Conflict and Types of Conflict

Dramatic Conflict In Your Story

An important aspect to creating DRAMATIC CONFLICT for your screenwriting is to present a
character, situation or belief that prevents the main character from achieving their goal.
Pretty simple stuff.
Let’s say your main character wants to cross the street to get to the dry cleaning store before
it closes. Just as they approach the lights, they turn red. And stay red for at least two three
minutes. You’ve just created conflict, right?

Let’s look at three key types of conflict:

1) NUISANCE
This is an inconvenience to the main character. Something that temporarily slows them down
without a major impact on the main character or the story. Although technically a
nuisance does generate conflict, it’s boring and lacks real consequence. There are two
possible outcomes. in this scenario. They either make it across the street just in time or
they’re too late and must return the next day. Perhaps the lights change red and they run
across the street regardless. Pretty exciting stuff! The type of scenes brilliant dramas are
made of. But do we really care? Do we want to keep watching? Probably not.

2) OBSTACLE
Let’s ramp things up a bit by creating a real obstacle for the main character. Something of a
larger scale that will generate more than a sigh. We’ll raise the level of conflict by making the
it more insurmountable. How about if a truck breaks down at the crosswalk so the main
character can’t see the walk sign and cross, thereby increasing the probability of not getting
to the store before closing time. They can’t jaywalk because they can’t see the cars in the
opposite direction. If they try to run against red lights, they could get hit by a car, or worse
still, get a ticket. Now you’re really getting the hang of this dramatic device called conflict.
The outcome could still go either way for the main character. But do we really care and want
to keep watching? Maybe for another minute. The overall story dynamics don’t really change.
The main character will eventually get to the dry cleaners.

3) OPPOSITION
This is the highest level of dramatic conflict. The main character faces a stronger and
seemingly insurmountable barrier to their goal with added danger. Let’s add some context.
The main character HAS to get to the dry cleaning store across the street because he has
just found out his brother who runs the store has a bomb planted behind a steam press that
will go off on thirty seconds. Now we’ve raised the emotional stakes so we’re really invested
in the character. We feel something and are concerned about the outcome. The outcome
literally is a matter of life or death.
How about this? The lights are about to change green, but the person who planted the bomb
is his brother’s arch enemy and tells the main character that if he takes one step he’ll shoot
him point blank. What should the main character do? Whose life is more important; his
brother’s or his own?

Now we have a DILEMMA. If the main character runs, he risks getting shot dead. If he does
nothing, his brother will die in an explosion. Both choices are terrible. The outcome could still
go either way in terms of whether the main character will cross the street in time, but now we
have context. We feel something and want to keep watching.
This is the difference between adding artificial barriers to your character’s goal and adding
real contextual conflict.

Types of Conflict

Conflict is defined as the act of two characters (or entities) with oppositional viewpoints
challenging each other until one of them ostensibly wins by the end of the story. They may
also both lose or both win. Sometimes, it’s more about the struggle of trying to achieve a
result.
It is the backbone of drama because it drives the narrative dynamics of a story while we learn
more about what motivates each character to make their respective choices and take
definitive actions. Conflict creates tension, suspense, excitement, and activates both
characters and audiences as they track who has the upper hand at various stages in the
story.
Conflict also explores and leaves a thematic residue inviting audiences to discuss the plot
and final outcome of the story in relation to how it aligns with their personal moral and ethical
codes.
Conflict also ranges in intensity from the high-stakes survivalist battle to save the world in
Alien and World War Z to the subtle, percolating angst in relationship canvases like Tár. Even
sports movies like Creed or King Richard require thematic substance to supplement the
white-knuckle action on screen.

Your screenplay needs layers of conflict.

