We love a good sword fight or space battle; it is known. But what if it’s feelings you’re more interested in? How are you supposed to build an entire conflict out of those? For that matter, what if you want to combine the two? This week, we’re looking at how to build emotional conflicts. That means giving the stakes, urgency, a likelihood of failure, and everything else a conflict needs, but with more feeling!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
[Intro Music]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: So today I went into Barnes & Noble and I saw the novel Babel by R. F. Kuang on the front display, and on one hand, I knew that sabotaging a bookstore’s display is wrong, but on the other hand, I’m really angry at Babel. And this just caused an inward emotional conflict. Thankfully, Oren was there to tell me not to spoil Babel for shoppers by leaving a warning on the book.
Oren: We could have put a little decorative doily on it with a little embroidered thing about what happens that annoyed us.
[both laughing]Chris: Do not read this book unless you wanna rip your hair out!
Oren: Or you could just be like me and not form emotional attachments to what happens in the books, and then you’ll be better off.
Chris: I just don’t honestly know why you would read Babel otherwise, because there’s very little plot, there’s very little tension, or anything happening for most of the book. So, if you don’t form any attachment, then why?
Oren: It’s easy. You know, you read it so you know what everyone else is talking about.
Chris: But if you do form any attachment, you will be BETRAYED.
Oren: Hurtful!
Chris: This is your warning. It is hurtful. It was very hurtful to me. Okay, so this time we’re talking about — not Babel, I mean, you know, except for when I talk about Babel.
Oren: Yeah. That’ll probably be coming up in the next few weeks of podcasts.
Chris: But emotional conflicts. So, first, what is that? Basically it’s when you set up an internal struggle over what to do, where a character has a dilemma, but the focus is not, I mean, it can have moral implications, but with a moral dilemma, it’s supposed to be hard to tell what the right thing to do is, whereas this is about two different impulses or two different priorities that the character has that makes a decision really hard for them to make personally.
Oren: Yeah. It’s to make you angst.
Chris: And again, the goal is not to let the character just think their way out of this dilemma. That’s not bad storytelling necessarily, and sometimes if the character has conflicted priorities and they think of some sort of clever solution so they don’t have to make any hard decisions, that can be a way of just procrastinating on something that they really have to work out or putting it off until later. But when we want the emotional conflict, the goal is to force them into that tough situation and just make things hard for them emotionally.
Oren: Yeah, if the character is portrayed as having an emotional struggle, having them solve it with an intellectual plan probably isn’t going to be super satisfying. If they have two friends who are fighting and they’re caught in the middle trying to figure out what to do and who to support or not, having them concoct an elaborate plan by which to trick both of their friends into thinking that they’re the one the protagonist has sided with is probably not a satisfying way to end that story.
Chris: Right. I mean, it can’t be an ending. You would expect in any story you saw that what you would expect is for that to backfire on the character. Because they had tried to take the easy way out instead of actually solving their problem in a more genuine way. You know, if they’re trying to choose between two different job opportunities and they clone themselves, the expectation would be that it would go very wrong and then they would regret doing that.
Oren: Right, you could have, depending on how it’s pitched, you could have a similar scenario that would feel like an intellectual solution is fine. Like if the idea was more that this person needs to have two jobs to pay the rent, a solution that lets them do both — as long as it is earned and feels like a good reward for them being clever — that could work fine. But if it’s specifically about how I want both of these jobs. They’re both so cool, which one will I pick? Being able to do both is just going be a cop-out.
Chris: Again, just to make this more emotionally loaded, if one job is the job that their parents approve of and they want to please their parents, and the other job is the job that is fulfilling their personal dreams and goals. So that we see there’s emotional weight and each job represents some sort of priority for them. And usually in that situation, we’d expect that the answer is not just to live your life to please your parents, right? But it’s tough for them to make that choice.
