Creating Unforgettable Characters, Part 5 Conflict

Conflict.

In real life, most people try to avoid it, but a story without conflict is like a latte without coffee. In fact, if your story has no conflict, you haven’t got a story.

Let’s first look at conflict from a big picture view: external and internal.

External conflict comes from outside your character—the people, circumstances, or forces of nature your protagonist faces in reaching the story goal.

Internal conflict comes from within your character. Fears, lack of confidence, false beliefs, and more that hinder your character reaching the goal. Quite often, the internal struggle isn’t apparent to your character until later in the story.

The conflicts (external or internal) must be plausible and legitimate, not contrived. Think about your favorite novels. Can you identify the external conflict of the protagonist? The internal?

Your character’s conflicts create a journey for her. As your story progresses, so must the conflict. Take the character from point A to point B to point C and so on, meeting increasingly difficult obstacles along the way.

Each obstacle brings a setback or a victory and change in your character for good or for bad. If she is the same in the end as she was in the beginning, she comes off as flat and unmemorable. And dare I say it, the reader might come away from the book disappointed.

Many stories end happy—the conflict meets a positive outcome when the protagonist triumphs. But we all cope with struggles differently and not everyone comes through life’s experiences a better person. Wherever your character ends up, it should be believable and consistent with the rest of the story.

Throughout this series on unforgettable characters, I’ve pointed out many potential areas to create conflict. I hope you’ll consider them for your WIP.

For more on conflict, read my blog post “How to Review Your Story Scenes for Conflict”

Take your characters on a journey of conflict.

Backstory

What is backstory? In a nutshell, backstory is our character’s history.

Our family and life experiences affect who we are. Our fictional characters are no different. You may have birthed them today as full-grown adults, but they still have a mother and father. They grew up and had experiences that play into who they are in your story today.

Is your antagonist a paraplegic? From birth or an accident? How does it affect his/her behavior, life outlook, and mental attitude?

Is your protagonist a radical feminist? Who are the people who influenced her beliefs? Was her grandmother a 1960s hippy who reveled in her freedom and taught her granddaughter to do the same? Or was she a hard-working, degreed single woman who was always passed over for promotions that went to less qualified men?

Do you see how these pieces of character history can impact your story characters’ reactions to the obstacles they face along the way?

What of your character’s history is important to your story?

Ask yourself questions about each major character until you discover all you need to know about them. You may also want to do this to a certain degree with your supporting (minor) characters.

Like the research you may do for your story, you will not reveal all that history to the reader. But it will help you recognize when your story people act out of character. It also helps you know how to show that character acting abnormally when the plot calls for it.

Revealing these tidbits gives your reader insight into why the character behaves the way he/she does and allows your reader to create an emotional connection to your story characters. How much you reveal is up to you, but like the physical characteristics, you will reveal them a little at a time.

As I discussed in part one, I recommend you use a Character Profile to keep track of your story people.

Errors with Backstory

Many new writers make two major errors with backstory: they put it in chapter one and they use too much at a time.

Backstory doesn’t belong in chapter one! And when you do reveal it, reveal only as much as necessary at that point in the story.

Here’s an example for a first revelation:

Danny cringed as he remembered the horrendous head-on collision with a semi that left him a paraplegic.

In a later chapter, you can reveal more to give greater depth to the character’s struggle:

If only he’d stopped for the night instead of pushing himself to finish that fourteen-hour drive to Mom and Dad’s house. A ghost pain shot through his left leg as he relived the agony of being crushed against the dash.

Backstory adds depth to your characters and your novel. Use it wisely.

This wraps up my series on unforgettable characters. I hope you’ve found it useful. For a pdf of this entire series, click here.

Debra L. Butterfield © 2019