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47 Intermediate Ic Internal Conflict Character

Internal Conflict

The struggle inside the character's own heart.

What it is

Internal conflict is a character wanting two things, being unable to have both, and having a real case for each one. The last part carries the whole element. Plenty of characters want things badly. Strength of feeling does not decide whether you have internal conflict. The standing of the second claim does. Here is the test: would a sensible person in the same position find the choice hard? If so, you have it.

Every other kind of opposition has an outside. A villain, a storm, a deadline, a system that will not bend: those all live on the Conflict page, which covers blockers, systems, weather, deadlines and opposition in general. A character can beat an ordinary obstacle with wit, by running, or by talking someone around. Internal conflict cannot be beaten that way, because the obstacle is made of something the character also values. The thing in the way is a second thing the same person wants. You cannot outwit it, bargain with it, or go around it. The only exit is surrender. The character has to destroy one half of what she cares about, and the surrender itself is the meaning of the story.

Insight does not settle it either. Seeing clearly fixes a false belief. Here it fixes nothing, because the character can understand herself perfectly and still face the same two claims. Internal conflict is not a weakness waiting for repair, and not a false belief waiting to be knocked down. Both sides have a case, and the ending removes one. What settles the conflict is a priced choice, with the bill visible to the reader. One big consequence follows for how you write it: internal conflict cannot be written as thought. It reaches the reader only as decisions with prices attached. And if one option is obviously correct, there is no internal conflict at all, only a postponement of the inevitable.

Try the advocate exercise. Write one sentence for each claim, the best case you can make, as if you were the character's lawyer. The sentence should say what is really at stake for her, which is often different from what she would say herself. If both sentences hold up on paper, you have real internal conflict. If the second one sounds like cowardice, laziness, denial or vanity, you have something else. Look at flaw or the lie instead, because those invite correction rather than weighing. Both have their own pages. Angela Ackerman's piece on Jane Friedman's site, listed below, does this exercise in public: she takes one dilemma and argues it from each side, and the demonstration shows that a loss on either path is what makes the struggle believable.

Take a woman whose sister faces prison. In one version she wants her sister free and she wants the truth made public. Both can be defended, and she cannot have both, so this is internal conflict. In another version she wants her sister free and she wants a quiet life. The second claim barely stands up. That version is a mood, nothing more.

Or take a surgeon who knows her hospital covered up a death. She can testify or keep silent. In the weak version she stays silent because she fears for her job. Readers get impatient with that. They are waiting on her courage, and they know it. In the strong version her department is the only provider of a certain procedure in the county. Forty patients a year survive because of it. Going public would close the unit, and the unit exists because of her. Now neither the reader nor the surgeon can say what she should do.

Look at what changed between those versions. The wrong answer got a constituency: real people who need it. So the right action now harms somebody specific. The method works in any genre. Find out who gets hurt when the character does the correct thing, then make that person specific, present and sympathetic.

Three elements on this table get mixed up all the time: the lie, the flaw, and internal conflict. Here is how they differ. The lie is a false belief, something like people leave, so do not get attached. The belief is wrong, and the story takes it apart. Nothing of value is lost when it goes, because nothing can be said in its defense. The flaw is a wrong habit so ingrained that it keeps damaging the character's own position. A flaw is a shortcoming, and nobody mourns its cure. Internal conflict has no wrong side. Both claims deserve a hearing, and the one that gets surrendered is truly lost. Antigone holds no false belief about burying her brother. Scobie, in Graham Greene's novel below, lacks no feeling. Neither of them needs fixing. Each is stuck.

One character can carry all three at once, and often a wound, old damage from the past, explains why one claim grips harder than it should. But the three are different machines. A lie is disproved. A flaw is outgrown. An internal conflict is paid.

The neighbor that causes the most confusion is want vs need. That element separates the outer goal the character chases from the inner truth she avoids, and its two sides are unequal. Nobody wants humility. The need arrives as a bill. On this page the sides are equal. The character wants both, consciously, and the story is about which one gets released. A quick way to tell them apart: if the character feels relief at being excused from one option, you are in want-vs-need territory, and this page is the wrong one for that book.

