Food and shelter are all well and good, but on the story stage, there’s one need that rules them all. The need for safety and security. Just as in real life, almost nobody wants to get killed or maimed or robbed or even inconvenienced.
But put several people into a room, or several countries or other entities on a map, and chances are that what one does to ensure their own safety and security will infringe on those of their neighbors. And vice versa. And there you have it: Conflict.
As everyone who’s ever taken a writing class knows, conflict is the meat and mead of a story. Escalating conflict, or so the teaching goes, is what keeps readers interested and pulls them through the story.
Motivation
First, though, we have to set up the framework of conflict. The motivation. Who is the Enemy? What’s everyone fighting over? An artifact? Power? Territory or other resources? And what are they fighting for? An idea or a value? A belief? Freedom? Identity? Justice? Survival? The Truth? The list is long, and limited only by the author’s imagination.
Form of Conflict
Then there’s the form that conflict takes. Arguing? Scheming? Diplomacy? Open confrontation? Or a mixture of all of the above? Both the object and the form of conflict are powerful instruments of world-building. And of course there’s the mechanics of conflict. What kind of weapons are being used, and how? Is it all mano a mano, or are there projectile weapons? Firearms even? Or battle magic? Is it a free-for-all, or are there rules of engagement? Who fights? Women? Men? Or any other beings? Professional soldiers or mercenaries or just anyone who’s got the urge?
Scale of Conflict
Next, there’s scale. If your conflict is being waged for the survival of a world, the ascendancy of one nation or religion or race over another, your world-building will have to look quite different from that for a story of personal revenge. An epic scale requires that you, the author, think like a general or a strategist or a top manager. A visionary or a criminal mastermind. You’ll have to juggle a large cast of characters, and there might well be more threads in your plot than in your carpet. More likely than not, you’ll get to write epic battles and/or devise intricate power plays or court intrigues that put [insert your favorite crafty politician] to shame.
Not everyone is cut out to build that kind of world. I know that I’m not. I prefer my story conflicts up close and personal. With swords, preferably.
Of course, even if you zoom in on one or two characters, you can’t neglect building your larger world. The characters can’t just hover in a vacuum. They need to act within the framework that their culture and their circumstances impose on them. Or they can deliberately break the rules. Point is, there have to be rules.
The Stakes
There also have to be stakes. In each conflict, something is at stake. In grand, epic tales, it might be the survival of the world as we know it. In smaller, more personal tales, it might be the survival of the character’s world as they know it. Or, simply, their survival against all odds.
On the physical level, you’ll write fight scenes, not battle scenes. Scenes of visceral fear. Of indecision and struggle. Scenes of personal glory, of pride and honor. Of cunning and skill and luck. You’ll probably choose a close third person, or even first person, point of view. And any description will be filtered through the character’s experience.
In short, you’re building your world through the character’s eyes.
Internal Conflict
When you’re that close to a character, it opens up another possible avenue of conflict: Internal conflict. This is the point when world-building transitions fully into character-building, and there’s no dichotomy. What is character-building if not building a character’s personal world?
A character’s internal conflicts give you plenty of opportunity to build that character’s world. When it comes to internal conflict, you, the author, have to think like a psychologist, an anthropologist, or just a student of life. Trauma, shame, resistance, moral dilemmas, and cognitive dissonance, to name just a few, can all give rise to internal conflict, which can be just as devastating as the external kind.
Of course all of these considerations can coexist. Well-written stories that operate on a large scale will typically have a cast of fully fleshed-out main characters through whose (inter)actions the reader views the story. The masters of the genre will weave plots and subplots into a taut, smooth fabric more dazzling and intricate than a piece of brocade, and at the same time give the story its emotional heft through the reader’s engagement with the individual characters.
The Limits of Safety and Security
Most people (and, by extension, most characters) will do anything to ensure their own safety and security. For some, though, there are higher needs that supersede even this fundamental need. Heroic self-sacrifice is real, and it can also be a powerful character arc. Who doesn’t feel for the mentor who sacrifices himself for the hero or the mission? Or the protagonist who sacrifices her fortune, her health, or even her life for the Greater Good? Well, us grimdark folks sometimes espouse a more jaded view, but self-sacrifice is a popular trope in Fantasy, especially in large-scale stories. It also tells the reader a lot about the characters and the world they move in. What is so important in this world that a character would give up their own safety or even their life for it? And what does that sacrifice say about the character and their motivations?
Safety and security as well as their flip side, conflict, affect almost every aspect of a story, and they are a central component of both character-building and world-building. Really, without conflict, in whatever shape or form it may come, you don’t have a story. Or at least not one that will captivate a reader’s attention long enough to engage emotionally and to read it read straight through to THE END.