If you have taken undergraduate classes in writing and story structure, then you’ve probably been told that all stories have conflict. This is an idea that is taught as foundational theory in almost every English language narrative writing classroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In all likelihood, you’ll also have been taught about the Three Act Structure (Act 1: Exposition, Act 2: Confrontation, Act 3: Resolution). You may then have seen it visualised and broken into more steps with a Story Mountain\u2014that caret-shaped graph illustrating a story shape with five segments marked as Introduction, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Resolution (or some variation thereof):<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, if your education was especially formulaic, you would have been taught that all stories follow the structure of Campbell’s Monomyth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was taught all of the above from primary through undergrad, and then I researched narrative design, and then I taught narrative design to undergrads. And I am here with a very basic proposition: Please, let us stop using these as fill-the-blanks templates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m not here to claim the language and concepts taught here aren’t useful, because they are. They are useful for succinctly communicating the structure of something you’re writing. “I want to craft a sense of rising stakes that build towards a climax” is a useful thing to be able to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, what scrambles my bacon is that even professional writers are taught to craft these stories to the template<\/em>. Not to use it as a bank of descriptive terminology but as a prescriptive formula for making a story\u2014typically a story that intends to be commercially viable<\/em>, above all else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think that these ideas should be treated as what they are: training wheels. They start one thinking about the qualities of storytelling that differentiate it from the general recounting of events. Which is indispensable! What makes a story a story is design intent<\/em>: precise choices about sequence, pace, expression and level of detail in which events are related, to craft an emotionally or intellectually affecting experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But at some point, insisting on the training wheels will only hold one back from the full joy of free-wheeling through the streets of narrative possibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First off, I have been dying to take a swing at the ironclad foundation of all the above narrative formulae: the oft-touted notion that all stories have conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Story Mountain, the “conflict” is usually pinned to the start of the Rising Action segment. It’s what makes the tensions start to rise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many, many formally-trained writers and writing teachers will swear by this golden rule. All story hinges on conflict.<\/a> Stories are boring without conflict.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, “conflict” conventionally refers to the friction between a character (often a protagonist) and a story element that opposes their goals. For Odysseus returning to Penelope in Ithaca, for instance, these are Polyphemus, Circe, the lotus eaters, Scylla and Charybdis, and his wife’s suitors (among others).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over time, to accommodate an ever wider scope of narratives under the golden rule, this definition has been broadened to refer to anything standing in the way of the protagonist getting what they want<\/a>, including entities with no will nor intent (man vs nature) and internal psychological phenomena (man vs self): rough seas, winds blowing the wrong way, crises of confidence, poor luck, even a lack of fortitude to do what is needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s my problem with it: by that token, just about everything that is positioned counter to a goal is “conflict.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking this conflict-centred view as truth, the vagaries of public transit become an antagonist in the story of my day (but hey, getting antagonised only costs 50 cents here!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not a joke, by the way. One of the exercises I remember being put through in undergrad was to characterise the events of my day as a Story Mountain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Across the internet, the most popular counterpoint I see against the notion that all stories need conflict is the \u8d77\u627f\u8ee2\u7d50 structure, usually rendered in Western spaces as the Japanese “kish\u014dtenketsu.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this framework, the story beats are instead as follows: Introduction, Development, Twist, and Conclusion. A well-worn structure in old Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese poetry, it has been applied to characterise Makoto Shinkai’s <\/a>Your Name<\/em><\/a> and many films in Studio Ghibli’s oeuvre<\/a>. The claim goes that this story structure illustrates how stories can be written without conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have to immediately and vehemently disagree. The notion that kish\u014dtenketsu stories “lack conflict” invokes a much <\/em>narrower definition of “conflict” than the one assumed by writing instructors when they say “all stories need conflict.” These different delineations of “conflict” are shuffled around arbitrarily to make both claims true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This much becomes clear when you compare kish\u014dtenketsu with the structure of a European murder mystery, in the tradition of Holmes or Poirot. The genre, as it is known in the contemporary zeitgeist, is quite European as genres go, and yet most stories engage with this same essential structure:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is there conflict here? Well, if I were to try shoehorning it, the detective wants to solve the mystery, but muddied evidence obfuscates the truth or lays a false explanation. So, yes, something’s getting in the detective’s way, and therefore there is Conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I can perform the same trick with Your Name<\/em>, the most oft-named kish\u014dtenketsu story in recent memory. Taki wants to solve the mystery of Mitsuha and the body switching by finding her, yet the infuriating obscurity of information about her village gets in his way. So, that’s Conflict, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Functionally and experientially, there’s not much of a difference between these respective tensions. It doesn’t really matter if the red herrings were the culprit’s design or the result of poor\/inaccurate documentation. As a writer, both achieve the same effect of putting the protagonist on a path of mounting intrigue and dead ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, to me, the hype around kish\u014dtenketsu (as applied in contemporary media analysis, not the original poetic structure) reads more as the exoticising of what is already a rather well-known, even mundane story shape, and it begs the term “conflict.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is certainly something<\/em> that makes a story<\/em> more compelling than a blow-by-blow account of what someone did before the got to their appointment this morning, but I’m not sure that conflict is that thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My inability to fry my egg properly is conflict, sure, but by itself it doesn’t really add much to the stakes of the scenario. I probably wouldn’t mention it if I were recounting a harrowing morning. Unless…<\/p>\n\n\n\n …Unless the egg actually becomes important?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s step back to the assertion that conflict makes a story interesting and that a story that feels directionless probably lacks conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAll stories have conflict?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Story Formula, Japan<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Setup and payoff<\/h2>\n\n\n\n