Seven pairs come up over and over. Each one is shorthand for a whole kind of story.

One caution. Those seven are categories, and a category cannot be dramatized. A blurb line like "Torn between duty and desire" tells you nothing about what goes in chapter nine. To be usable, the pair has to be specific to one person. Reduce each claim to objects, names and dates. Duty against desire is a category. A man must sign for cargo at the harbor at five, because his father's creditors are waiting on it, and the woman leaves on the seven o'clock train, and no evening contains both. That names a scene. Loyalty against truth is a category. The fingerprints on the shutter are her brother's, the file goes to the prosecutor on Thursday, and she alone has seen them. That names a scene too. Writers who stall on a book have usually stopped at the category level, and the result is vague chapters. If your pair is still abstract, Ian Irvine, a working novelist, keeps a long free list of ways to pit two claims against each other inside one character, and the list is linked below.

The pair also has to fit this character's history, not only the situation. A woman who has been told all her life that she is the reliable one feels duty differently from someone who was never asked for anything. Backstory has one job on this page: explaining why one claim outweighs the other for her specifically, rather than for anyone else. Backstory for its own sake is only explanation.

Now the part most writers get wrong. Internal conflict has no body. You cannot film it. The reader sees only behavior. So the element reaches the reader one way, through choices that cost something. Interior monologue, the character's thoughts on the page, looks like the obvious vehicle, and in practice it wastes the element more often than anything else does. Four pages of deliberation are busy on the surface and static underneath, because nothing got closed off. The reader learns what the character thinks, and learns nothing about what the character will lose. What she will lose is the element's only question.

Four forms do work, roughly in order of power. The first is a small decision with a visible price. Her brother phones, she answers, and she walks into her daughter's recital twenty minutes late. Nobody says the word loyalty. The reader can now see how she ranks things. The second is a decision that closes an option. She signs a non-disclosure agreement, and the truth is now expensive in a way it was not a page earlier. Growth in this element comes from doors closing, never from feelings getting stronger. The third is a decision under a deadline the character did not choose. Anyone in a real dilemma stalls. Pressure stops the stalling. A ticking clock in this role is not thriller seasoning. The clock is the reason the choice happens at all. The fourth is the one irreversible decision, which is the climax.

Between decisions, the conflict leaks out in behavior: an uncharacteristic snap, a missed appointment, a drink at an odd hour, fussing over trivia. Becca Puglisi, co-author of The Conflict Thesaurus listed below, keeps a catalog of these tell-tale behaviors at Writers Helping Writers. The idea underneath her list is that a split mind performs badly at everyday tasks. Subtext does similar work in dialogue. The character talks around the pair as though she were talking about something unrelated, which is how real people handle what they cannot face.

Thoughts remain usable, as seasoning rather than the meal. The best place for them is after a costly choice. Thought after a decision is rationalization, the character excusing herself, and that is far livelier than weighing before one.

Why it matters

This element earns its place on the table for structural reasons more than emotional ones. A plot is a sequence of outside pressures. By itself it can be competent and still feel arbitrary, a sequence of things that happen. What makes a draft feel like a book is each big turn bearing on one internal question, each from a somewhat different direction. The plot's main job, in fact, is to narrow the ground until the decision can no longer be postponed. Narrowing the ground is what makes a book read as one thing rather than two.

Knowing the two claims gives the plot a job description. The first plot point is where the two claims first collide; before that event, having both was still believable. The midpoint is where the secretly preferred option gets dearer. All is lost removes the compromise that let the character avoid choosing. The climax is the moment postponement ends. When readers call a book coherent, they mean the plot and the person are one problem seen from two sides, not merely a plot that makes sense. Donald Maass spends a long section of The Emotional Craft of Fiction (Writer's Digest Books, 2016), listed below, on joining the inner journey to the outer one so that plot events push on the internal question. Most novelists who read that section outline differently afterward.

An editor's note that a draft reads like two books almost always means this is missing. The draft has a plot doing plot things beside an inner life that touches it now and then. When an editor writes this reads like two books in the margin, more introspection does not fix it. The fix is to take every major event and identify the claim it prices up.

