Conflict in Writing: External and Internal

Many years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Margaret Atwood.  After a few opening remarks, she told us she was going to share the secret of writing. Atwood leaned into the microphone and whispered loudly, “conflict.”

Conflict is the engine, the beating heart, the whatever-cliché-you-want-to-use core of every story. There is no story without conflict. We writers all know that, of course. But, as with so many things in life, knowing it and doing it are two different things that often have a yawning gap between them. Since many of us spend our personal lives running from conflict, it’s difficult to torture our characters by piling it on.

Here’s a tip that might help: think of conflict in your characters as external and internal.

Internal conflicts are the thoughts and emotions that swirl in our heads all day, every day, the crap we practice meditation to silence. The I’m not good enough, I wonder what he thinks of me, I’m can’t do it because I’m alone, I have to be perfect, etc., etc., whatever your character’s fun flavor of internal torture might be.

And external conflict is the obstacles we face as we navigate through life.  The job we lose, the illness we contract, the wife who leaves us, the friend who betrays us, and so on and so forth.

Thinking of conflict in these two ways always helps me. And there’s more. Because internal conflict and external conflict influence and affect each other, like energy swirling in a figure eight. So, the woman plagued by self-deprecatory thoughts (internal conflict) is so nervous she flubs a work assignment and loses her job (external conflict).  Or, the brash young wunderkind who’s cutting a swath through his local social scene gets in a car accident (external conflict) so he can no longer go out and this causes him to get depressed (internal conflict).

There’s tons more I could say about conflict, including the simple way to figure it out but I’ll save that for next time. And meanwhile, start thinking about conflict in terms of inner and outer and see if it doesn’t help you pile it on your character.