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mbarkerWriting Excuses 13.6: External Conflicts for Characters
From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/02/11/13-6-external-conflicts-for-characters/
Key points: External conflicts, aka person versus nature? Disasters. Anything outside the character that gets in their path. Make it personal, make the world provide conflicts for the characters. Think about how the person connects to their environment. Threaten things that main character cares about. Not just disasters, smaller stories, also, can have external conflicts. Acne, broken elevators, a food shortage. Try crossing two conflicts and see what happens. Mix an overarching conflict with day-to-day conflicts. Look at the cracks between how society labels a character and how they identify themselves.
( And then the volcano erupted... )
[Brandon] Awesome. Like I said, I think that we could probably do…
[Mary] An entire…
[Brandon] An entire season ongoing against your society, but we're going to have to end here. I'm going to give us some homework. This homework kind of traces back to one time Mary was on the podcast early… One of your early appearances, you talked about this yes-but, no-and method of plotting. Which is where you start with a person having a problem, you ask if they solve it. You answer it yes, but you add something on top of them. If you answer it no, you add something else on top of them. I always had just heard this called break things.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] So, I'm going to go back to the more simple version of the homework, which is you have a character. Start their day, and have things start breaking. Everything around them breaks. It can be literal. The coffee pot can just… The copy machine doesn't work. It can be figurative. Stuff goes wrong, and you don't fix any of it. It's… A lot of times, in stories, it's… You… A problem comes up, we fix that, a problem comes up, we fix that problem, problem comes up, we fix that. In this story, you're not going to do that. You're going to have things just constantly keep breaking, until the end, however you decide to end it.
[Mary] I have had that day.
[Laughter]
[Amal] So say we all.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/02/11/13-6-external-conflicts-for-characters/
Key points: External conflicts, aka person versus nature? Disasters. Anything outside the character that gets in their path. Make it personal, make the world provide conflicts for the characters. Think about how the person connects to their environment. Threaten things that main character cares about. Not just disasters, smaller stories, also, can have external conflicts. Acne, broken elevators, a food shortage. Try crossing two conflicts and see what happens. Mix an overarching conflict with day-to-day conflicts. Look at the cracks between how society labels a character and how they identify themselves.
( And then the volcano erupted... )
[Brandon] Awesome. Like I said, I think that we could probably do…
[Mary] An entire…
[Brandon] An entire season ongoing against your society, but we're going to have to end here. I'm going to give us some homework. This homework kind of traces back to one time Mary was on the podcast early… One of your early appearances, you talked about this yes-but, no-and method of plotting. Which is where you start with a person having a problem, you ask if they solve it. You answer it yes, but you add something on top of them. If you answer it no, you add something else on top of them. I always had just heard this called break things.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] So, I'm going to go back to the more simple version of the homework, which is you have a character. Start their day, and have things start breaking. Everything around them breaks. It can be literal. The coffee pot can just… The copy machine doesn't work. It can be figurative. Stuff goes wrong, and you don't fix any of it. It's… A lot of times, in stories, it's… You… A problem comes up, we fix that, a problem comes up, we fix that problem, problem comes up, we fix that. In this story, you're not going to do that. You're going to have things just constantly keep breaking, until the end, however you decide to end it.
[Mary] I have had that day.
[Laughter]
[Amal] So say we all.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