Knowing the two claims also tells you what the last chapter contains. The climax is a situation where the character cannot keep both, cannot delay, and cannot hand the choice to anyone else. The part writers skip most often is the visible loss of the surrendered claim. Suppose a character chooses duty, then learns in the last chapter that desire was available all along. The climax settled nothing. The question was canceled after the fact. Readers feel the cheat without being able to name it, and this is the top cause of flat endings that are otherwise technically sound.

Payment is what gives the choice its meaning. The reader watched two things matter for a whole book. So the last pages must show one of them going, and the character living in what remains. Misery is not required. A small, specific cost is fine. But the cost must be visible and on the page, not implied.

Of every fix a thin draft can get, this one is the easiest to add late. Structure cannot be bolted onto a finished plot. Internal conflict can, which matters if you write on a schedule. If your outline works but the book feels thin, do not rebuild. Locate claim two, the thing your protagonist also wants that winning the plot will destroy. Then price three or four scenes the outline already holds. Expect about a week of work and no restructure. Of all the changes you could make, this one is the likeliest to move a draft from adequate to memorable, and it is the substance of readers saying they cared.

Internal conflict also generates scenes. If you have a blank chapter and can name both claims, the remedy is simple. Same room, both claims, and somebody demands a decision.

In a series, internal conflict is a consumable asset. Careers go wrong here. Settling the conflict spends it, because the choice has been made. Repeat the same dilemma in the next book and readers see regression, and they do not forgive it. They paid to watch the choice get made, and a reversal feels like a refund taken back. Yet a lead who carries no dilemma at all stops being worried about. So a series needs a plan, and three patterns work.

Re-pose it; never repeat it. Keep the pair, change the terms, raise the price. A detective chooses the job over her marriage in book one. In book four the job is set against her daughter. Same category, new claimants, and the earlier choice feeds the new difficulty.

Stack it. Give each book its own conflict and run a second one the length of the series arc, resolved at the series end. Long-running crime and fantasy series are usually built this way, and of the three patterns it is the safest.

Move it into the cast. Keep the lead mostly settled and let the book's true subject carry the dilemma: the client, the suspect, the recruit, the antagonist. Nearly all long fixed-lead series do this, which is why book eleven can work as an entry point.

Decide before book one how much it may settle. The failure mode is book three discovering that book one spent everything.

Real-world examples

Antigone (about 441 BC): two people, one claim apiece

Sophocles' Antigone was first performed in Athens at the Festival of Dionysus around 441 BC, which makes it the oldest example of this element. Antigone's two brothers have died at each other's hands in the Theban war. Their uncle Creon, who now rules Thebes, decrees that Polynices, the brother who attacked the city, must stay unburied. Antigone buries him regardless.

The play repays study for its even balance. Creon's side is a city fresh from civil war, whose laws must be obeyed if it is to survive. Antigone's side is her obligation to her dead kin and to the gods, which no edict overrides. Neither can compromise, and neither is stupid. In his lectures on aesthetics in the 1820s, Hegel read the play as a collision of two moral claims rather than good against evil. Each claim is justified within its own sphere. Each turns ruinous once it claims to be absolute. Both are right, and both are too narrow, and that narrowness is what destroys them. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on Hegel's aesthetics summarizes the argument. Most craft writing on this subject descends from Hegel's reading, whether the writer knows it or not.

Notice the structure. For most of the play there are two characters carrying one claim each, rather than a single divided mind. The device is legitimate and ancient, and much easier to stage than one person at war with herself. Novels use it all the time: a loved one voices claim two. If your internal conflict is reading flat, give one claim to a character who argues it aloud.

One caveat. Hegel's balance is an ideal, and no requirement. The play itself is less balanced than his reading implies, and audiences have mostly sided with Antigone. Perfect balance is unnecessary and usually out of reach. What you need instead is a losing side with a real advocate and a real cost. The full text of the play is free at the Internet Classics Archive, listed below, and takes about an hour to read.