An example that I really like is episode two of Teen Wolf. It’s in the first season, where Scott is a new werewolf without very good control of his power. So, he could, if he gets too excited or angry or something happens, he could just lose control and start turning into a werewolf. And he’s been working really, really hard to get onto the lacrosse team and thanks to his new powers, he has finally done it so he’s finally going to actually play in a lacrosse game and the game’s coming up and then he’s warned that he shouldn’t play the game because he could lose control and expose himself as a werewolf.
Oren: And also hurt somebody.
Chris: Right, and hurt somebody. At the same time, if he doesn’t play the game, he’ll be letting other people down. He could possibly lose his position on the team, because it’s expected that when he tried out for the team, that he would actually be playing games. So that is the kind of thing we’re trying to do, whether he should prioritize that dream he has been thinking about for so long versus that risk of losing control or hurting somebody. Something like that. That would be an example.
Oren: The one that I really like, but I have a hard time creating this is, I like it when friends fight. I like it when you have characters who are close or have some kind of existing relationship and then they end up on opposite sides of a conflict. I find that really cool and really compelling, but it’s hard to set that up. Partly because you need to actually demonstrate the friendship. And I don’t know how well it would work — and my guess is usually not very well — to have them be friends in the backstory. Maybe not never, but I just feel that’s going to not feel very real for a lot of readers.
Chris: Yeah, I do think it’s about how important it is, because definitely the first step in any kind of emotional conflict is that we need to design the two impulses or emotions that are at conflict but we also really need to make them compelling to our audience. And that’s what you’re talking about. If the character has to balance their friendship against what they think is right, for instance, in order to make this a compelling conflict, we need to make sure that the audience can care about both of those things because you want them to be in the shoes of your character who’s having this conflict and empathizing with this conflict as much as possible and feeling the dilemma with that character. So, you want to make both sides really compelling so that the audience feels like, “Oh, I don’t know. What are you going to do?” instead of just feeling like, “Ugh, why are you angsting over this. Just do that.” You don’t want that to happen.
So, if one side is a relationship with another character, you do need to make that relationship compelling and showing the relationship is kind of an important part of that. I would say that if that friendship is a really central part of the whole plot, then it is worth usually just a few scenes in the beginning to show them together. But you can also do a lot with exposition, right? It’s just, exposition is much faster and you want to show those details like when did the friend help them out? What has the friend done for them in the past? And to make the case for why this friendship is so valuable. But, if it’s really central to the story, then yeah, usually it’s probably worth some initial, at least one initial, scene in the beginning of the story, of course, is so crowded and usually has so many priorities, but if this is load bearing, then it’s often worth an extra scene in the beginning where they’re still friends with each other, for instance.
Oren: You can also have them be friends for a good portion of the story and have them split up towards the end and become on opposite sides that way. They have to cooperate at first to save the city from a giant meteor or whatever, but then at the end of the story, the big climax, is actually the different factions in the city are fighting over who gets to control the meteor and that’s a problem, and then they split over that. That sort of thing could happen.
Chris: Yeah, you could definitely have how they’re facing a problem together, but at the end — and usually you would show fractures in their friendship earlier — they managed to keep things together despite the fact that they have a difference in opinion, and circumstances would conspire to make that worse.
Oren: This can also work well in sequels. I’m actually a big sucker for sequels where friends who used to be part of the same adventuring team have to fight. I’m not a huge fan of sequels where they’re all sad and depressed.
Chris: Really? Are you saying you didn’t like Picard? Geez! Picky, picky.
Oren: No, I wasn’t a huge fan. But sequels where before, especially if it was a fairly simplistic idea, like we’re on an adventuring team and we’ll be friends forever. I like sequels where things become more complicated and they maybe have to come into conflict with each other. Now I do want them to make up and be friends again. So, I have requirements, but that’s my favorite part of the Avatar comics, is when Team Avatar come to blows over something. There’s some problem that they can’t agree how to address do they end up in competition with each other. I find those scenes really compelling because I have this extremely big attachment built up to their friendship from the original series.
