You don't need conflict on every page
This advice always seemed wrong to me...and here's why
No piece of writing advice is more oft-heard than this: You need conflict on every page.
Like most advice, I think it’s useful as a rule of thumb—especially for anyone just starting out in the craft who finds that their story is flat and their pacing feels too dull. Emphasizing the conflict is a fool-proof way to make sure there’s always something interesting happening, which is the hardest part at first. But like most writing advice, this adage is overly simplistic and perhaps even just plain wrong.
How do I know this? Because I can find endless counterexamples of stories that work without putting conflict on every page. Some books devote whole passages to description, telling you about the foods eaten at a feast or the glint of light off of ocean waves. A long action segment might be followed by extensive emotional reaction, and for many readers that part is just as engaging as the action that preceded it. Two enemies finding they had something in common all along: that’s not conflict, that’s harmony. How do these things work when they aren’t playing off of constant conflict?
Conflict isn’t the point at all. Instead, I’ve come up with a less pithy but more truthful phrase.
The driving force of stories is Desire, Complication, and Resolution.
These three forces are really more like links in a chain, with one leading to the next. I visualize it like this:
Desire → Complication → Resolution.
Let’s look at them one at a time.
Desire
The first thing a story needs is a goal or desire. Without that, what you have is a recollection of events with no trajectory, like random photos in a scrapbook showing unidentifiable objects. Why unidentifiable? Because as soon as you know what something is, you ascribe purpose to it. A photo album of wooden toys with no one to play with them is lonely; it is unmet desire. A mountain range is ominous and beautiful—emotionally moving because it is fulfilling its natural, alien purpose. Even the fact that a human chose to take pictures of that mountain range implies desire of some kind: to capture beauty, to impress, to remember.
Similarly, the desire in a story may be immediate and urgent:
“I’m thirsty”
“I need to defeat the villain”
“I just got a call from my sick mother and I need to go see her”
But it may also be vague, unspoken, or even pre-existing before the story begins:
“I’m unsatisfied”
“I can’t seem to communicate with others”
“I want to live in peace”
Implicit in all of these is a desire, conscious or not, that acts as an arrow pointing which way the story will go. Once there is desire, there is a sense of progress since we can determine how close or far a character is to achieving their goal. Without desire, there can be no forward or backward. There can be no conflict. There can be no resolution.
Most often, the strongest desire will be felt by the protagonist. But every character should have one in order to be a more well-rounded individual, and to reflect the fact that everyone on earth desires something, even if it’s to be free from desire. Inanimate objects and abstract constructs can manifest desires since they have “default” or “ideal” states they naturally tend towards. Kingdoms can have desires. So can cultures. So can the universe, if you think of entropy and the dispersion of all motion as a sort of end result toward which our universe slowly moves. Trees desire to find nutrients. The wind desires to create equilibrium. Even God, who has limitless power, feels desire.
Without desire, there is no story.
But desire, by itself, does not reflect the human experience. Because there is no more common human experience than frustrated desire.
For that, we need Complication.
Complication
Complication is anything that gets in the way of desire. This is what story pundits are talking about when they demand conflict on every page. But I don’t believe conflict is the right word for this, for a number of reasons.
Conflict implies conflicting desires; it’s right in the name. And while it’s true that the majority of conflicts will be between two entities whose desires are mutually exclusive, that is not the only form of complication possible—nor the only form of complication that makes for a compelling story.
Consider a husband and wife who have been happily married for 20 years when they find out that one of them has cancer. Immediately we have a complication—a big enough complication to write a whole story about. But is this a conflict? Both parties desire the same thing: to remain happily married. Now they must fight the battle of treatment, hope, and despair together. It’s true that cancer is a conflict for both of them in a technical sense. The pundits are correct. But the word “conflict” suggests cross purposes, which is only true if you think of cancer as having a desire. Did you think that way before reading this essay?
Take the example further: What if instead of cancer, you merely have a couple who have fallen out of love with each other. They still want the relationship to work. Neither one has been unfaithful to the other or found a replacement that's pulling them away. There isn't a “conflict,” unless we say that their conflict is with the natural decay of emotion over time. And it is! But when you say "I want a conflict in their marriage," the first thing that comes to mind is a nasty argument or even infidelity. And that is far from being the only form of conflict possible.
This is why I prefer the term “complication.” A complication can be a world-ending conflict, or it can be an everyday uphill battle of the kind we all face. Complications are, more than anything else, realistic and relatable obstacles. They are the stuff of life, the common friction we all experience on a daily basis. Complications are a form of pain, and that is why they increase our empathy with any character who faces them.