The Heart of the Matter (1948): paying in small decisions

Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter was published by William Heinemann in London in 1948 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize that year. Greene drew it from his wartime service in Freetown, Sierra Leone, though the book never names the colony. The setting is a British West African colony during the Second World War. Major Henry Scobie is the deputy commissioner of police. His two claims are pity, a crushing sense of responsibility for the happiness of everyone who depends on him, and Catholicism, with its precise knowledge of his sins.

No book teaches the dramatizing of a dilemma better. Little of the conflict is ever stated. Most of it is played out in deals. Scobie cannot make his wife Louise happy; she is miserable, isolated and devout. He borrows money from Yusef, a Syrian black marketeer, to send her to South Africa. While she is away he begins an affair with Helen Rolt, a nineteen-year-old widow who survived a torpedoed ship. Then Louise comes back. There is no weighing scene. Instead there is a chain of small, concrete, ruinous decisions, each purchasing one claim with the other: the loan, the letter, the lie to Louise, a promise to Helen he cannot keep, and receiving communion while he knows himself to be in mortal sin. Every decision is a scene with an object in it, money, paper, a wafer, and the objects alone carry his inner state. The letter reaches Yusef, and blackmail follows.

The novel dates from 1948, so its ending is given away here. Scobie sees no exit in which someone who depends on him is not destroyed. He invents a heart complaint, obtains sleeping pills, and arranges a death that will pass as natural. In his faith this damns him. He picks total loss, God included, on his own understanding of things. The closing note is a priest who declines to pronounce on Scobie's inner state, and the verdict is left open.

The transferable shape is this. Feeling held level. Transactions escalated. Doors shut one by one until only a single door is left.

Gone, Baby, Gone (1998): two defensible answers at the climax

Dennis Lehane's Gone, Baby, Gone is the fourth novel in his Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro series, published by William Morrow in 1998 and filmed by Ben Affleck in 2007. Its investigation ends in territory most crime fiction avoids. A warning before the plot: the book's whole force is in its last forty pages, and they are given away here.

Four-year-old Amanda McCready vanishes from a Boston neighborhood. Her mother, Helene, is neglectful. Patrick discovers that a few police officers have been quietly taking children away from abusive or neglectful parents and rehoming them with capable ones. Amanda is alive, safe, loved and cared for in one such home. Angie begs him to leave her there. He reports it. Amanda goes back to Helene. The final scene shows the returned child slumped in front of a television, Helene dressing to go out with a neighbor lined up to mind her, and Patrick looking on. Angie leaves him.

The book shows two things this page keeps insisting on. First, neither answer is rigged. Patrick's claim is that no private group of men may decide who deserves their children, regardless of how any one case turns out, and that the law exists to take such decisions out of the realm of opinion. Angie's claim is the welfare of one specific four-year-old, and the fact that children are not raised by principles. Readers finish the book firmly on either side, and in practice the verdicts split both ways. The disagreement is proof that the dilemma was real, and no flaw in the novel.

Second, the payment is immediate and permanent. Patrick does not get both. The relationship is gone, and the outcome stays in view. Think of the timid alternatives Lehane could have taken: a reformed mother, the state stepping in, the placement quietly allowed to stand. The book's standing depends largely on his declining every one of them.

There is a series lesson here too. The bill keeps running. Angie's departure and its fallout carry on through later books, and Moonlight Mile, published by William Morrow in 2010, returns to Amanda McCready twelve years after the first novel to show the decision still doing damage. A dilemma settled at real cost is no shut door. The next books inherit a legacy of consequences.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017): the same choice, made again and again

Taylor Jenkins Reid's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was published by Atria Books on June 13, 2017. The commercial lesson has nothing to do with its subject matter: settlement does not have to happen once, at the end. The dilemma itself can be the repeated unit.

Evelyn, a film star aged seventy-nine, tells the story of her life. Over five decades she wants two things: a career, with all the security that means to a girl from Hell's Kitchen poverty, and Celia St. James, the actress who is the love of her life. In mid-century Hollywood she cannot have both, and she is never confused about which she chooses. Her seven marriages are mostly arrangements; the first, at fifteen, exists purely to get her to Los Angeles. When rumors about her and Celia start circulating, her answer is a bigger scandal of her own making to drown them out. Celia, who was never asked, reads it as betrayal and leaves. Later Evelyn accepts a part and films a scene she knows Celia will find unforgivable, and Celia leaves again. Every reconciliation is real. Every one leads back to an identical choice, identically ranked.

