For example, we don’t know anything about the siblings. Not every conflict is this neat, of course: it’s interesting when the parties to a conflict can’t articulate their own needs, but things can get quite exciting when those needs are diametrically opposed.Īnd this is where we, as writers, could start making the story of the orange more interesting. But their needs (the fruit, the peel) were not. The siblings’ positions were opposed: each wants the whole orange. It also illustrates the importance of addressing needs rather than addressing positions. On the other hand, the mother in this story can be said to have a collaborating style, which attempts to find a solution that fully satisfies everyone’s concerns (note that this is different than a compromising style, in which the imagined solution is both expedient and partially satisfying). Many epic novels fall into this category, in which one side must wholly defeat the other to save the world. In the orange story, the children display a style defined by competition.
Accommodating – Giving in to what the other side wants.These styles are often divided into five categories: The way that individuals deal with these concerns determines their conflict style. Risk – How much trouble is this conflict going to cause me, and how much will it cost for me to lose?.Relationship – How will this conflict affect my relationship with the other party/ies?.Those concerns typically revolve around three areas: Here are a few.Ĭonflict style is how your character addresses their own concerns in a conflict situation.
KICK IT UP A NOTCH MEME CRACK
Because just as there’s more than one way to crack an egg, there’s more than one way for a character to deal with conflict. What changed was when I started applying what I learned as a conflict resolution student to my conception of conflict in story. The key word there is not “avoidant”-plenty of conflict-avoidant characters can still drive the plot-but “unintentional.” I wasn’t being intentional about how my characters dealt with conflict, and so I never forced them to finally confront one another. It also meant that I unintentionally would write characters who, like me, avoided conflict. I’ve written before about how my own avoidant conflict style (I’ll define these terms below) made it difficult for me to set my own characters at odds with each other. It keeps readers interested: we’re always trying to get them to ask, “And then what happened?” It moves our plots forward and forces our characters to adapt and change. An ending where everyone is happy and gets 100% of what they want? Yawn.īut what if I told you that not only could this story be made interesting, but that writers miss critical opportunities to introduce readers to non-oppressive ways of looking at the world if they ignore different conflict styles?Ĭonflict is at the core of many of our most beloved stories (here, I’m defining conflict broadly as a situation in which a character’s need or want is frustrated by an opposing force). But in a great deal of popular Western media, this type of resolution to a conflict might be seen as unsatisfying, even boring. The mother peels the orange, and gives the first child the fruit, and the second child the peel, and everyone leaves happy.Ī version of this story gets used in books on negotiation to illustrate different methods of resolving a seemingly intractable conflict. The second child wants the peel to use for an art project. She learns that the first child wants to eat the orange. Finally, the mother takes each child aside to talk. But the siblings say no: each wants the whole orange. The orange will rot if it isn’t consumed today, so the siblings’ mother offers to cut it in half. It is the only orange they have, a rare and delectable treat. Two siblings are fighting over an orange. There is a story that I wish I saw replicated more often in fiction.
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