Creating Both Internal and External Conflict

by Beth Groundwater

Early in my writing career, I learned that in commercial fiction, there must always be conflict. Dwight Swain succinctly defines conflict as “two dogs, one bone.” The protagonist wants or needs something and has to fight to get it. And in most novels, we authors need to create both external conflict and internal conflict to engage and captivate readers.

External conflict happens in the physical world: space colonists fight alien invaders in a science fiction novel, the heroine struggles to escape after being kidnapped by the villain in a romance novel, the sleuth must find a killer covering his tracks in a murder mystery. Internal conflict happens in the emotional landscape of the novel and usually involves the protagonist needing to learn a life lesson, conquer an inner fear, solve a relationship problem, or surmount some emotional barrier.

The most interesting plots intertwine multiple external and internal conflicts of multiple characters. They feed on one another, successively raising the stakes until the final crisis or “black moment.” In a mystery, the primary external conflict is the need to solve the crime and find the murderer, while the internal conflict can be any emotional issue that must be faced by the sleuth while investigating the murder. This close relationship between the primary external and internal conflicts is one that I strove for in both of my published Claire Hanover gift basket designer mystery books, A Real Basket Case and To Hell in a Handbasket, the second of which was just re-released in trade paperback and ebook by Midnight Ink on November 8th.

In A Real Basket Case, the main external conflict is that a massage therapist is shot dead while giving Claire a massage and her husband is wrongly accused of the crime. Claire must convince the local police to reopen the case and look for the real killer. The internal conflict is that this event shatters Claire’s marriage, making her husband Roger believe she was having an affair and putting Claire on the defensive to prove her love to him and rescue their marriage.

Similarly, Claire’s initial external conflict in To Hell in a Handbasket is to convince local authorities that a young woman’s death on the ski slope of Breckenridge, Colorado was a murder, not an accident, as seen in this snippet of a scene:

Realizing the senior ski patroller didn’t believe her, Claire kept pushing. “The ski tracks came straight out of the woods above the collision point. No turns. If the skier was the one who hit her, either he never saw Stephanie or he deliberately hit her.”

Judy stared at her mother. “You think someone killed her on purpose?”

“Whoa.” Matthews put out his hands. “You’re getting carried away here.”

The internal conflict in To Hell in a Handbasket is Claire’s reluctance to let go of her college-aged daughter, Judy, who is eager to leave the nest. Claire worries about Judy’s safety as a result of Stephanie’s death on a ski slope, but Judy refuses her mother’s smothering protective measures. An early hint of this conflict is given in these lines:

A surge of jealousy engulfed Claire. Judy had shrugged off her mother’s attempts at comfort, and now she clung to her boyfriend like ivy sucking life from a tree.

By setting roadblocks in Claire’s way, increasing the danger to her daughter and Claire’s confusion about what’s happening, and precipitating arguments between the two, my job as an author was to continually “make things worse” in Claire’s life. That way, readers can worry about her and root for her to succeed. For those who read the book, I hope you enjoy the wild ride that Claire takes in To Hell in a Handbasket!

Do you have any favorite examples of external or internal conflicts in books you’ve read--or written?

My Four One-Word Writing Prompts

Lately I've come up with a "cheat sheet" sticky note that I keep on my computer monitor to remind me of four basic concepts that I want to include in every scene of the book I'm working on. For my Work in Progress (WiP), the second book in the Rocky Mountain Adventure series, I'm editing chapters to submit to my critique group, then editing them again after I receive comments from the group. As I edit the scenes in each chapter, I look at my cheat sheet to make sure I have evaluated these four concepts in each one.

1. Emotion - Are all of the characters in the scene, especially the POV character, experiencing some kind of emotion, the stronger the better? Am I expressing that emotion in their gestures, actions, speech, tone of voice, facial expressions, etc.? Is there any way that I can increase the emotion in this scene? Can I better elicit emotion from the reader?

This usually means evoking the "show not tell" principle. Instead of saying that a character felt nauseated by the blood on the corpse, I have her swallow back the burning bile in her throat, tear her gaze from the body, put a hand to her roiling stomach, and finally involuntarily gag and bend over to splatter her breakfast on the ground below.

2. Conflict - Does the scene include a conflict, either within the POV character or between at least two characters in the scene? If not, how can I introduce conflict into the scene? How can I escalate the conflict if I already have one?

I recently attended a workshop by literary agent Donald Maass at a writers conference about adding micro-tension to scenes and have started to put that into practice. For example, at the beginning of a scene, I have Mandy Tanner, my whitewater river ranger sleuth, putting up her equipment and raft at the end of the day. Her boss comes out in the equipment yard to ask her if she's heard how the fly fishing tournament is going. She says no and suggests they walk over to the event registration area to find out. No conflict there, right? This is just the start of a scene where there's conflict later, but I thought I could add some here, too.

So, I changed the scene so that Mandy had a rough day, having to pick up muddy, rank-smelling trash along the river and she has to heave a heavy, wet trash bag into the dumpster which drips all over her, making her even dirtier and smellier. She wants nothing more than to go home and take a hot shower. But, when her boss asks her about the tournament, she sighs, delays her shower, and suggests they find out about it. More interesting, right?

3. Question - Am I planting a question in the reader's mind during this scene, especially at the end? Is the question strong enough to propel the reader forward and make him or her turn the page? If not, how can I plant a question, or leave out something that I'm explaining in this scene and explain it later?

Having spent years writing technical documentation and user's manuals in my former career as a software engineer, I had a firmly ingrained goal of making my writing clear and straight-forward and explaining everything in a step-by-step way so the reader doesn't become confused. This is exactly what a writer does NOT want to do in a mystery! What this often means is that I delete the last sentence or two from a scene, and many times replace them with a question, either in the POV character's thoughts or spoken aloud. Or my characters refuse to answer each others' questions or do so indirectly or incompletely. Or I describe only part of what my character sees or does.

4. Senses - Am I eliciting all of the reader's senses in this scene (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, etc.)? If not, how can I add to the descriptions in the scene to evoke more senses?

For example, in the opening scene of my WiP, I kept reworking the description below until I had the characters, and the reader, feeling the heat, hearing the wind, seeing the trees, tasting water, and smelling...death.

Heat waves shimmered off the parched ground. Mandy followed Steve's lead, removing her PFD and lifting the end of her strawberry blond ponytail off the damp back of her neck. An early September Monday in Chaffee County, Colorado, this one was showing signs of being a record-breaking scorcher. While Steve took a long pull on his water bottle, Mandy shielded her eyes from the glare of the late morning sun and scanned the Vallie Bridge campground. From the tent sites she could see, it looked deserted.

With the raven now quiet, the only sound was the hot wind soughing through the grasses and nearby copse of stunted pine trees, bringing with it the scent of baking dry needles, and something else...

Mandy wrinkled her nose. "Something smells rank."


Do you have any "cheat sheets," notes, or other writing prompts stuck on your computer monitor to help you remember good writing concepts or avoid bad ones? What are they?