: Re: Hang on - where's the main conflict? I've recently been struggling with a very strange problem in my writing: I can't find the main conflict in my novels. This has inspired quite a bit of

@Debbie451

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This related answer may help you, but I'll expand more here:

I think it was J. Michael Straczynski, writer of Bablyon 5, who wrote that one could sum up "conflict" in three questions:

What does the character want?
What will the character do to get it?
What will someone do to stop the character?

As noted in some of the other excellent answers here, the Someone who is Stopping the character could be the character him/herself.

I'm not sure what you consider to be a message or theme, but let's say your message is "Work is important, but love is more so."

So your detective is assigned a case. And it's a really big case, Mr. Muckety-Muck got whacked and nobody knows who did it, and the superintendent is really breathing down your detective's neck to solve this before the Police Officer's Ball next week. Separately, your detective's husband has been feeling lonely and neglected, and has been threatening to pack up and go home to mom if your detective doesn't put some more effort into the marriage.

So your character now wants two things, which happen to be in opposition: (1) to find and catch the killer (2) to spend more time with/attention on husband so he doesn't leave.

What will the detective do? Take hubby to dinner but keep fielding phone calls? Stake out a suspect but also trade texts with hubby? This balance can keep seesawing.

The boss will want to stop the detective from being distracted (or maybe not, if the boss is really sympathetic). The killer wants to stop the detective from catching her. The husband wants the detective to stop working and come home on time for once.

To resolve this in favor of your message, at some point the detective would have to choose between catching the killer and doing something important for hubby, and chooses hubby in some way. Or maybe the killer is caught and the detective quits and they both move to mom's city.

You may be going at this backwards with your current work. If your message or theme is the central point, then you have to define that first. The conflict then becomes what gets in the way of the characters realizing or embodying that message.

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