Spark to Story: Turn an Idea Into a Page-Turning Concept for Your Novel

Workshop, Week 3. Adding Conflict

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Welcome to Week 3! Over the past two weeks, you've made impressive progress. In Week 1, you identified your basic idea—that initial spark of inspiration. In Week 2, you breathed life into your idea by adding a main character with a burning desire or goal to create a concept. If you missed either lesson, you can catch up here: Week 1 and Week 2.

Here's your summary for Week 3:

1. An essay on the importance of conflict in a novel, the types of literary conflict, and how to enhance your story concept by devising strong conflicts.

2. A trick I’ve learned that helps when you struggle to uncover suitable conflicts.

3. Your weekly assignment.

Now, we're ready for one of the most important tasks in writing a novel: adding conflict to your story.

My mantra is: No conflict, no story.

I can't emphasize this enough—conflict is essential to storytelling. It keeps readers hanging on because they want to know how the conflict gets resolved. Even children's books and fairy tales have conflict! Again, without conflict, you have no story. At least not one that readers will want to stick with to the end.

I learned this the hard way with one of my first attempts at writing a novel. I created a character who went about achieving her dreams with only minor obstacles getting in her way. I soon realized that the story fell flat. Readers wouldn’t care what happened (I barely cared) because nothing was at stake.

Think about it, if you were reading a novel where the lead character merely went on a series of pleasant dates and quickly found her dream match, would you keep turning the pages? Probably not! The drama—the reason readers stay engaged—comes from the roadblocks, complications, and challenges that make achieving the goal difficult.

I knew I needed to shake things up with that early attempt in a big way. I abandoned it and focused on coming up with an idea that would have multiple conflicts in mind from the inception. I realized I could use conflict to power the story forward. It would force my character to make difficult choices under pressure, and that would slowly reveal who she truly was and how she might want to change.

(As with all workshops and challenges at Behind the Chapters, this workshop remains available as long as you are a paid subscriber.)