When conflict is only addressed at the scene level, the screenplay can feel sort of thin. Like
there’s no weight or consequence or bigger meaning to what’s going on.
And a screenplay full of surface-level conflict can be tedious to read. (Kind of like when your
couple friends bicker in front of you. You know there’s nothing getting solved or resolved and
it’s unclear why the conversation matters enough to keep going on about.)
But that’s not to say there’s no place for scene-level or surface-type conflict. Your
screenplay absolutely needs it. It’s just that you need other layers of conflict too, and those
conflicts need to connect in order to create meaning (and not fall flat).
So what types of conflict does your screenplay need?

1. Foundational conflict
This is really the main conflict that the story is built on. When you describe your story as
“someone wants something and goes after it against strong opposition,” the main conflict is
the protagonist going after something vs. the opposition that’s stopping him or her.
Act 1 establishes that conflict, Act 2 escalates it, and Act 3 resolves it. That’s the framework
for a screenplay.
And we know that main conflict is the thread that runs through the whole story. Or the
throughline, as we often say. It connects everything, holds the story together.
In planning the story, we want to think about what the protagonist is doing in pursuit of their
goal and what the antagonist is doing in opposition to that. This might sound basic but it can
be easier said than done. Why? Because the protagonist and antagonist may not face off in
scenes together. So you’ll need to think about this foundational conflict from a big-picture
point of view and consider what each side is doing in the grand scheme of things (and how
we see that).

2. Conflict from supporting characters

Conflict can and should also come from supporting characters. You want to create some kind
of conflict in every relationship the main character has.
If you think of the conflict in your story as a spectrum, at the far extreme end of it is the main
antagonist – that’s the person or entity that’s really in direct opposition or that’s most
actively stopping your protagonist from achieving their goal in the big picture. But there are
other forces that fall elsewhere on the spectrum.
Supporting characters may not be actively working against your protagonist, but because
they have their own desires and agendas, their actions cause conflict – either external or
internal – for your protagonist. So the conflict supporting characters cause for your
protagonist might be somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, more like friction in the
protagonist’s life.
But that doesn’t make it any less important. You want the conflicts in the screenplay to hit
different levels of intensity. Constant high-intensity conflict would be exhausting, but hitting
one middle-range intensity note would get boring. We want variety.
3. Internal conflict
A character’s deepest fears can be sharpened and wielded as a weapon for the internal
conflict in a screenplay. This emotion can be the engine that drives the entire plot and every
scene. Synecdoche, New York is a great example of this.
Really the focus of any internal conflict is going to relate to the character arc. The internal
struggle demonstrates the growth we see in the protagonist, and the story should maintain a
focus on one type of growth, one transformational experience. (Otherwise the story feels
scattered and loses meaning.)
In terms of showing internal conflict or a character arc happening… in a movie you have to
find a way to externalize it. Often that happens in relation to other characters, but not
always.
You can think about how situations, plot events, and other characters challenge the inner
wound or deficit or fear your character has, which helps force their growth or change in this
story.

4. Situational conflict
And finally we come back around to the kind of conflict we started with.
You can think of situational conflict as the obstacles a character runs into. It’s the traffic jam
on the way to the airport to get the girl. Or the food poisoning the bridal party gets on the
day of the dress fittings.
Situational conflict (which is the kind of conflict our writer friend added to his screenplay in
order to address the “lacks conflict” note) is important too. It adds variety and layers to the
conflict in the script. It makes scenes entertaining.
We just want to make sure it’s not the only kind of conflict in the script. And, if you receive
feedback about needing more conflict, let’s start with the foundational conflict and make
sure that’s in place before we go building all of the other conflicts on top of it.

Give us all the conflicts

“Where is the conflict coming from?” is one of the most important questions you can ask
when planning and writing your screenplay.
What the protagonist is doing to get what they want, and what the antagonist is doing to
oppose it is vital – but it’s not the only type of conflict you’ll need in the script to keep us
engaged and entertained on every page.
It’s important to think about what other sources of conflict can help create immediate,
tangible conflict. But, again, this can’t be the only type of conflict or your screenplay will end
up feeling like it never goes deeper than the surface level.
We want to cover the spectrum and deliver a variety of conflicts, layered and woven together
throughout the screenplay.