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Christopher Mlalazi

We cannot talk about creative writing without discussing what moves a compelling story forward.

This is another vital component in the creative writing toolbox of the budding writer.

Moving a story forward does not just mean that character A travelled from point B to C, and end of story. We call a story like that as flat as a ruler, or iplanka.

But imagine this.

Character A moves from point B to point C. Along the way they have something stolen from them, and they spend the rest of the day trying to find the suspect, and after many tribulations, they finally do, and cut.

Between these two stories, common sense will tell us that people will be more interested in listening to the second one, all because it has that one essential ingredient, and yes you guessed it, story conflict.

Conflict in a story is its marrow. It is that other layer which is the whole point of telling the story, and hopefully to get readers.

We must also remember that we tell stories so that they can be consumed by an audience, and not necessarily telling them for our own, the writers’ consumption. That is why there are bookshops online and offline with books with price stickers on them for people to buy.

Some books get sold, and others don’t, and we should know by now the reason why. For those that don’t sell, it is usually through lack of that ingredient that starts with the letter C that we just mentioned.

As we talked about story layers in our last installment of this column, and how we go about producing a holistic feel of a well written story utilising them, and so too layering applies in the integration of conflict into a story.

When writers are still starting, when we mention conflict, they immediately think of war. Funny. Yes it could be that too, but in a story we can abstract it and just say it is two opposing forces. The protagonist and the antagonist — the former always wants to go one way, and with the latter always pulling in an opposing direction.

If you inspect your story and discover that you don’t have this, you still have a long way to go.

Story conflict assumes several forms, but two always stand out. It can either be internal or external.

The internal is the strife within the mind of the character, and the external is you versus the physical environment around you.

Mostly, when we are still starting to write, the external conflict is much more easier to deal with as it’s tangible and we can see it, just as we can see that rogue who decides to nick your mobile phone while you are not looking.

This kind of conflict, the external, is where we should practise to write, and juggle with treating it in our infant stories.

And this is another simple trick. The sooner you present the conflict in your story, the greater the chances that the person reading won’t throw it away.

You can imagine yourself sitting down for a movie, and then it starts with a huge yawn, you wait and wait, and wait and wait, until you fall asleep. Why? Because there was no conflict to begin with, and if there was, it was either too hidden for you, or it came very late in the story – and not many of us can endure for long a story that does not create a tension within ourselves.

A long time ago when we used to go to the bioscope in the community hall, if you were late and found the film already running, you would know while still outside if it was exciting or boring.

If it was exciting, there would be yells from kids inside, “Eyi! Eyi! Eyi!”, and you would know instantly that Bruce Lee was delivering the blows, and that he was winning.

That is exactly the story conflict that we are discussing, and as mentioned, it’s triggered in the story right close to the beginning or somewhere close there, as a hook.

And usually when we are still starting to write, we normally like to concentrate on one layer of conflict.

But as experience and confidence grows, one slowly learns how to infuse into the story several layers of it, like for example, our fellow who is trying to investigate who stole his mobile phone is also faced by other problems at home with his family. That is two simple layers, and more can be added, also depending on the skill of the writer to handle this.

But eventually, the protagonist must persevere and triumph over the main conflict, if not all of them, and then we can now call that a story.

Today we end here folks, and we have more creative writing tricks in store in the coming weeks.

Stay safe, stay writing!