If desire defines an end goal for the story, complications define the plot. The more complications you have, and the more they escalate, and the greater their variety, the more interesting your story will be. When things start feeling slow, the easiest way to rev them up is to throw a new complication—a new conflict—in the way of your heroes. But, crucially, an equally valid choice would be to add a new desire, or transition to the final stage of a desire…
Resolution
Resolution is the outcome of a desire that has met with complications. Most often it will be a positive outcome, the attaining of that desire—at least by the end of a story. But it can also be something complex and bittersweet, or even something tragic.
Resolution is the resolving of tension. It is the reaction phase after the action sequence, the final chapter in a book where our beloved characters get to finally enjoy the fruits of their labor. It is also the moment they decide they no longer want the thing they always desired. It is the moment they let go, or find that the complications they faced have taught them lessons along the way.
Generally speaking, the deeper the desire and the more protracted the complications, the larger the resolution should be. The final film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King, spends a full 30 minutes showing us the aftermath of Sauron’s defeat and the reestablishment of peace. There is no conflict in this section, except perhaps the burden of letting go—something that both the characters in the story and us, the viewers, must do. You heard that right: 30 minutes of movie with no real conflict.
And this illustrates an incredibly important point:
Every page must show at least 1 of the 3 stages.
It must establish or reinforce a desire; it must present or escalate a complication; it must resolve a desire.
Not every page needs conflict, but every page does need to be driving one of the phases of story.
Additional thoughts
It is worth mentioning that the reader experience can be managed by changing how you space these phases out:
If a desire is expressed, a complication appears, and it takes a long time to reach resolution (usually because of many compounding complications), then you have tension.
If a desire is expressed, a complication appears, but resolution is instant (such as a child breaking a priceless urn only to find some treasure was hidden inside), then you have intrigue, surprise, or delight.
It also seems to me that certain genres will emphasize one phase over the others. Action and adventure books spend their time mostly in the realm of Complication, while a cozy slice-of-life story might highlight Resolution.
It’s also the case that multiple Desire-Complication-Resolution threads should be running simultaneously. A story becomes much more interesting when the hero isn’t just trying to defeat the bad guy, but also to prove his innocence and reconnect with his estranged wife. Better yet: these threads should be intertwined, so that a resolution in one becomes a complication in another, or so that they all resolve together. Temporary threads can be used to bolster otherwise dull sections of the story, while longer threads will define the overarching plot.
This framework for storytelling better describes the vast array of movies and novels which make use of conflict as just one piece of the total package. A page where there’s no conflict may not be a failure, as long as it contains Desire or Resolution instead. And those writers who love putting conflict on every page? They may continue doing so, secure in the fact that conflict, or at least complication, is a vital part of any story.
It’s just not the only one.
I'm with you absolutely on not needing conflict on every page. I would approach the explanation differently, though, and I'm not sure if I would be saying something different from you or if I would just be saying it differently. But here goes.
You don't need conflict on every page. You need tension on every page. Conflict occurs when the thing in tension snaps, and the outcome resolves the tension, which ends the story, or at least ends that arc of the story. When writers fill their books with conflict, it is because they are not good enough to sustain tension.
And I agree with you about desire, though I am more inclined to call it love. But to me, the key to story is not so much conflicting desires or loves, but incompatible desires or loves. But the incompatibility of the two loves only arises when faced with a particular situation. The crisis of the story is reached when the incompatibility of the two loves cannot be sustained, and one must be sacrificed. This is why, in the hero's journey, there are two refusals (though they are often omitted from accounts of the model). They are the refusal of the call at the beginning and the refusal of return at the end. These refusals frame the hero's moral reluctance to go on the journey.
Without that moral reluctance, without the incompatible desires, the plot is a merely technical one. The hero has a problem to solve, and he solves it. The only tension comes from the practical difficulties he will face, though we know very well that he will overcome them all. But with the incompatible loves or desires, the hero has a moral problem as well as a practical problem, and the thing about the moral problem is that we know that no matter which way it is solved, it will involve a significant loss as one desire, one love, must be sacrificed. This creates sustainable moral tension.
Thus in LOTR the task is not simply to carry a magic ring through Middle Earth and drop it in a volcano. That would be a merely practical challenge. What gives it tension is that Frodo desires both to keep the ring and to destroy it. He must choose between these two things and whichever he chooses will come at enormous moral cost.