Challenge Your Characters

Conflict is the one and only thing that truly reveals character. We go about our daily lives taking the path of least resistance. We smile pretty to each other and don't always say what we think or act as we wish we could.

But put us under pressure, and what happens? Ever have an argument with your spouse and say things you never intended to? Ever hear of a man who lost his job committing suicide? On the other hand, how about a child raised in poverty becoming a Congressman? Put a person in a conflict-filled situation, and his character is revealed.

Let's say there's a man you work with who seems to be a loner who doesn't care much about other people. Now let's say the building catches fire. He pulls out half a dozen people who would have died of smoke inhalation, sustaining third degree burns to do it.

What if that external event had never occurred? You might have gone another ten years and never been aware of that man's depth of character. In your books, you must create that burning building. Think about it: If not for the Civil War, would we ever have known just how resilient Scarlett O'Hara really was?

In essence, we have to push our characters to the wall to force them to show on the outside the kinds of people they are on the inside.

Kinds of Conflict

External conflict is the situation that your characters are forced into. It resides outside them, beyond their control. It's the set of problems your characters have to solve to achieve their goals and move the plot from point A to point Z. External conflict is a tornado picking up Dorothy's house and dropping it in Oz.

Internal conflict is the conflict that a character brings to a story, something inside him that has yet to be resolved. Frequently it's something that he doesn't even realize is there, but for whatever reason, he has never confronted it. Just as the external conflict will need to be resolved, so must the internal conflict. It's the thing your character has to learn before he can find true happiness. When the internal conflict is resolved, that's the evidence that your character has grown. Internal conflict is the dissatisfaction Dorothy feels inside, her sense that there's a better world outside of her mundane existence.