Considering the Conflict and Struggles in Your Story · 9:06pm Sep 2nd, 2013
Every story needs conflicts and struggles. These are the entertaining parts of the story that allow a character to grow and the readers to root for them as they do so.
What is a Conflict or Struggle?
So, what makes a struggle or conflict good? Well, first let's break it down into its essence and figure out what it is. A conflict or struggle is essentially when a character has a goal or objective that requires them to exert an aspect of their character (shows some level of who they are as a character) to achieve those goals (or fail to achieve them in some cases). It's pretty straightforward.
It can be a physical struggle (a fight with an enemy, running out of town, competing in a race etc.). It could be interpersonal (An argument, buying an item from a street vendor, or trying to cheer up a friend, etc.) or it could be personal (Trying to overcome fear, making a tough choice (gray choices) where no answer is better than the other, dealing with jealousy, etc.)
The majority of your struggles are going to be Physical or Interpersonal, while the Personal ones often transform into one of the other types, or are present when one of the other struggles is being considered.
How to Introduce Conflicts and Struggles
You do this by introducing the protagonist and establishing who they are, and what their goals are. From there, the character will naturally move toward their goals, and you, as an author have these characters get dragged into conflicts and struggles that will define and change who they are as a character.
Things to consider when introducing conflict: Coherency, Perspective, and the Stakes themselves. You want the struggle to be coherent with the rest of the story. It should share the tone that you are trying to achieve with the story, and it should be presented in a believable manner that doesn't feel shoehorned in there. In other words, try not to jostle your readers out of the story with a struggle that basically tells them, 'This is the struggle I want the characters to face, so they are going to face it now'. It needs to be something that flows from the character, using their motivations to spring the struggle into motion. If the character doesn't have the motivation required to face the struggle, then don't make them face it, otherwise it will feel forced and wrong.
Once you have your character working their way through a struggle, the character will either overcome it, lose out to it, or stalemate it. However for the struggle to bear any real significance, the reader has to have an indication of what is at stake in a struggle. What happens if they overcome the struggle? What happens if they lose out to the struggle? What happens if it's not entirely resolved?
Delivering the stakes to your readers comes from perspective. There are a few ways of doing this (and probably more than the ones I mention here). One way is through shared perspective of the character. By getting in the character's mind and feelings, the reader will see the struggle from the character's perspective and learn what is at stake. This is good for having the readers cheer alongside the protagonists (and I use this form most prevalently for the SoC stories)
Another way is to give the reader an exclusive, alternate perspective of the conflict that the characters don't know about. Doing so leads the readers to knowing what is truly at stake, while the characters struggle without that knowledge. This can be used quite well to build up a situation where one of the characters ends up struggling against something that is really not in their best interests at the end. Pretty decent for a tragic end to a conflict, or for a fine horror story. (imagine Apple Bloom wandering around, lost in a forest, yet as a reader you just read about a murder that had just happened to another character in that same forest. AB has no idea about that and gets curious when she sees a shadow move in the distance, hoping to ask the potential pony if there's a way out of the forest. This causes the struggle to be more about the reader wanting AB to do the exact opposite and have her get out of there even as she slips close toward her demise. Simply because the reader knows (or assumes to know) what is truly at stake.)
Another perspective would be when one of the characters knows what is at stake, yet the reader doesn't. Yet after the conflict, it is then revealed to the reader. This can be a great way to introduce the stakes, though it is extremely hard to handle properly, and shouldn't be done too often. If the reader doesn't know what's truly at stake during the conflict, then they are often going to not really be engaged by the conflicts as every single one of them turns out to be different from what they were led to believe. Though sometimes that flare of mystery for a single struggle can be a great change of pace, particularly in a mystery story. It gets you wondering, 'What's that character trying to do?' and then moments later all the pieces click together. In any case, during these struggles you still need a character to which the audience can relate. (For an okay-ish example (I'm not really a fan of the episode), look to MMMystery on the Friendship Express. See how Twilight knows what's really at stake, and the audience is left trying to piece it together? That's what I'm getting at here.)
Regardless of how much the reader knows about what is at stake, as an author, you have to consider those stakes and reveal them at the right value to your characters in order to subtly guide their actions. Judge if the stakes are enough to get a character motivated to actually get into the struggles you have planned in the first place. When you make a character who is not motivated, and yet you force them to face the struggle and 'overcome' it, that's like a slap in the face for the reader. If the character isn't motivated enough, with what has already been introduced with their character, then you need to introduce higher stakes until they are willing to, as characters, head toward that struggle.
Here's an example of my own from back when I was just getting into my writing stride. I had Sweetie Belle all set up to learn magic and go on a journey, except there was one problem: I couldn't get her to leave Ponyville. She had no reason to do so. Her friends and family were there, and she was more willing to trust them than if some crazy voice she met only the day before were to just suggest that she leave Ponyville. So I went about having her consider the fact that she might hurt her own friends and family if she stayed, after all, she did burn down the clubhouse. I then cemented that seed of self-doubt and fear by having her drain Twilight of magic. Finally, there was enough there for the filly to feel that she had to leave Ponyville in a hurry. In retrospect it was a fairly heavy-handed move for me to make as an author, but it was much better than her leaving Ponyville without a strong reason.
Knowing what is at stake gives the character's actions more meaning, and thus, their eventual victory or failure consequently has a greater effect on the character as a whole. You have to keep the struggles of these characters in mind, and realize how the struggles have changed them as a character. The good conflicts and struggles are the catalysts for character change, and the character's following actions are the evidence of their changing.
And that's what I have for conflicts. Honestly, writing this was very messy and hard to do (I rewrote it two separate times, and I'm still not entirely pleased with it). I imagine it's because I don't really focus too much on the conflicts themselves when writing. I focus on characters and their motivations, and the conflicts are merely the knots of those character threads as they interact with one another. So if a character suddenly does something that I didn't plan, yet makes for more sense for the character to do, I run with it and explore the resulting conflict, in spite of what I had originally thought might happen.
I'll admit this is probably my messiest blog on writing thus far, but hopefully there are some scraps of knowledge in here that you might find useful. I think I'll do a blog focused solely on World-Building next, which will go more into depth than my previous blog that just touched upon it very generally. Thanks for reading,
~SilentBelle
Nice blog! Love learning about writing more than anything I've ever really learned. I mean I've been jotting down ideas in my head since I was a kid maybe I shoulda tried it sooner. Good advice, as always. Looking forward to reading your world-building blog it'll def help with my new story!
1324047 Your avatar and name are hilarious and awesome!
Very helpful. It was a little messy, as you said, but I understand the feeling, when you try to reason something new out on the spot. Thinking about the conflict I had in mind now, I feel like it'll all work out.
1324720 Yeah, I think the world-building one should be far cleaner. Since world-building is something I have given a lot of thought in my spare time. I'm glad you found it useful though.
This is very helpful! Although it didn't seem messy to me.
Thanks for posting this. Constructing believable, natural conflicts in my stories is one of my biggest weaknesses (though it sits atop a long, disheartening list), and it bothers me to no end.
That one and "getting the emotions to feel right". Moments that I want to be
end up just being 
Sigh. Someday. Until then, I'll keep reading blogs that you and others post up to try to figure out why this (horse)wording thing is just so darn elusive to me.
But thanks again, and take my follow. 