5 ways to avoid writing contrived conflict
Conflict is one of the core components of any good story. No one wants to read a book where nothing ever happens or there are no conflicts or challenges to overcome.
But sometimes that leads writers to stuffing in conflict where it’s not needed or adding conflict for the sake of conflict. We don’t need any more drama queens.
Adding real conflict takes practice and it takes the ability to separate yourself from your story and your characters. We often see contrived conflict when the main character is a self-insert and the author doesn’t want anything bad to happen to them or they don’t want them to struggle too hard to get their happily ever after.
But that is boring! And it can quickly turn your audience on your beloved characters.
Just as show, don’t tell is standard writing advice, avoiding contrivance should be another piece of advice for writers. Contrivance is essentially a break in believability or a device that gives a sense of artificiality. It typically reveals to readers what the author wants to happen or that the author is controlling the story instead of letting it naturally unfold.
Yes, as a writer you do control the story and manipulate your readers’ emotions and feelings, but it still needs to be believable and not come from left field.
If you’re ever reading something and think to yourself, “well that’s convenient,” you’ve probably encountered contrivance in writing. So, let’s talk about five ways to avoid contrived conflict in your writing.
How to avoid contrived conflict in your story
Follow your rules
If you’re writing a vampire story and have established that your vampires cannot go out in the day and be exposed to sunlight but later one of your vampires goes out in the sun unharmed, people will be mad. They’ll be even more mad when it’s revealed that oh, on the day of a full moon vampires can go out during the day and there are no repercussions but that tidbit wasn’t shared until it was happening.
Plot twists are good, but not when they haven’t been foreshadowed or can’t work within the rules you created for your story.
Write in third-person POV
If you do have a unique twist or want to hold out on sharing information that will be important later, do not write in first-person. Like the vampire example, you can’t write from the vampire’s POV and then try to shock your audience that he can go outside when he knew this all along.
We should have followed along with him as he plans to go out on this day because he can. First-person doesn’t allow you to hide information from your readers as we should see everything in the character’s head. A first-person POV character wouldn’t be hiding anything from themselves, so it seems contrived to hide it from the audience.
Have characters communicate
With everyone glued to their phones these days it’s a lot harder to use miscommunication as a point of conflict in your story. I’ve seen modern stories where part of the conflict is because characters aren’t communicating with each other even though they have all the means in the world to do so! It’s annoying and pulls a reader right out of the story.
Provide motivation behind character’s actions
Have you read books where the characters get into fights to generate some conflict even though it doesn’t add up or make sense by their driving motivation? Or have you seen where a character hates another character for no reason just to introduce some conflict?
It falls flat! Readers need to understand each character’s motivation and how it played a role in creating this conflict or they won’t buy it. Tell us their history, their wants and needs, their goals in life, and how they make the choices they do so we know how this conflict came to be.
Because the plot says so (AKA put a lampshade on it)
This is when a character takes an action because you need to get the plot to the next scene. It doesn’t make sense but the author lampshades the fact by having other characters point out that it’s weird but still accept it and move on.
Have any other tips for writers on how to avoid contrivance in their WIP? Share your ideas in the comments below!
