Three types of conflict

[Teresa Edgerton]

It's like all other writing advice and writing tools, Mouse. It's greatest use may be when the writer is already aware that something isn't working or something is missing, and is looking for a way to remedy the problem.

So long as your stories develop instinctively and you and your readers are happy with the result, you don't need to understand any of this. On a deeper level, I suspect you do understand, but it's subconscious, not something you think about as you are writing.

 

[Jesspica]

I first read this idea in Nigel Watts's excellent book "Writing a Novel". I don't know if it's his creation, but I haven't seen it elsewhere, and after being reminded of it recently, I think it deserves to be more widely known.

He posits that you can divide the sources of conflict in a story into three basic types or levels:

Internal
Interpersonal
Environmental (this can be nature but also society, cultural mores etc.)

And he says that if you add another source of conflict of the same type to a story, it complicates it**. If you add another source of a different type, it deepens it.

I think this is a very clever and simple way of looking at it -- one of those things that seems so obvious when pointed out, but which I would never have thought of myself. If I were about to start another big story, I'd bring this into my planning, and try to give roughly equal weight to each type.

** This isn't necessarily bad, up to a point.

These are basically arcs. See 8 Arcs Screenwriting Storytelling Advanced Worksheet Template

 

[Star-child]

These are basically arcs. See 8 Arcs Screenwriting Storytelling Advanced Worksheet Template

I don't see how those 8 arcs are the same as 3 simple conflict types and their additive effect.

There are all different formulas that can flesh out writing, but these two appear to be coming at it from fairly different places. If anything they appear complimentary because of their differing perspectives