606 – Conflicts Without Character-Antagonists

Authors generally know what to do when their hero is threatened by an assassin. The resulting sword fight may not be easy to write, but there’s an understanding of who needs to be stopped and how. But what about conflicts where the “antagonist” is a force of nature or simply people’s apathy toward buying baked goods? That last one can be a real problem for heroes who are trying to save their school through a bake sale. This week, we talk about how to write conflicts in which there isn’t a conscious force pushing back.

Show Notes

• Antagonist 
• Agency 
• Legends and Lattes 
• The Skin Map
• Turning Point
• The Spellshop
• Sandman Fight
• The Character Goal Model

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Steve. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris. 

Oren: Uh-oh, there’s a flood coming, and I’m going to sword fight it. And then after that, we have to put on a bake sale to save the school, so I will argue with the brownies to be more delicious. 

Chris: Oh, no, those brownies. They are very malicious, always trying to be as disgusting as possible. 

Oren: ‘Cause that’s how conflict works when you don’t have an obvious human or human-equivalent antagonist, is that you just personify whatever is around, and then you use the same tactics against it as you would against a human enemy, right?

Chris: Did you know that we only sink in the water sometimes because the water’s very angry with us? 

Oren: Yeah, it’s actually a character flaw on the water’s part. It is malice in the form of H2O. So today we are talking about conflicts with non-character antagonists. I’m probably gonna slip and say non-human throughout the episode. That’s not technically accurate because a character can be an animal in certain circumstances. 

Chris: A character needs intent. An animal can have intent. You could say a robot has intent if you want. But we’re talking about, you know, antagonists that do not have intent or any kind of awareness or sentience.

Oren: Right. And, a protagonist needs to be a character, as far as I know. 

Chris: Correct, because if they don’t have intent, then they don’t have agency. We could get into lots of theoretical stuff of what happens if you’re not using tension as your primary plotter, but this is about conflict, so we’re talking about tension here. And so we do need to have points where a character or protagonist has agency, and they don’t have agency unless they have intent. 

Oren: Yeah, so barring some extremely weird edge case that I haven’t considered, the main character, your hero, needs to be a character of some kind, but the antagonist, the force opposing them, doesn’t necessarily have to be a character.  This can be obvious in the form of a natural disaster, or in, maybe in the case of a panicked crowd, which isn’t a character. It’s technically made up of people, but it doesn’t act like a character. Or, it could be that you need to make money at a bake sale or something. Or, maybe in the more specific example, at a bake sale it would be that people are kind of suspicious of your brownies ’cause they look a little odd ’cause you used non-standard ingredients.  But they’re actually very delicious, and so you have to overcome people’s hesitancy to try the odd-looking brownies. Something like that, right? 

Chris: Yeah. Those are some great examples, but I think this instance of the odd-shaped brownies making people hesitant really highlights kind of how artificial this concept of a quote-unquote, “antagonist” is.  Because really what these are, are just plot problems, right? They’re obstacles. And so treating them… When we say antagonist, treating them that it’s a thing- or like it’s one thing – is in all cases very artificial. Like in this scenario with the brownies, is it the odd shape of the brownies that’s the antagonist?  Is it the people? Is it their hesitancy itself?

Oren: Is it the social construct of money? 

Chris: [Laughs]. Capitalism. Capitalism was the antagonist all along. 

Oren: Uh, excuse me. You can’t give capitalism credit for the concept of exchanging money for food. Wow, that’s super capitalist of you. Really capitalist-centric. Pardon me.

Chris: Oh, no. Maybe the antagonist is my capitalist-centrism. 

Oren: Yeah, exact- very. I don’t know what we’re talking about anymore.  But yes.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. But the point is that when you have a conflict, you have your protagonist Who is facing, and they could actually face a variety of obstacles which we could all call antagonists, right?  And they can have more… It’s not like there’s just one antagonist. Like, when you have a villain, usually what happens is your hero does something, the villain does something, and the villain is directly responsible for most of the obstacles your hero faces. But I find in a lot of  non-antagonistic conflicts, they appear as often a little bit more like bad luck, where there’s not just one antagonist.  There’s a variety of things that go wrong, and every time there’s a problem or obstacle that’s technically an antagonist. So again, for simplicity, it’s convenient to use the word antagonist because we have to talk about what is opposing the hero, but it’s also kind of a very artificial concept, especially when you don’t have a villain who’s actually opposing the hero on purpose.