The structure is decision after decision: one choice in many versions, each with its own price. The repetition works because the terms keep shifting. Her age and power go up. Her excuse goes down. The price climbs with each iteration. A level price would have read as someone unable to learn. A rising one reads as a life.

And she never gets both. The career claim pays what was asked of it: worldwide fame, among the most famous women living. The surrendered claim comes back late, and its return is no payment for telling the truth. Readers finish the book arguing about whether she was right, which is a reliable sign that there were two real sides.

Robin Hobb's FitzChivalry Farseer novels (1995 to 2017): one dilemma, nine books

Robin Hobb wrote nine first-person novels about one man across twenty-two years of publishing, from 1995 to 2017, and nothing else demonstrates so well how to pace a single dilemma over many books. FitzChivalry Farseer, called Fitz, is the illegitimate son of a prince, raised in the stables and trained as the royal family's assassin. His pair is fixed early: service to the Farseer line, his only source of belonging, against a private life, meaning a home, a woman, a child, and a name beyond the job.

Hobb's handling across three trilogies matches the three series patterns above. In the first trilogy, Assassin's Apprentice (1995), Royal Assassin (1996) and Assassin's Quest (1997), the conflict is set up, Fitz chooses duty, and the books make him live with the cost. The Tawny Man trilogy, published 2001 to 2003 and written four years after the first, reverses the terms. Fitz now has the quiet life, and the question is whether he leaves it when he is asked again. Same pair, reversed starting position, so there is no rerun. The Fitz and the Fool trilogy, published 2014 to 2017, two decades on, compounds the cost. Six prior books of paying in installments make the third trilogy's bill heavier than anything that came before.

The usable point: no settlement, no rerun. Each trilogy revalues the claims. Revaluing is the only method by which a single dilemma lasts a long series without running dry or turning into a mannerism. Readers who have followed Fitz for decades are not waiting for him to repair himself. They are watching a slow settling of accounts.

An everyday scenario: the detective whose brother is the suspect

Imagine a writer on the second draft of a police procedural. Detective Imogen Byrne is investigating a hit-and-run, and midway through the book the evidence points to her younger brother. The writer planned this as the book's core. Three beta readers, in different words, said they did not feel the middle.

Apply the two-sentence test. Claim one holds: a death, and her case. Claim two, protect the brother, because… stalls right there. The second claim has no case. In the draft he is merely her brother, and readers are waiting for the obvious action.

So the writer builds the second claim. The brother is raising a nine-year-old alone. Their mother is in a nursing home neither sibling can afford. He has been sober for four years. Now anyone rooting for Imogen to report him has to swallow what that does to a child. Two sides.

The actual failure turns out to be a separate problem. The draft has eleven scenes of Imogen thinking about it and three of her doing anything, and all three are cost-free. She delays a forensics request and nobody notices. She warns her brother and pays nothing for it. She lies to her sergeant, Nkem, and the lie is overlooked.

The fix is mechanical. Cut six of the eleven thinking scenes. Turn the three action scenes into priced decisions: the delayed request makes a second victim's family wait two weeks; the warning is overheard; the lie costs her Nkem's cover, which she will need later. Fix the forensics deadline at an immovable date. Delete the ending's escape hatch, because in the current draft a witness conveniently turns up to clear the brother, which voids the entire book after the fact. The result is the same length, and the flatness is gone. Expenditure has replaced contemplation.

Try it yourself

This takes about an hour. It works for a book you are planning or one you have already drafted.