Chris: Another thing to consider is if you need to add backstory. For instance, if your character is afraid of something. Again, you want to put people in their shoes and overcoming fear can be their conflicting impulses. They have a goal, but they’re afraid or they have a goal, but they’re angry and they have to work with somebody who hurt them in the past, for instance, they have to learn how to tamper down on some jealousy. Fighting impulses definitely works to make an emotional conflict, but you’re trying to justify their emotions as much as possible. So creating some backstory events and again, this can be worth just some exposition to flush them out can be quite effective if it’s not the whole story. Maybe they need to get over their jealousy, but the whole story isn’t about their jealousy. That would be unusual. And of course, you can use multitasking too, so if you have a scene about something else, maybe you can do double duty. But basically make up this is what they feel. How can I get readers to understand what they feel or the logic of it?
Sometimes writers really do need to explain why their characters feel the way they feel. Like if they’re grieving somebody and they’re not sure they’re ready to date again, is it that they feel like they’re betraying their dead partner? Or what is the reason why they’re feeling these emotions? And kind of spell that out a bit.
Oren: Yeah, with the dating one, this comes up in some romance stories and also in some client work that I’ve done where there’s been a problem where the author wants to use emotional problems to keep the characters apart but isn’t willing to show those emotions. And so either we have to sort of guess why does this person not want to date? And it’s because they’re still upset from the bad breakup they had last time but I didn’t even know that from the story. Or sometimes they’ll say it, but it doesn’t really feel like the character feels it, and that also seems contrived. At that point I’m just like, “Get together already guys. None of this matters.”
Chris: Definitely. And if it’s not a viewpoint character that obviously can get harder. Sometimes you may need to use dialogue or plan a stimulus that they can react to so you can see them react. Seeing the character react can also help to communicate what’s going on with them, but that can be a little bit trickier, which is generally why with a viewpoint character you can have more emotional depth. If you’re planning a romance in particular, this is definitely something that goes into the decision of whether your romance has one viewpoint or two. If you have a lot of really complex emotional obstacles for your love interest, that’s often a reason to add another viewpoint, whereas otherwise, that can actually make the romance less compelling.
So, justify each emotion as best you can. Make sure that it’s compelling, that your audience sympathizes with it, and then the next step is to exert external pressure on them. Make it really hard, right? You’re trying to make things as hard as possible for them to make their choice, so really load the pressure. And again, this just goes to the fact that the emotions the characters are experiencing are really important, but we can’t only do internal stuff in the story. We need to have external things happening. It’s boring to have a page of just your character thinking and feeling things. We don’t want you to narrate them meditating, although actually some stories do have where they actually act out what’s happening in the character’s head. They have a dream sequence that represents their emotional turmoil or whatever.
Oren: Those are really useful, those dreams sequences.
Chris: We have a mindscape where one character goes into another character’s mind and then we play it all out like it’s an external scene. Some stories do that, but for the most part, you need to then make it so that external events hang on this choice and that there’s a lot of pressure externally. For instance, my example from Teen Wolf, Scott has pressure from on one side his werewolf mentor, Derek, who is really funny.
Oren: Yeah, Derek’s great. We love Derek in this house.
Chris: Oh man, because he’s like the weirdest, least charismatic person ever who is trying to be scary and creepy but is mostly funny. Who just comes and is like, “No, you can’t play in the game. Don’t even think about it!”
Oren: “Don’t do it!” And then he just aways like, “All right, I’ve given my command, I’m out.”
Chris: And then he just disappears. It’s like . . . what? Okay, weirdo. And then Scott’s team coach is on the other side so when Scott then tries to tell his coach that maybe he can’t make it, his coach is like, “No, no, no, no,” and will not take ‘no’ for an answer. Making it as hard as possible. We have a scene where his mother says that she’s proud of him and that she’s coming to see the game.
Oren: They really twist the knife on that one.
