Does a novel require a conflict?
Unless a better writer can dissuade me I am minded to say no. The 'essential' 'conflict' is cultural. It is part of the western 'Human Condition' - Eastern cultures have stories without conflict.
Indeed, I'd venture the first story you ever wrote did not contain a conflict. It was entitled "Me and Mommy in the park" and was little more than a juvenile chronicle - regardless it was still a story.
My next experience comes from comedians, 'The two Ronnies' spring to mind. Their stories (jokes) had no conflict and in many examples the expected conflict never materialised. (That fact, in itself, making the story humorous). The skill of these comedians lay in how long they could entertain whilst stringing-out a simple story.
In my personal development as writer I began the exercise of how long I could go in a story without introducing a conflict. (I can do about 60k).
This is a very old debate - the defence of the argument seems to be to broaden the definition of conflict.
My current position is that conflict is not a requirement. In comedic terms - how long can you string out a joke before revealing the punch line.
I have been asked to clarify this question as it has been flagged as similar to 'Can you have a story with an antagonist?'. Antagonist is generally used with regard to character driven conflicts (Hero vs Villain). The films 'The Martian', 'Gravity' and 'Castaway' do not have antagonists because the character is alone. (Wilson is a foil). These stories are tales of struggle. Whether 'struggle' = 'conflict' is a debate in itself.
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I don't know the eastern tradition well enough to comment on whether or not it has stories without conflict. But of course, this depends on what you mean by story. But then the question is not about stories, it is about novels and the novel is not an eastern art form. It was invented in the west within the culture of the west.
But that does not help much because it depends on how you define the word novel, which gets defined broadly or narrowly by different people for different purposes (see Walter Scott's distinction between novel and romance, mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel)
But this is just how language works. There are not enough words for all the things we want to talk about, so words are used with different degrees of specificity and scope depending on the kind of argument you want to make. Any serious work of argument, therefore, has to begin by defining its terms.
For example, one could argue that all humor requires conflict because the essence of humor is the conflict between expectation and reality. The fork handles sketch is funny because of the conflict between the expectation the Ronnie Barker wanted four candles when he actually wanted fork handles.
But you might argue that that is not conflict, just a misunderstanding. But that is not a disagreement about substance, it is simply a preference for a different definition of the word conflict. Behind it is (one hopes) a desire to make an argument about the real world, not simply an attempt to claim prior right of definition.
The best way to get to the substance of the matter is often to reframe the debate without the use of the contentious word. So let me take a stab at defining story without using "conflict".
Story (for my immediate purpose here) is a fictional narrative in which a change of state takes place which engages the interest of human beings. The key components of this definitions are fictional (it did not happen) change (something is different at the end than at the beginning) and interest (the change captures our attention).
So, a fictional narrative in which nothing changes is not, for my purpose, a story. Call it a vignette, if you like. It is out of scope.
So, what makes a change interesting?
I believe that what makes a change interesting is how that change affects our lives. If the river is higher today than yesterday, that is interesting to me if my house is beside the river and I might get flooded out.
But such a change is only interesting when it is true. If someone tells me the river is rising and I look out the window and see that it isn't, I lose interest.
So the question becomes, what type of change is interesting even when we know it isn't true? I believe the answer to that is changes that involve making decisions. But not all decisions are interesting. The interesting ones are those with consequences. Decisions with consequences are hard to make because we then have to live with the consequences.
Making difficult decisions requires not only knowledge and skill, but also courage. Difficult decisions are the pivot points of human life. They are moments in which we commit ourselves in irrevocable ways that change our lives and the lives of others. As with any other difficult task, we like to rehearse for difficult decisions. We like to draw inspiration from the brave decisions of others. We like to explore the potential consequences of deciding one way or another.
Stories are how we do this. Stories are how we explore and prepare for making hard decisions in our lives. We read them for comfort, for reassurance, for courage, for guidance, and for inspiration, because we know that from time to time we have to make hard decisions ourselves.
If this analysis is correct, then a story (a fictional narrative the involves change and evokes interest) requires the protagonist to make a difficult decision with consequences for themselves and others.
Where does this leave us in regards to conflict? What makes a decision difficult is that it involves a choice between two values. (Thus my frequent assertion that all stories are fundamentally moral -- they are about a choice of values.) A choice between two values strikes me as a conflict. This is, finally, a matter of definition though. If you choose to narrow the definition of conflict to only apply when punches are thrown, for instance, then you can certainly have a story (by my definition) without conflict.
But then I would have to ask what larger point you were trying to make in defining conflict in a way that would exclude it from some instances of story.
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Stories need conflict - that's a rule.
Rules are there to be broken - that's another.
And there's the unbreakable one, about when the rules can be broken: when you know what you're doing.
Story when the author failed to create a conflict - through negligence, lack of skill, or burn-out, or whatever lame excuse - are boring. Yes, you can create one, and no, it won't be good.
But a conflict is such an inherent part of every known story, that subverting it can achieve great results when done right.
It's very rare the conflict will vanish completely. It may do so in some jokes, especially groaners. It may be completely vestigial in slice-of-life, documentary, mood pieces. Sometimes it will be merely implied. In more "active" genres the more likely approach is subversion: consciously "murdering" the obvious conflict and replacing it with a more subtle and less obvious one.
Let me give an example of the latter: One Punch Man manga. It's humorous, but simultaneously cynically bitter. The protagonist is a superhero, who can beat every single enemy with a single punch. Which totally ruins the obvious conflict of the typical superhero story (which "One Punch Man" pretends to be). That's boring! And that boredom is lampshaded to ludicrous levels.
This is the actual conflict: man versus self; protagonist versus own boredom. He's so powerful he has no room to develop. No super-villain is powerful enough to stand in his way. And so we have the actual conflict - search for friendship, recognition, challenge, overcoming simple daily routine difficulties - all in a world wrecked by supervillains he can dispose of with one punch.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28332. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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