Welcome to day 14 of PREPTOBER! This is a series of daily questions and prompts to help you prepare for this year’s upcoming NaNoWriMo!
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Today’s question is:
What is your novel’s Universal Conflict?
Feel free to share your answer in the comments! I would love to hear your response!
All good stories have three levels of conflict. We’ve already talked about internal conflict and external conflict. The third is universal conflict.
You may have heard this concept called existential conflict or societal conflict. But I prefer the term universal because this is a conflict that affects your novel’s universe…. Universally.
Let’s take a look at Game of Thrones.
Jon Snow is a bastard son of a high lord. This means he grew up side by side with the lords and ladies of Winterfell but has no title or inheritance. So he goes to The Wall where he swears an oath to protect the realm from threats beyond the wall including wildlings and the legendary white walkers who haven’t been seen for centuries. Part of that oath is to remain celibate. But then he meets Ygritte, a wildling woman.
Jon struggles internally with the ramifications of breaking his oath. The Night’s Watch and the Wildlings are enemies, which creates the external conflict.
But as the lines between friend and foe become blurred (internal conflict), a new enemy arise…The White Walkers. These are a zombie-like foe that are marching on the realm, a threat to all humanity.
They represent the Universal Conflict. They affect all the Wildlings, the Night’s Watch and the Realm at large. It is only by banding together that they can overcome such a terrible enemy. And guess what? Jon Snow is precisely the hero to unify the realm.
Now, in this example it’s easy to point out the Universal conflict because it is represented by a supernatural force, there are actual characters that represent this conflict.
But not every story will have a convenient supernatural element like the White Walkers to demonstrate their universal conflict. So how do you use universal conflict in a more contemporary way?
The White Walkers aren’t just an army of the dead but are a metaphor for death— something that affects all of us. Especially the folks in Westeros.
For your story, your universal conflict could be love, death, sickness, poverty, power, or revenge. You might be thinking, hang on, this sounds a lot like Theme. And you are completely right.
Universal conflict is an echo of your theme. Theme is a message, but Universal conflict is the explication of that theme. It draws out the theme and makes it real and tangible on the page. Universal Conflict is still conflict: two sides must collide viscerally on the page.
In Star Wars, it’s the conflict of good versus evil as represented by the Rebels vs the Empire. In Pride and Prejudice, it’s about upper vs lower class. In Avatar it is about the conservation of natural resources vs the exploitation of them. The result of these conflicts further illustrates the theme, but is not the theme itself.
What is your novel’s universal conflict?
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