If you’re anything like me and avoid conflict like it’s your career, you may have also struggled with creating real, genuine conflict in your fiction. I certainly have. Luckily for us, fiction is not real life.

How do you develop a compelling, authentic conflict in your fiction that has actual tension in it? I’m going to give you four of my favorite strategies.

I have this tattoo. Don’t get me wrong—I like it, a lot. But it’s about…twice as big as I wanted it. 

When the tattoo artist drew an outline of it on my arm with magic marker first, it had honestly looked a little big, but I hadn’t wanted to be a difficult client, so I heard myself saying, “Looks great!” 

45 minutes later I took a photo of it and sent it to my husband, who wrote back, “That is not small.” 

I was so conflict avoidant…I got a tattoo bigger than what I wanted. 

Conflict in life is one thing. 

Conflict in fiction is another: it really can’t be avoided, not even with an oversized tattoo. If you avoid conflict in fiction, your story just…well, stinks. 

This is because, in storytelling, conflict is the driving force of narrative. It’s the thing that makes it a story at all. If everything is great and peaceful, we have no story. 

Let me very briefly explain why: a story is a shift in perspective. 

That’s it. 

Someone changes their take on things. 

And to change your take on things, you need to struggle. We don’t come to new realizations when things are easy and everything is going great. We come upon hard won truths when we are forced to examine our current way of looking at the world, and the thing that forces us to do that is: you guessed it, conflict. 

Internal or external, both are good, but we want conflict. 

A person that struggles—the stuff getting in between point A and point B for your protagonist—is conflict. 

Another word for it is tension, or friction. Sometimes I say tension. 

Use whatever word you like, but we want things, not totally content and harmonious, at least not for long.

So how do we create conflict? 

Tip #1: Give your protagonist a compelling want

I tell the writers I work with—at the beginning of any story, your main character, or protagonist, needs to want something. 

It should be something they can’t easily get. It can be big or small. 

An example of a big want with high stakes is Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain. 

At the beginning of that story, the protagonists, a group of scientists, want to stop an alien virus from infecting and killing the world’s population. 

Saving the world: that’s pretty big want with some pretty terrible consequences, right? 

But it doesn’t always have to be on such a grand scale. 

Stephen King says that just making your character crave a cigarette is enough. 

Here’s the key: it should be something they can’t easily get. 

Figure out what your protagonist cares the most about in this moment that you’re opening the story—is it a glass of water? Chocolate? The love of a missing father? 

Then, watch what they do when they can’t easily get it. 

Tip #2: Be mean

I know, we’re all nice people. Truly, writers are so kind, I’m constantly astonished by how kind the writers in my program are to each other. It gives me hope for humanity. 

But for conflict to be compelling, you’re going to want to make things difficult for your main character.

Suffering—or genuine struggle, if you prefer to think about it that way—is at the core of a meaningful perspective shift, which is what we’re trying to lead our main character to.

So if you’re not making things difficult enough for your characters to change, any change you impose on them won’t feel earned. 

I think of it kind of like parenting…if my son is struggling to write a word, like PIG, and I see him about to write the G backwards, I may be tempted to reach out and help him. 

But I have to resist. Because whether he does it correctly or not, he has to do it on his own or he won’t learn. 

This may sound like a silly illustration, but it is genuinely hard for me not to help him when I know I can. 

The same is true for putting on his shoes, or trying to open a package of something when he insists on doing it himself. 

In order for your characters to grow, they’re going to have to hit some rough patches. And not fake rough patches. Real rough patches. 

How can you tell the difference? 

For me, I know that I have to be genuinely afraid for them. 

I have to be unsure that even I, as the author, will be able to fix things for them. 

That’s how I know it’s real. 

Tip #3: Give them a tough choice

This tip can be really helpful especially if you are trying to ramp up both external and internal conflict. 

The act of making a difficult choice is internal, but usually with external consequences, so it’s a simple yet extremely effective way of tying the two together. 

Giving a character a tough choice can demonstrate what their values are as they debate what to do, or can show how resourceful or determined they are if they try to figure out a way out of their sticky situation. 

But even if they can’t, that choice can also show how they’ve grown from the beginning of your story. 

Let’s take one of the greats as an example: Shakespeare. 

Hamlet is a play that’s all about one guy who can’t make a choice—whether or not to avenge the murder of his father at the hands of his own uncle. The ramifications of not wanting to make a choice get really bad.  

So what’s a tough choice your character can struggle to make—and what consequences can flow from that choice, even if they wind up refusing to make it? 

Finally, my last tip for you is to…

Tip #4: Explore different ways of achieving your protagonist’s goal

If you have more than one character who wants the same thing, a great way to ramp up tension and generate conflict is to have them disagree, or have the ways in which they’re going about it conflict with each other. 

Remember the scientists in The Andromeda Strain? 

In that book, the scientists all want to save the world from a destructive virus, but they disagree on how to do it: one scientist thinks a universal antibiotic might work but another tries to stop him. 

They also debate on whether they should let a nuclear bomb destroy their facility to stop a worldwide outbreak. 

These clashes make for compelling conflict as the scientists have to figure out what they should do and try different ways to achieve their goals. 

Ready to write your book?

If you made it this far, I’m guessing that you are writing a book, or want to write a book. 

If so, I want to talk to you. 

When I’m not writing, my mission in life is to help talented writers write their dream books. I love it. I live for it. 

Because before I published my novels, I first had to figure out how to write one. It wasn't easy because none of the writing classes I was taking showed me how to actually write a novel.

Not until I had a newborn and only a couple of hours to write did I come up with a process. The process worked. I wrote my entire novel during my 8-week maternity leave.

Now, I teach it in my program the Book Incubator and it works for dozens of other writers. 

If you're curious to know more, I have a free video walking you through my exact process for writing a book. You can get it by clicking below and answering two questions to apply to the program.

You get the video whether you join or not—no pressure to enroll. 

Just click below to tell me a little bit about you and your book—you can fill out a form online. I’m so excited to hear from you!

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