Welcome to day 3 of PREPTOBER! This is a series of daily questions and prompts to help you prepare for this year’s upcoming NaNoWriMo!
Today’s question is:
What are your character’s external struggles?
Feel free to share your answer in the comments! I would love to hear your response!
Feel free to share your answer in the comments! I would love to hear your response!
Last time, we talked about how all characters have internal conflict. A set of beliefs that are opposing in nature.
External conflict is similar, it is two opposing forces that collide thus creating conflict and tension.
This is the easier of the conflicts to identify. It’s Katniss vs the Other Victors in the Hunger Games, It’s Harry vs Voldemort, and Luke vs Vader.
For today’s exercise, I want you to focus on the conflict between two characters. This may be between your protagonist and your antagonist. Or perhaps it’s a conflict between two friends, like Harry and Ron in the Goblet of Fire and the Deathly Hallows; or like Sam and Frodo at the end of the Lord of the Rings.
How does conflict appear to wedge itself between your characters and why?
The reason why we started with Internal conflict, even though external conflict is easier to identify is that knowing your character’s motivations helps you understand why they even bother with conflict in the first place.
You may not be a Hamilton fan, but this line rings in my head every time I think about my characters:
“If you stand for nothing, Burr, what will you fall for?”
(Fast forward to the 2-minute mark for just that line. It gets reprised again in an excellent way in this song around the 3:30 minute mark).
So the question is, what does your character stand for, and what are they willing to fight for, fall for?
There is a reason why Burr is the villain in this story. He has no spine, he’s wishy-washy and has no stance.
Give your character some backbone. Make the stakes high, we can’t have your main character people pleasing and walking away the minute they meet resistance. That’s a terrible story. Give them something that they are willing to die for, and then create an antagonistic force that threatens to do just that.
Harry fights for his friends, and he dies to protect them from Voldemort.
Frodo fights Mordor for the Shire.
Katniss fights the other victors for her sister (remember her story is a little more nuanced. If she dies, her family starves).
So step one, go back and complete the internal conflict exercise. Then identify the external conflict that threatens to destroy what your character holds dear.
Share this post with a friend so that we can all write together!