Chris: Yeah, exactly, it is about twisting the knife as much as possible so that we get good tension and power from the conflict. That’s why I like this episode so much, it does such a good job of setting this up as a really difficult dilemma for Scott. Obviously, the show runner wants Scott to play the game so we can have an exciting sequence of him playing lacrosse and trying to keep himself from transforming too much. And we do have to justify that, which normally if it’s something like this, it would be, oh well, this is dangerous and you could endanger other people, that would normally be a difficult thing to justify. Scott might look bad, but once we like really pile on the pressure enough, we can sympathize with that decision and understand why he plays the game even if it’s a bad idea.
Oren: And in case it’s not obvious by this point, I’d say it is important if you have a big external conflict with high stakes: try to tie the emotional conflict into that. If you have a really high stakes problem of evil invaders are coming and they’re going get you, having your character be caught in a heartfelt emotional conflict about something like whether or not he can adopt this pet is not going to make sense, right? Even if in isolation that emotional conflict would be great, if there’s a big high stakes external conflict that is unrelated to it, those two things are going to clash. They’re going to compete for space.
Chris: Yeah, and in the same vein, usually an emotional conflict would be part of a character arc. Otherwise, you’re usually stretching yourself too thin if you’re trying to do some other character arc and also have an unrelated emotional conflict. A character arc is all about making it so that your character’s emotions have a purpose to them. I mean, not every emotion, of course, at all times, it has to be directly linked to the character arc. But in general, it lets you add emotional depth to the story while making it feel cohesive and giving it a united purpose. So your emotional conflict should have some relationship and be part of that character arc in some way. Now of course, when I’m talking about this Teen Wolf emotional conflict, that’s part of a TV show, which is very episodic, although Teen Wolf actually is a great mix of having episode arcs with a strong season arc usually. So, this is kind of part of a growth arc for Scott where he comes into his powers and deals with having these powers in his life and adjusts. That’s how it connects to what he’s going through during the season.
And then another thing to think about when we’re talking about external stuff is a character is likely to be inconsistent or go back and forth when they’re struggling over this and trying to decide, but we can’t just have them spontaneously change their mind.
Oren: Yeah, I was wondering how you have them do that without it seeming like you’re retreading old ground.
Chris: Okay, so without retreading old ground, let’s say we have this as one step in a larger character arc. There are basically two things that we can do. We can have them sort of make a baby step, where maybe a character is adjusting to a change. For Scott, we had a situation where he was in denial. He was adjusting to being a werewolf and we could have one little arc where he’s in denial that he’s a werewolf at all and then can’t deny it anymore, for instance. In this particular emotional conflict, it might be about admitting that his life is going to have to change. That doesn’t mean he’s adjusted to all the changes.
So, it’s about finding a baby step. And then the other thing that can happen is they can actually go in the wrong direction and cause problems for themself. This is what we’re talking about with if they find a clever solution to avoid making a decision that they have to make. Usually that’s going to come back to bite them, right? So that’s another way of doing it. They put it off, but they’ve actually dug themselves in deeper so we can see that that’s going to come back to bite them. That would be another way to divide up that larger character arc into a smaller conflict.
Oren: [sarcastically] Or they could just get away with it with their clever idea that makes it so they never have to face the emotional consequences. I don’t see a problem. Like what could go wrong?
Chris: Talking about wavering, the other thing about that is that we need to see why they waver, which also generally is going to rely on some kind of external change or trigger. So instead of writing a page of them thinking through the entire situation in their head and finally making a decision you would have some outside stimulus. It doesn’t mean that they can’t do any thinking in their head or figuring out in their head, but usually we want that to be in small pieces because it does feel like the story’s not moving forward.
Oren: Yeah. Probably if they’re dealing with like the fear of, Should I try to diffuse this bomb? Or should I try to escape? That’s emotionally difficult because it’s scary. You probably don’t want them to just be sitting there thinking about how scared they are. If you want their fear to be higher, you would prompt them with something like the bomb makes a weird noise and now they might have less time.
Chris: Right, we want to place things wherever the climax of this emotional conflict takes place. You want to place things in their environment that can have an effect on them or have things happen. And often it’s a character, just like I talked about with Scott, with his mother saying she’ll come to the game. It can be other people pushing in the various directions, but also it can be if they’re scared, again, with the bomb making a noise makes them even more scared.
