Conflict Is the Very Heart and Soul of Drama

Conflict lies at the heart of all effective stories.

Every good story requires three basic conflicts: the hero’s internal flaw, an antagonist, and an external threat to the hero. These all need to be appropriate, balanced, believable, and capable of contributing to a satisfactory resolution. Ineffectiveness in these elements of conflict is one of the biggest problems storytellers have. That ineffectiveness can be the result of many things:

• from naiveté (it’s all good) to cynicism (it’s all bad)
• from making it too hard on the hero to not hard enough
• from an ineffective antagonist to one who overpowers the story
• from letting your message overpower the story to having no message at all
• from inappropriately mixing one’s personal problems with the hero’s to a lack of any believable human relevance
• from focusing on the hero’s personal conflict to the exclusion of its universality, or vice versa
• plus many more individually unique barriers to building great conflict

There are two essential qualities of good stories: familiarity and surprise. The clever writer will use universally familiar concepts and principles (mythic themes, archetypes, and imagery) and give them a unique, surprising spin to entertain and enlighten us anew with the universal truths around which wonder and recognition circle in delight.

Three must-have aspects of good stories are sympathy, danger, and salvation. We must have sympathy for and interest in the protagonist; the protagonist must be placed in danger; there must be some sort of salvation, direct or implied, for a satisfactory (not necessarily happy) resolution.

You must never make it easy for your protagonist. Barriers, setbacks, detours, and delays are the stuff of drama. Selecting and developing effective conflict requires knowledge of the so-called Dark Side – all that which stands in the way of their desires and fulfilment.

(…) The Dark Side is there in comedies: Dr. Evil and Mini-Me in AUSTIN POWERS, Cold War cartoon spies Boris and Natasha in the BULLWINKLE TV series, and Cruella DeVil of Dalmatian Deviousness, Evil may not always pay, but sometimes it can be awfully funny.

Stories most popular with children have some seriously evil villains and deadly dangerous situations: HARRY POTTER, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, STARWARS. Developing young minds require a sense of meaning, self-importance, and optimism; the way these heroes deal with the Dark Side offers insight and encouragement for the dangers inherent in any child’s existence.

In romance stories the Dark Side is whatever comes between lovers, be it family feuds in ROMEO AND JULIET, 19th-century English societal barriers in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, or selfish indecisiveness in MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING.

Documentaries are only interesting and effective if there is an us-against-them element. Whether “them” is the environment, a bureaucracy, a disease, or a situation, you will only engage our interest and stir our actions if you show us conflict and choices.

Fairy tales, comedy, romantic comedy, drama, action-adventure, horror, tragedy, historical fiction, documentaries… all need worthy opponents, dangers to heroines, and the opportunity for your audience to observe and experience transformation as the story moves through conflict to resolution. No matter the medium – from a theatrical blockbuster to a YouTube short, a massively multiplayer online game, a torrid romance novel – without vivid and believable antagonists and threatening situations, there can be no heroics (whether of the heart or the sword), and hence no real story.

Conflict is the very heart and soul of drama, and the Dark Side offers worlds of conflict.

From the Introduction to Pamela Jaye Smith The Power of the Dark Side.