Conflict and how to resolve it

Hi all, as promised this is the first of the backup articles I'll be posting. Each one will be a summary of the theme we cover each week. Today's deals with conflict.

Briefly, there are two kinds of conflict, outer and inner – often called external and internal.

External conflict
This deals with tricky situations your character has to contend with. He or she may be under attack, from one or more persons (or entities). The conflict may even involve natural phenomena: an earthquake, a storm, a tsunami, a cosmic upheaval, a plague. Whatever the cause, your character has to battle it. The external conflict prevents your character from having an easy life.

But an easy life does not an exciting story make.

Internal conflict
This takes place in the mind of your character. He or she is torn by great emotions: fear, love, hatred, jealousy, envy, a thirst for vengeance, bitterness. Anything that makes the heart beat faster.

The heart is the strongest muscle in the body: it has to pump blood to every extremity and do it 24/7.

By tradition we believe the heart is the seat of the emotions. If your story doesn't have a heart it won't tug at the heartstrings of your reader.

What's more powerful, external or internal conflict?
Internal wins out every time. All the great people of history were driven by strong emotion: the Roman emperors, the great painters, the philosophers, the great writers, the great physicists and biologists, the saints, the soldiers, the good and the bad.

Want, the most powerful emotion of all
Look at every man, woman and child on the planet and note what all have in common. We all want something; it's what keeps us going. The hungry child wants food. The lonely man and woman want love. The poor boy wants a job, money, prospects. The rich man wants even more money. The party girl with 150 pairs of shoes wants 300 pairs.

We all want (wish for, desire, yearn for, long for) something we haven't got. It's what makes us human.

That's why you can't go wrong when you create a great need for your character. What does he or she want from life? What are the chances of getting or achieving that something?

Something gets in the way
Every ambition can be thwarted. There's always the possibility that something will get in the way of your character's need or desire. In every great story something will always go wrong.