Conflict in Storytelling: Why Your Story Needs More Than One Kind

Without conflict, there is no story. This is not an opinion — it is a structural fact. Story is movement, and movement requires force, and force requires opposing forces. Even the quietest, most uneventful piece of literary fiction contains conflict somewhere, even if it is entirely internal, even if nothing anyone would call dramatic ever happens on the page.

The writing guides that list the four or five types of conflict — person versus person, versus nature, versus society, versus self — are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They tend to present these types as separate options rather than layers that the best stories use simultaneously. Understanding not just what each type is, but how they interact, is where conflict becomes craft.

External Conflict: The Surface of the Story

External conflict is what the story appears to be about. Two people want the same thing. A character is in danger. A social system is preventing someone from getting what they need. These are the visible mechanics of the narrative, the events that create urgency and forward movement.

External conflict is necessary — without it, a story has nothing to show, only things to say — but it is rarely sufficient on its own. A story of pure external conflict, with no internal dimension, can be gripping on first read and completely hollow on reflection. Action movies work this way, and that is fine for action movies. Literary fiction almost always needs more.

The function of external conflict in literary fiction is to create the conditions for internal conflict to become visible. The plot puts the character under enough pressure that who they really are — their fears, their contradictions, their genuine values — is forced to the surface. The external situation is the fire. The internal conflict is what the fire reveals.

Internal Conflict: Where Stories Live

Internal conflict is what the story is really about. A character wants two incompatible things. A character believes something that their circumstances are forcing them to question. A character knows the right thing to do and cannot bring themselves to do it, or knows the wrong thing and does it anyway.

In "Crime and Punishment," the external conflict — Raskolnikov has committed murder and the police are closing in — is the engine that drives the plot. But the story's meaning lives in the internal conflict: he committed the murder to test a theory about special people who are above ordinary morality, and the murder has destroyed the theory along with his ability to function as a human being. The external and internal conflicts are inseparable — the external creates the conditions for the internal to become unbearable.

In Alice Munro's "Runaway," the external conflict is minimal — a young woman considers leaving her husband, almost does, and goes back. The internal conflict is immense: the competing claims of freedom and security, the desire to escape and the terror of what escaping means, the way the women in her life represent different paths she might take. The small external event carries the weight of an enormous interior drama.

The Conflict Within Values

One of the most interesting forms of internal conflict — and the one that produces some of the richest fiction — is when a character's own values are in conflict with each other. Not a conflict between their good values and their bad impulses. A conflict between two things they genuinely and rightly believe in.

A doctor who believes in both truth and compassion has to decide whether to tell a patient something that is honest but devastating. Both truth and compassion are real values. Neither is wrong. The choice is tragic precisely because something good must be sacrificed for something else that is also good.

Sophie's Choice is the extreme version of this — an impossible dilemma between two things of equal and absolute value. But the principle operates in less extreme forms throughout literary fiction. A parent who values both honesty with their children and protecting them from pain. A person who believes in both personal loyalty and institutional accountability. The conflict between values is the territory where moral fiction — fiction that engages seriously with how to live — gets its material.

Conflict Between Character and Society

When a character's wants or values clash with the world they are embedded in, the conflict has a particular quality. The character is not just fighting another person — they are fighting a set of norms, expectations, structures that have collective force. This conflict is often more oppressive than person-versus-person because it is diffuse. You cannot defeat it by winning a single confrontation.

Emma Bovary's conflict with provincial society — her desire for romance and glamour and a life bigger than the one she was born into — cannot be resolved by any single action because the society she is fighting is everywhere and in her too. She has absorbed its values even as she rebels against them. That doubling — the external constraint and its internal echo — is what makes the conflict tragic.

Person-versus-society conflict is particularly rich in fiction that deals with race, class, gender, or sexuality — when what a character naturally is comes into collision with what the surrounding world permits or acknowledges. Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison — these writers use the conflict between individual consciousness and social structure as the central engine of their fiction.

Layering Conflicts in Your Own Work

When a story is not working, check the layers. A story with only external conflict often feels shallow — things happen but nothing means anything. A story with only internal conflict often feels static — nothing changes, nothing happens, it is all internal weather. The combination of both, with the external driving the internal and the internal giving the external its significance, is where most successful fiction operates.

Ask three questions about your story: What is your character fighting against in the world? What are they fighting against in themselves? And what do those two conflicts have to do with each other? If they are genuinely connected — if the external battle reflects or amplifies the internal one — you probably have a story. If they are separate — interesting external events happening to a character with a different set of internal concerns — you may need to revise until they converge.

More narrative technique guides in our writing and fiction blog.