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The plot of a story is more interesting and exciting if the characters have something to gain or lose.

Because of this, the characters in your story should something at stake, or some personal interest or involvement in solving the story’s conflict. Establishing what these personal interests or involvement are early in the story and then returning them through the rising action generates reader interest.

The “stakes” always revolve around two basic questions: “What does the protagonist want?” and “What if the protagonist fails to get it?” For example, in Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation,” the character Salvor Hardin wants to ensure his home planet of Terminus (one of two depositories of scientific knowledge and reason in which humanity’s future depends) survives the collapse of the Galactic Empire, which is fragmenting into several war-like kingdoms. If he fails, Terminus will be taken over by the warrior kingdoms – and humanity will fall into a dark ages that lasts thousands of years. Those are high stakes.

Remember that virtually all stories center on a character that possesses some want that if unfulfilled means some disaster. The plot of the story is little more than the obstacles that the character must overcome as trying to fulfill this want.

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.
(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: characters, conflict, plot, protagonist, rising action

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Perhaps the most profound conflict a character can face is when he is at odds with himself. Conflicts in which the protagonist faces off against other individuals or society often result in characters that represent ideals and concepts. But the character that first must deal with his own foibles in order to overcome a villain or oppressive values has learned something. He has grown as a character and become a better human being. Ideally, your readers will grow with this character, making his triumph over others more lasting in the readers’ minds.

An example of man vs. himself conflict is Anakin Skywalker’s internal struggle in “Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith” in which the young jedi must decide if he will serve the powers of good or turn to the Dark Side. In this case, Skywalker makes the wrong choices and becomes the villain Darth Vader.

If handled correctly, a man vs. himself conflict can raise a story to high art. The “Star Trek: The Original Series” episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” in which Captain Kirk must decide between his love for a woman and his responsibility to the future of humanity is modern tragedy. In Stanslaw Lem’s “Solaris”, a psychologist is reunited with what appears to be his wife but in reality is an amalgam of his memories of her. The result is an intense psychological struggle worthy of the best contemporary literature.

Arguably, your story gains sophistication when your main character must do overcome a challenge other than defeating the forces of nature or a straight villain. To survive being marooned on a desert world or succeed in taking down an alien menace, your main character ought to first have to overcome some internal conflict that in turn allows him to be victorious over nature or invader. For example, in Anne McCaffrey’s short story “The Smallest Dragonboy,” the main character Keevan must learn self-discipline and gain self-confidence to achieve his goal of becoming a dragonrider. In doing so, he overcomes the story’s wider challenge of being ridiculed by the other older and stronger boys.

Your story almost always is better when a man vs. himself conflict rests at its core.

Tags: conflict, main character, plot

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One type of conflict your characters could engage in is against God or the gods. In this conflict, the main character opposes a supernatural being that claims to be (or even is) the creator of everything.

Such conflicts were common in ancient literature when gods were believed to play a greater role in the day-to-day life. Often the gods tested the main character or the story’s protagonist challenged them to benefit humanity. One of the most popular of such stories is the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and against their express wishes gave it to mankind.

Science fiction stories often pit characters against false gods. “Star Trek: The Original Series” is fond of this theme, with Captain Kirk traveling to alien planets and overthrowing an oppressive false god, which usually turns out to be a computer or machine. This most notably occurs in the episodes “The Return of the Archons” and “The Apple”. 

Today’s treatment of man vs. God in stories typically is a type of man vs. himself conflict. The main character doesn’t face off against God per se but undergoes an internal struggle in which his faith in God or belief in holy works is questioned. Sometimes this occurs because of contact with alien beings. This occurs in James Blish’s “A Case of Conscience” when a Jesuit priest investigates an alien race with no concept of God or original sin.

You Do It
Write a 200-word piece in which your main character undergoes an internal man vs. God conflict. What causes your main character to question his faith in God? What keeps him from entirely turning his back on his religious beliefs?

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.
(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: conflict, main character, man vs. himself, plot

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Rather than take on another individual, the main character could find himself in conflict with an entire society. When the main character or small group of characters take on the greater culture – who usually are represented by a group of authority figures or “upstanding” citizens – the author is using a man vs. society conflict.

An example of this occurs in the “Star Trek: The Original Series” episode “The Apple”. When Captain Kirk and his landing party beam down to a planet with an ideal climate, they soon discover a machine mind controls the planet and that the natives worship this machine. Kirk sets out to destroy this machine, named Baal, after it attacks the Enterprise. The native aliens try to stop Kirk, however, and are disappointed when our mighty captain succeeds. Through the episode, Kirk and crew find themselves in conflict with the native’s society’s customs and beliefs.

Indeed, such a conflict is good way to show the illogic of a society’s values. The moral of “The Apple” is that intelligent beings need to be free, even if it means suffering (indeed, the planet’s inhabitants now will have to live in a harsh climate, break their backs farming by hand to feed themselves and suffer the psychological loss of faith in a god that provided for and cared for them). Of course, Baal is a false god, so a system in which intelligent beings worship and serve a false god is illogical.