  1. Write both claims as sentences of advocacy. Use the template "She has to ______, because ______." twice, once per side, in the character's own terms, with no authorial opinion in it. If the second sentence sounds like a weakness, stop. See flaw or the lie, because those need a different fix.
  2. Give the losing side a constituency. Identify who suffers when the character does the correct thing. Be specific: a name, an age, and a scene early in the book. This step pays off more than any other, and most thin internal conflicts fail right here.
  3. Swap every abstraction for an object. A document, a deadline, a key, a diagnosis, a train, a badly timed phone call. You should end with two lists of visible things.
  4. Find the moment the claims stop being compatible. Mark the event in your outline that splits them. Before it, both are possible; after it, they are not. Expect it near the end of the first act. If the split comes in chapter thirty, the first half of the book has no engine.
  5. Price three existing scenes. Give each a decision that costs the character something on one side. Small is fine. Visible is required.
  6. Design the climax in one paragraph. Describe the situation, then run three checks. Could the choice be delayed? Could someone else decide? Could she get both? Any yes means the climax is unfinished.
  7. Write the loss in two or three sentences. Name what she possessed at the start and will not have at the end. Then pinpoint the late-chapter moment where the reader sees it gone. If there is no such moment, you have the ending problem beta readers will call "satisfying but flat".
  8. Tally two numbers. Count the scenes where she thinks about it and the scenes where she makes a decision with consequences. If the first is more than twice the second, you have found your middle's problem.
  9. For a series, record what this book settles and what it reserves. Put it in the continuity bible, the series fact log, so book four does not quietly relitigate book one.

Claim A: ______ has to ______, because ______ Claim B: ______ has to ______, because ______ Who is harmed when the right thing happens: ______ Physical objects on each side: A ______ / B ______ They become incompatible when: ______ Priced scenes: ______, ______, ______ The choice cannot be delayed because: ______ What is gone on the last page: ______ Held back for later books: ______

Common mistakes and misunderstandings

Stating the dilemma once and never charging for it. The dilemma gets announced, in chapter two or only in the writer's notes, as farm versus orchestra, and then nothing on either side ever costs anything. Declaring it gives the reader a label. Readers only notice the split by watching something get given up.

Making one option obviously right. Call it the false dilemma. Spot it by writing the strongest case for the option the character resists. If you cannot fill the sentence, there is no contest, only a delay, and delay makes readers impatient rather than tense. Fix it by strengthening the bad option until somebody real depends on it. Never fix it by weakening the good one.

Agonizing for the whole book, then getting both. Three hundred pages of suffering, then a last chapter that makes the sacrifice unnecessary: the witness recants, the inheritance arrives, the other party never wanted it anyway. Of all the mistakes on this list, this one does the most damage, and you cannot detect it while drafting, because every page is fine on its own. The damage shows up only when readers say the ending did not land. Whatever is chosen, the other thing must truly go.

Using interiority in place of a decision. Pages of weighing, reversing, and imagining both futures read like depth and work like a stall, because nothing closes. Thought's proper slot is after the choice, as rationalization. Before the choice it reads like meeting minutes, the same points rehearsed again. See show, don't tell.

Never putting the two claims in one scene. Duty at work, desire at home, chapters taking polite turns. Internal conflict needs collision: a call from one world in the middle of the other, two people in one room wanting incompatible things, a choice made in front of a witness.

Confusing it with the false belief underneath. If the dilemma dissolves the moment the character learns a fact or sees clearly, it was the lie dressed up as this element. Real internal conflict outlives complete self-understanding. Perfect insight, and still no answer.

Leaving both claims abstract. "Freedom against responsibility" has never produced a scene. Each side needs a concrete person, object or deadline. Otherwise Tuesday's chapter stays unwritable, and thinking harder about theme will not help.

Giving the whole cast the same dilemma, or giving a dilemma only to the lead. Four people all split between duty and love is an authorial obsession. An inner life granted to the protagonist alone makes a soloist with a backing band. Give two or three secondary characters pairs of their own, aimed in different directions. Doing so also justifies a subplot.

Resolving the whole conflict in book one of a series. Understandable, since book one is the one you are trying to make good, and fatal by book three. Decide beforehand what gets settled and what gets reserved, and check that the reserved portion is interesting in itself rather than a technicality.

Escalating the feeling while the price stays flat. Stronger anguish vocabulary over level stakes. Readers go numb to intensity. A closing door never stops registering.

Related elements