Or something else, if they have a deep, dark backstory, there can be something that suddenly reminds them of the backstory, seems reminiscent of it. Anything that is a stimulus that they would reasonably have an emotional response to can then change their mind and cause them to waver more in the other direction as long as the audience can see what that stimulus is and how that would reasonably have an effect on them. As opposed to just spontaneous mind changing, which comes off as really inconsistent.
Oren: One way that I like to use emotional conflicts, but again, is challenging for me, is sympathetic villains. Because they can, in theory, do the same thing where the villain is doing something and the hero has got to stop them, but you’ve built a relationship with them or you’ve made the hero think that maybe they have a point or something and that does create emotional complications. The problem is that I find myself always being like, “Nope, that villain’s gone too far. I don’t like them anymore. Now I don’t care about your emotional conflict!”
Chris: Yeah, that’s why they have to be usually the lesser antagonist or villain working under a Big Bad, because then you can have other minions and they don’t have to be responsible for everything bad that happens. And you can be like, “Oh maybe they killed somebody off screen, but maybe not. Who knows? I mean, we didn’t see it directly, so —”
Oren: Who’s to say?
Chris: Who’s to say? Might depend on how much time you have to devote to this character. I think one of the biggest issues of having those really complex emotional things happen is usually these are characters that we just don’t have as much time. Might not have a viewpoint, and that always makes things harder, so oftentimes we do need it to be a little simpler and less complicated. We can give them a sympathetic reason, for engaging in villainy, a revenge arc or the big bad has an influence over them or something, and then we can see that they’re clearly guilty. And that usually makes for a fairly simple emotional conflict that is easy to observe from the outside instead of a complex conflict over their feelings of self-worth versus whether or not they deserve to be in a relationship, for instance.
Oren: Yeah. What do we think about the emotional conflict, in The Tainted Cup, which —spoilers for that book although it’s been out for a little while at this point — culminates at the end with the protagonist revealing to his boss that he got this position via sort of cheating a little bit, and that he has real trouble reading? Because he’s been thinking that he is unworthy of this job the whole time. What do we think about that?
Chris: I feel like that was kind of underdeveloped. I mean, unfortunately one of the weakness of that series right now is that Din never solves any of his own problems. Ana always solves his problems for him, which I’m hoping will change in the future book. But gosh, I just think that conflict is just really underdeveloped. We don’t have a lot of instances where it actually comes into play in the story. Okay, there’s the cheating, but actually, if we make it about him being willing to admit about his, I want to call it dyslexia, but in this particular context it’s a magical feature that probably stems from dyslexia but has got other features.
So, he has photographic memory, but he can’t remember words whereas he would’ve been expected to. I will say that having Ana know, that’s the thing, is that Ana already knows, and we can tell that she already knows and that does take a lot of the pressure off of him. He still does have to come up with the courage to tell her, but at the same time, on the reader’s end, and I don’t know, maybe there was some reader who couldn’t tell that she already knows and was nervous about this, but I thought it was pretty clear.
Oren: Yeah, Ana seems to know basically everything, so it would’ve been very weird to me if she hadn’t also known that.
Chris: Again, it’s a little arc for him, but calling it an emotional conflict, I feel like that’s giving it more power than it really had because we can’t really be in his shoes and it comes up not that often in the story and it’s solved pretty easily. That’s my two cents on that one.
Oren: Because I’ve just been trying to think of good examples from books, and again, it’s weird that all of my good examples are from TV shows. Surely there must be a book that does good emotional conflicts.
Chris: I mean, TV shows have a neat plot every episode and with so many episodes, think of a Star Trek that has 20 episodes per season and seven seasons.
Oren: Yeah. That’s true.
Chris: I think one of the reasons why, is a TV show is like lots of little stories, so many that you just have tons of examples to work with.
Oren: Yeah, well that is a good point. Speaking of episodes, I think we are about ready to call this one to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.
We’ll talk to you next week.
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