How Your Character’s Internal Conflict Can Help You Plot

Janice Hardy

If you've been struggling with a plot, or you're looking for ways to deepen an existing plot, try looking at how your protagonist's internal conflict is driving her external actions.

Since today is Halloween, I thought it would be fun to look at ways a character's fear can help you plot. 

A lot of focus gets put on the core conflict of a novel—the main problem the protagonist has to solve to win—and for good reason. It's the whole point of the book. But sometimes, when we look too hard at the external problems, we miss out on opportunities to let the internal problems muck things up. This is especially true in a character-driven novel, since that inner journey is what's driving the entire book.

While you can’t plot with a character arc, you can use it to create your plot, because what a character has been through and fears, if what determines how they face their problems and make decisions.

At the heart of every good internal conflict is a fear created by trauma.

Making Sense Out of Character Wants and Needs

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Plot and character arc. External and internal conflict. Intellectual and emotional. There are indeed two sides to every story.

Confusion between a character’s want and need has sent many a writer down the wrong plot path, and I’ve run into quite a few who found themselves puzzled over how to use wants and needs in their novels. Are they the same thing? Is one the plot and the other the subplot? No, and no.

A strong want/need pairing shows an emotional hole in the protagonist’s life, and how resolving the plot allows them to fill that hole.

The protagonist doesn’t always know what they need, but they usually know what they want. That conscious goal (the want) drives the plot. It’s the unconscious goal (the need) that gets realized over the course of the story as the protagonist resolves and experiences that plot. The protagonist “goes through some stuff” and is changed by it. It helps to think of wants as the plot and needs as the character arc.

The Inner Struggle: Guides for Using Internal Conflict That Make Sense

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Here’s an easy way to develop character arcs in your novel.

Years ago, I sat in on an amazing workshop at an RWA conference. Michael Hague's Using Inner Conflict to Create Powerful Love Stories was one of those workshops that discussed a topic I already knew, but he presented it in such a way that I saw a super easy way to apply inner journeys to my stories (something this plot-focused gal can always use).

While the workshop was about romance specifically, the pieces of Hague’s inner conflict template work for any character journey. He calls the overall arc the “journey from living in fear to living courageously.”

5 Ways to Add Internal Conflict to Your Scenes

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Strengthening the internal conflict in a scene can lead to a deeper connection with your reader.

Back in my “still working out this writing thing” days, I didn’t even know what internal conflict was. I had a vague sense that conflict was the plot, and that it involved grand battles and exciting fight scenes (it didn’t, by the way). I thought that in order to write an exciting novel, I needed to pack it full of exciting action.

Since I’m a plot-focused writer, this misconception fit my writing style well and kept me struggling to understand conflict longer than I should have.

Eventually I figured it out and my novels improved. And once I knew what skill I lacked, I focused on developing that skill—in this case, conflict in general, internal conflict in particular. This “skill cycle” was also part of my process, where I’d hit a technical wall in my writing and then shift to learning how to handle it.

Five Stops on Your MC’s Inner Journey

By Dorian Cirrone, @DorianCirrone

Part of the How They Do It Series

JH: A strong character journey can be a powerful element of a story. Please help me welcome Dorian Cirrone as she visits the lecture hall today to share her technique for creating memorable character arcs in her novel.

Dorian is an award-winning writer of books for kids and teens. Her most recent book, The First Last Day (Aladdin/Simon and Schuster) has been translated into five languages and was featured on Bank Street College’s Best Books List and New Mexico’s Battle of the Books list.

Website | Goodreads | Facebook | Twitter |

Take it away Dorian...

The Easiest Way to Create Conflict

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Writer Unboxed had a great article over the weekend about a fun tool to develop stories. John Vorhaus showed us how asking a few simple questions gets to the heart of your idea, and I wanted to expand on one aspect of that regarding conflict.

Great story conflict is when what we want doesn’t get us what we need. Michael Hague gives fantastic workshops on this same concept, and I’ve talked about it here before with how the character arc illustrates the story’s theme while the plot arc illustrates the story’s goal. External versus internal, each pulling the protagonist a different direction.

Building Your Core: Internal and External Core Conflicts

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

A strong core leads to a strong novel.

When you're talking about plot, the core conflict is at the center of everything. It's what the novel is about, and the whole reason our characters are putting up with all the terrible things we do to them. It's the conflict in our one-line pitch, and what the focus of our query hook will be.

The core conflict is the story.