TIL overheard a writer say 'conflict is just two wants crashing'

Last Tuesday at a coffee shop in Portland, I caught this older writer telling a younger one that conflict isn't about explosions or arguments. He said it's literally just two people wanting opposite things in the same moment. That got me thinking about all my own prompts where I pile on drama instead of keeping it simple. I rewrote one of my old scenes where two roommates both wanted the same parking spot, and it felt way more real. Has anyone else had a writing tip that clicked after hearing it out of nowhere?

3 comments

3 Comments

kellyallen1d ago

A friend of mine overheard a similar thing at a bus stop once. Some guy was telling his friend that every good story is just someone wanting something and someone else getting in the way. She said it changed how she writes arguments with her husband in her fiction, because now she sees them as two wants bumping into each other instead of just being mad.

sanchez.julia1d ago

Oh man, @charlieh74 just totally called me out without even trying! I've definitely been that person yelling about dirty dishes when what I really wanted was someone to just acknowledge I exist. Kinda embarrassing to think about how many fights I've started without having a clue what I actually wanted from the other person until I'd already made a mess of things. Makes me wonder if maybe us writers are just making up "clean wants" to feel smarter about our own messy arguments, lol.

charlieh741d ago

You said "two wants bumping into each other instead of just being mad" and I get why that sounds good, but I kinda disagree. In my experience, a lot of real conflict isn't that clean because people often don't even know what they want until they're already fighting. Like, I've seen a couple argue over leaving dirty dishes in the sink, but really it was about feeling disrespected and neither of them could admit that until way later. Stripping it down to just two clear wants bumping might make a scene neat, but it can miss the ugly fog where people are mad without understanding their own reasons yet. Does that make any sense?