Two problems can arise with man vs. society conflicts, however. First, when readers can focus on a specific individual as the antagonist, relating to and identifying with the main character can be easier. The challenge for the writer is to make the society a living being itself. Otherwise, the main character simply is defending himself against minor characters and obstacles throughout the story. Another problem is that often society is too monolithic for a single character to overcome. The story problem shouldn’t end with the collapse of society but instead the main character escaping it or achieving some success that creates a new hope for the culture’s eventual fall.
 
You Do It
Create notes about a society that for a character to oppose. What are the society’s prevailing beliefs, laws and mores? Why would this motivate the character to oppose it? In what ways would the society come into conflict with the character? What might the character do to sidestep or challenge these conflicts with society?

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.
(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: conflict, main character, plot

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When developing your story, you’ll want your characters to face a number of challenges or conflicts. One of the most basic of them is man vs. man. In this conflict, the main characters find his goals jeopardized by another individual: a stormtrooper shooting at them, a Klingon arguing with them in a space station cantina, a lowly human turning our astronauts in to the sadistic ape overlords.

At its basest, man vs. man conflict is just two people taking on one another, with our hero usually winning. At its best, this conflict can symbolically test competing ideas and ethical solutions. A character represents one approach to a problem while the other represents an alternative path. All too often, these representations are reduced to simplistic views of good and evil. But by showing each characters’ motivations and needs, the story’s theme gains depth while the dramatic tension soars. 

A good example of man vs. man conflict is “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” The story clearly revolves around two people: Khan and Admiral Kirk. The motivations of each are given: Khan wants revenge upon Kirk for marooning him on a planet that then underwent an ecological disaster and that killed his wife. Kirk feels a responsibility to protect the civilized world from Kahn, a disposed dictator and product of genetic engineering who he had defeated several years before. They play an extensive game of cat and mouse with one another in an effort to win. In the end, Kirk wins because his motivations are not based on revenge but doing what his right by others.

You Do It
Write a 250-word piece in which your main character, to achieve his goal, must overcome another character. Make clear that each has worthy motivations in wanting to defeat the other.

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.
(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: character, conflict, man vs. man, plot, villain

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When developing your story, you’ll want your characters to face a number of challenges or conflicts. One of the most basic of them is man vs. nature. In this conflict, the characters find their goals jeopardized by the natural forces of the universe: the cold of an ice age, dangerous plants and animals in an alien jungle, or the vacuum of space.

This conflict can truly test the characters’ stamina, and in a Darwinistic way, show who is the fittest. There’s virtually nothing that a character can do to change the weather or his environment, but he can through physical strength, willpower and intelligence survive it. Exactly how the character does survive – whether by forcing himself to stay awake for three days until he can march his out of the desert or by using his wits to kill a beast and sleeping in its belly to stay warm – says a lot about what characteristics the author values.

The man vs. nature conflict can takes on a thematic role in ecological disaster stories. A good example of this is Larry Niven’s novel "Legacy of Heorot". Set on a colony world, the story centers on how nature is “fighting back” against the ecological changes that the colonists have engendered. It examines the issues of what happens when humans interfere with the natural order of a world and if the notion of “protecting nature” is rational.

Write a 250-word piece in which your main character must overcome a force of nature to survive. Some possible forces could include a desert on an alien world, a spaceship caught in the grip of a black hole or total darkness caused by an eclipse on an exoplanet.

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.

(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: conflict, main character, plot, setting

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When telling a story, you’ve got to have conflict in it. If there’s no conflict, you have a wooden story that starts nowhere, leads nowhere and ends nowhere. As E.M. Forster noted, “’The king died, then the queen died’ is a plot. ‘The king died, then the queen died of grief’ is a story.”

Forster’s quotation is apt because a good plot is about at least one character under adversity. Conflict typically arises from the characters’ perceptions, needs and wants. As each character has an urgent personal agenda, your plot really is a synthesis of its individual characters’ efforts to achieve their agendas.

Tags: conflict, man vs. man, plot

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In every story, something happens. These events form the structure of your tale. Plot, then, is the drama and action through which characters come to life.
 

Plot is far more than a series of events, however. Events occur in a story because of cause and effect. Luke goes into space with Obi-Wan because once the farm is destroyed, nothing remains for him on a planet where he doesn’t want to be. Because of this cause and effect rule, most stories are told in chronological order. “A New Hope” doesn’t start with Luke rescuing Leia then jumps to the events that led him to the Death Star. In good stories, these events that occur also should involve conflict. Luke doesn’t just walk aboard the Death Star and take Leia. Stormtroopers chase him, and he is caught in a trash compactor with a sea monster.

There are some basic rules of plot that authors should follow:

n A plot should be logically consistent. Nothing should happen at random in a story. Random events slow the story and confuse the reader.

n A plot begins before the story does. “A New Hope” begins with the Empire’s forces firing on Princess Leia’s ship in orbit around Luke’s world. If the plot began at the chase’s beginning, the main story about Luke realizing his dreams of doing something important with his life would be delayed.

n Events in the plot should surprise the reader. That a sea monster is in the trash compactor waste and that it pulls Luke under into the muck are surprises.

n Keep your characters in trouble. So long as the characters have problems to overcome, the plot can remain interesting. For example, when Luke and his companions escape the stormtroopers by jumping into the trash chute, they find there is no way out – and then the walls of the trash compactor begins to close. In addition, come up with creative ways to get your characters out...

Tags: conflict, plot, star wars

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