Can you believe it? It’s already time to vote for crowd favorite and top row winners at the first supergrid of our 2014 summer series! But first, I am pleased to bring you part two of my article on literary conflict. You will find the grid and all the voting guidelines at the bottom of this post.

Conflict in Writing: What is it and why do you need it?

Part Two: How to Incorporate Conflict in Your Writing

Last time, we talked about the different types of literary conflict and the role conflict plays in good writing. Conflict drives your story forward, so it should be present in any scene you write—and it should be believable and engaging. Let’s look at some different ways to incorporate conflict in your writing.

Risk & Emotional Connections

The most common way to create conflict is by putting your protagonist or another character at risk. Have them face their fear of giant spiders, give them a broken leg and put them in front of a train, put them in a situation where their greatest secret is about to be revealed, have them battle six armed demons or one nasty mother-in-law. But before you put a character at risk, it’s absolutely vital that you create an emotional connection between your reader and that character. Your reader should love or hate the character in question; if your reader doesn’t care about the character’s fate, then the conflict will fall flat and your reader will feel like you’ve wasted their time. 

Dialogue

The interaction between your protagonist and another character (or characters) can introduce your reader to the underlying conflict quickly and effectively. Look at the following example:

“Pass the potatoes,” said Sally.
“Get the damn potatoes yourself!” Victor replied.

The tension is immediately apparent. The reader knows Victor is angry, and likely with Sally. Look at what happens when you alter the dialogue:

“Pass the potatoes,” said Sally.
“What potatoes?” Victor asked.

There is still tension, but it’s different. Instead of anger, we have confusion and perhaps the beginnings of a potato mystery.

Word Choice

Choose energetic words to describe the conflict, rather than just stating what’s happening. This helps to bring your reader into the scene, drawing on their own emotions and experience to feed the conflict in the story. Compare the following two sentences:

1. Debbie was scared, so she lit the fire.
2. Debbie’s heart raced and her hands trembled as she lit the fire.

The first sentence tells us what’s happening, while the second makes us feel what’s happening. Be deliberate in your word choices—and please don’t fall into the trap of overusing adjectives and adverbs, which can be really off-putting. (I highly recommend investing in a good dictionary and thesaurus for this reason.)

Contrasting Emotions & Opposing Goals

Another good way to build conflict is by putting two of your main characters in conflicting emotional states. For example, Stan is desperately in love with Amber and will do anything to win her love. Amber, however, is in love with Stan’s older brother, Billy, who prefers to fight aliens, but occasionally pays attention to Amber. This puts the characters in close proximity and gives you lots of simmering tension.

Giving two of your main characters opposing goals can also create conflict. For example, Klaus and Greta are desperately in love. Klaus wants nothing more than to get married and have a family, but Greta wants to become a rocket scientist and doesn’t really like kids. Lots of potential tension in that scenario too.

These are just a few examples of how you can incorporate conflict into your own writing. You can have different types of conflict within one story. You can also vary the intensity of the conflict in different scenes. The key is to choose believable conflict that suits your story and your characters—and then make your readers care about what happens.

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The summer supergrid is open for popular voting!

The summer supergrid crowd favorite and top row winners will be determined by popular vote. Be cautioned: yeah write isn’t an Internet clicking contest, and the votes are moderated for fairness. Read each post before voting.

Everybody gets four votes

We use scaled voting each week for the challenge grid. This week, we each get four votes because there are between 31 and 40 entries. Click on the thumbnails to read each post before voting. Click on the nifty heart-shaped voting icon to vote for the post after reading. Do not vote for your own post, please. We’ll delete your vote if you do. We’re not kidding. Trust us, it’ll be OK if you vote for other people.

Read the posts before voting

We are responsible voters here at yeah write. Read, evaluate, and vote on merit. Even though the grid was unmoderated this week, we’re still writing the yeah write way, and we want the votes to reflect it.

Voting is open until Friday, 6:00 p.m. EDT

• Yeah write and the Inlinkz app allow only one round of votes per IP address. When campaigning for votes for your favorites, please ask outside voters to read this section before voting. It will lessen their confusion and curb their clicking enthusiasm.
• If it’s after 6:00 p.m. EDT [-4 GMT] on Friday when you’re trying to vote, voting is closed. There will be no more voting icons on the thumbnail and voting will not work.
• Once you’ve voted for your four favorite posts, you’re done voting. The voting icons will disappear.
• Voting for your own post should be disabled. If it’s not, please don’t vote for your own post.
• Once you’ve voted for the four best on the grid, you are then free to campaign for votes for your favorite entries.
• If you’d like to see the current vote tallies after you’ve voted, refresh the page.
• If you just cannot resist asking your people to vote for your entry, please let them know they have four votes, and they should vote for yours only if they honestly think it’s one of the best on the grid. Campaigning for your own targeted votes is highly discouraged.
• The vote tallies show only from the same IP address you voted from the first time, so if you leave home and get to the gym and, oops, now can’t see who’s in the lead, please wait until you get back home. Voting again to reveal the new tallies just makes much more work for our editors who, in exasperation, may delete first and ask no questions later. One voting round per IP address, one voting round per person. Thanks.

Winners’ announced in Sunday’s kickoff post 

Once the voting ends, the challenge grid will sort itself from highest number of votes to the fewest. Ties are broken by number of page views. Until the winners’ post is published, none of the sorting will be official, but you can still get a good idea of where everyone ended up until the votes are validated.
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