguing about groceries.

Each character in a dialogue scene should want something from the conversation. When those wants are incompatible, the dialogue generates tension naturally. If both characters want the same thing, or neither wants anything, the dialogue dies no matter how pretty the sentences are.

Don’t resolve a dialogue conflict with a speech.

One character delivering a monologue that settles the argument is the flattest thing you can do to a scene, and it happens in nearly every first draft I read. I tell writers to cut the speech and let the argument stay broken. Real conflict in dialogue escalates, shifts, and sometimes ends without resolution, and that tension carries into the next scene.

Pacing Conflict

Conflict needs rhythm. Constant high tension exhausts the reader. No tension bores them. The pattern is tension and release: escalate the conflict, give the character a brief respite to regroup, then escalate again to a higher level.

The overall arc of a book should follow this pattern on a large scale. Early chapters introduce the conflict and establish what’s at stake. Middle chapters complicate and escalate. The character’s initial approach fails, new obstacles emerge, allies become unreliable, and the cost of the conflict increases. The climax forces the character into a final confrontation where the stakes are highest and the outcome is uncertain. The middle is where most books die, and it’s usually because the writer stopped raising the price. (More on The Conflict Thesaurus, Volume 2)

Within this large arc, each chapter and each scene should have its own smaller conflict arc. A chapter that’s entirely setup with no tension will lose the reader even if the overall book structure is sound. Every scene needs something at stake, even if the stakes are smaller than the book’s central conflict.

Resolving Conflict

How conflict resolves matters as much as the conflict itself. The resolution should feel earned. The character should have to sacrifice something, change something, or risk something to get through it. Easy resolutions feel cheap. Impossible resolutions feel contrived.

The best resolutions grow from choices the character makes under pressure. The character faces a dilemma with no clean answer, makes a choice, and lives with the consequences. That beats bailing them out with luck or a power nobody mentioned until page 300. Readers hate that, and they’re right.

Not all conflict needs to resolve cleanly. Some of the most powerful endings leave certain conflicts partially unresolved. Not every problem has a solution. Memoir in particular benefits from honest, incomplete resolutions, because that’s how life works.

How does conflict work in nonfiction?

Conflict isn’t exclusive to fiction. Every effective nonfiction book has conflict at the center, even if the author doesn’t think of it that way. A business book presents a conflict between how things are currently done and a better approach. A self-help book presents a conflict between the reader’s current situation and where they want to be. A memoir presents the conflicts the author lived through and how those conflicts changed them.

If your nonfiction book has no clear conflict (a problem the reader recognizes, a tension between competing ideas, a challenge that needs solving), it will read like a textbook instead of a narrative. Readers engage with problems. Give them one.

If a scene feels dead, find out who wants what and who’s blocking them. If the answer is nobody, cut the scene. I’d sooner lose a chapter I loved than make a reader sit through one where nothing’s at stake, and a writer who protects a dead scene because it was hard to write is putting their own feelings ahead of the reader’s time.

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