Being a Better Writer: Why Stories Need Conflict · 10:58pm Nov 2nd, 2020
Hello readers! Before we dive into today’s (somewhat delayed) Being a Better Writer post, I have an urgent PSA for all of you residing in the United States.
Go VOTE. Election day is November 3rd, 2020—which should be a national holiday, and the fact that it isn’t tells us a lot about what the government thinks about our involvement in matters. Look up all your candidates. Study them. Learn about them. Don’t just watch their ads and a three second clip of the “News” and decide you’re good. Do some digging. Read about tbe results of their policies and approached. If you’re religious, pray for some guidance. Whatever means available to you, make use of them to learn about the candidates running for all the various positions you’ll be voting on, and then go out and vote.
Yes, I know this year has made it a mess. Voter suppression has been pretty flagrant and open, as has complete ignorance of the current pandemic sweeping the nation. Keep that in mind when you vote too, or rather when you’re looking at candidates. If you’re in one of those counties where for “safety reasons” five polling places were reduced to one, consider who made that decision, how safe it really is, and whether or not you want someone with the governmental mindset of UNSEC in office again.
All right. PSA over. But it was an important one. And it’s probably going to be scrutinized by the ad-checkers, or even demonized by a few people who take issue with it.
Whatever. Go. Vote. Don’t let anyone stop you. Unless, you know, you’re not registered, in which case you should regretfully acknowledge that you didn’t prep for this one. But on the bright side, you’ll most likely have four years to correct that mistake.
Now, with that PSA said, let’s move onto today’s BaBW post! Which is an interesting one! Today’s topic was posed by a reader after they encountered a post on a writing forum where the OP (original poster, for those of you not familiar with internet parlance) argued that stories did not need conflict to be stories, and in fact (IIRC) that whole genres such as ‘slice of life’ shouldn’t have them. The reader posted here asking if that was or wasn’t possible (suspecting, again if I recall correctly, that it wasn’t) and asking me to do a bit on it.
Well, reader, here you are! And let me clear this up immediately, and with a declarative statement:
A story without a conflict is not a story, but merely a series of words laying out a disconnected summary, lacking events.
For just a second, I was worried that this was a response to my topic suggestion, considering the similarities. That's clearly not the case after reading through it, at least. I hope mine is still on the list, but I did get a partial answer to my question as it is: conflict, as you've presented and defined it, almost certainly exists in the stories that I have seen criticized for lacking it; the problem that I've noted probably lies either in the definitions used or the mindset/biases of the critics.
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I think that it actually was, at least, indirectly associated with it. Your suggestion became a note on the list of "Why stories need conflict" and then from there mixed with writing forum discussions and other questions I've received on the topic. With every question, the response kind of evolves, and yes, I didn't directly address some of the subsections of your question (and in fact, just added one of them to the list as its own topic).
Still, I hope it was a helpful post regardless!
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Heh. Maybe be careful about taking my suggestion's components too literally; for clarity's sake, it's probably for the best that you happened to have broken it up. Now, what's left of it is more likely to be what I'm really curious about. As such, yeah, definitely a helpful post for that and I appreciate knowing that my sanity is still intact when I come up against this "X story didn't have conflict" condemnation in the wild. Because, I reasoned, if a story must have conflict and I'm pretty certain something that had been condemned is a story, how could it not have conflict? One of us must be wrong. Cases where I clearly can identify conflict in the condemned material pose another puzzle—how did this misapplication of the idea that a story must have conflict get to be as common as it is?
I look forward to it! As I've said, I think it'll be easier to identify/tackle whatever it was that I didn't have the words to succinctly describe in my original question/suggestion now that you've discussed forms of conflict in a separate post.