Wattpad brings you a guest post from whikerms, author of the fantasy adventure Majestic Shadows: The Pillar of Smoke:
“In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
― Margaret Atwood
We can’t live without water. It’s a simple fact that we don’t need to read in textbooks to understand. We become thirsty and so we drink. It comes natural. Writing a story, too, has essential elements that keep it alive, and conflict is one of them. Almost every story needs conflict to thrive.
With every rule there are exceptions. Great authors in the past have written stories lacking conflict that have become masterpieces. Yet in real life we encounter conflict in everything we do (yes, even Buddhist monks). What should I wear today? Should I choose a bagel or banana for breakfast? Should I sleep in past nine or wake up early to beat traffic? I almost always go with sleeping in. And those are conflicts before we’re even out the door.
In everything we do, we encounter struggle. In my book, a sword-and-stone adventure story called Majestic Shadows: The Pillar of Smoke, the main antagonist, Malachi, is exiled from his homeland for murdering seven people. Why? His daughter’s experimentation with an ancient device caused her to disappear from her world, and Malachi’s victims had information to lead to his daughter’s whereabouts. His path surely will be plagued with conflict as he seeks revenge on those who exiled him.
Conflicts are necessary to achieve character resolutions. The ending of a book is bittersweet because we’ve invested time in connecting with these characters and watching them at their highest and lowest points until the end. We want to turn the page not to get the book over with, but to see how they overcome conflicts. What makes your main character tick? What are her pet peeves? What’s her worst fear? How does he handle disappointment? Does he cry? Does he get angry?
We’re all driven by a myriad of motivations and fears and dreams. Some of us want to fulfill our parents’ expectations. Others just want to escape reality and immerse themselves into a book. It’s the same for stories. The keys to conflict are the barriers that exist between where your character is in one point in time and where they will be when they reach a resolution.
Margaret Atwood was right. A story should follow a twisty road, whether it’s through a fantastical land full of orcs and dwarves or an encounter with the five people a man meets in Heaven. Conflict shows us who a character really is when everything is stripped away. It shows the reader a character’s ups and downs, their skeletons and their best characteristics.
A story’s conflict should keep us up at night. It should make us grateful that we can be a silent witness to what is happening in someone’s life from the safety of the page (or of course the Wattpad app on a mobile device).
Read whikerm’s stories on Wattpad!