Oren: Yeah. And so it’s worth asking, why does it matter? Like, why are we talking about this? And the reason is that as I have edited manuscripts over the years, I have discovered that authors…it’s not like they are always great at writing a traditional conflict with a human-ish villain, but they tend to have an easier time with that than when the conflict lacks a character antagonist.  Because when there’s an enemy, there’s an assassin, and they’re trying to get you, so you punch him. That’s pretty straightforward. Or if it’s a social conflict, you argue the chancellor down so he doesn’t pass the evil tax cut bill, or you mind meld with the alien rock monster so it doesn’t eat the town, et cetera.

That’s… Not like there aren’t a billion ways to mess that up, but I have found that writers tend to get it better than the bake sale example that I mentioned. They will often…I will read stories where there is a bake sale, and it’s important. The bake sale is gonna save the school maybe.  But how? How is that going to work? And it’s very difficult for a lot of authors to make that real enough to be a satisfying conflict. And so you often end up with conflict where stuff just kinda happens And it’s like, yeah, I guess we made enough money, or we didn’t make enough money. But why?

What was the turning point? What was the dramatic effort? What made that compelling other than just watching things happen? Authors struggle with this a lot. 

Chris: Yeah. I feel like we’ve read a lot of cozies and we have an obstacle, and then the protagonist just tries one thing and it automatically works, right?  Like in Legends and Lattes, oh, I know, we’ll just… We need customers. Let’s just do this one thing. Oh, look, we have tons of customers, right? 

Oren: Yeah, it worked actually. 

Chris: It worked. 

Oren: [Laughs] 

Chris: That was super easy. Barely an inconvenience. Yeah or my favorite one of course was in that story where they had the bread maker.  God, Skin Map. 

Oren: Yeah, The Skin Map. Not a title for a book you would think was about a bakery. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: There is also a skin map in it. 

Chris: Yeah. There’s multiple POVs in that book, and the bakery was just the best POV where it’s basically a side quest. But again, we had problems getting customers, and then we just did one thing.  Oh, wow, it’s so easy, you know? We have sweets that people will buy ’cause the coffee’s too bitter, nor why people wanna buy coffee. 

Oren: Yeah. Don’t worry about it. And then it can go the other direction too, and I don’t know of as many published examples of this just because readers are sensitive to failure.  The character can also be like, “We’re gonna save the school with this bake sale.” And then the bake sale happens, and it didn’t work, right? We made a big thing about it, and they just didn’t make enough money. And it’s like all right, well, that’s frustrating. Why didn’t you make enough money?  What occurred that made that not happen? And that doesn’t happen as often in published stories I think ’cause it tends to get weeded out more, but I see it a fair amount in my unpublished manuscripts that I work on. And so the end result of all of this is that you end up with characters that are just kind of milling around.  They don’t really know what they’re doing. The reader doesn’t know what it is they’re trying to accomplish, and that hurts tension, and then it hurts satisfaction. And if you do that too many times, you won’t be able to create tension again ’cause the readers won’t believe you, and it’s a vicious cycle.

Chris: All right. So how do we do this? How do we create a detailed conflict when we have a non-character antagonist? 

Oren: Well, in some cases, if it’s something like a natural disaster, you can sort of treat the natural disaster the same way that you would treat a character antagonist. Like, “Oh no, there’s a flood.  We have to escape the flood.” Well, that’s a life and death situation. It’s fairly straightforward. You still need to create the back and forth that Chris has described a few times. 

Chris: Yeah. So I’ll get specific about the back and forth. So in a conflict, we should see a pattern where both the protagonist and the antagonist are acting, and this kind of reflects tension structure.  So the antagonist strikes first, creates a threat. The protagonist has to scramble to sort of respond to that, and then the antagonist responds to the antagonist. This is very much just like a conversation where people respond to the last thing that the other person said. That’s kind of ideally what you want to happen, and you want both sides to go back and forth.

We’ve seen a lot of stories where this happened in “Skin of the Sea”, where we had kind of a situation that was supposed to be a conflict but wasn’t really. More like “Calamity”, where the character is out and they’re fighting a storm, but there’s… The storm is happening to the protagonist, but there’s no sense the protagonist can actually intervene in events and do anything, right?

And that’s the purpose of the protagonist. That’s what the protagonist is for. And then what happens in that sort of scenario where, oh, we’re being buffeted by the wind, and the waves are crashing over us, and all of these things are happening…but there’s no sense of the protagonist responding to them and doing anything, is that we kind of start to tune out because it just doesn’t feel like it matters anymore.  There’s no edge of our seat, you know, will the protagonist make it or will the antagonist make it? The antagonist is just gonna get to do what they want, and we’re just waiting till it’s over. And this, I think, is one of the things that people find tricky when they have a non-character antagonist, right?

So, oh, the wave is in the boat. All right, now the boat is sinking ’cause it’s full of water. Okay, so the protagonist has to intervene in order to avoid complete disaster. So okay, I’m gonna grab something that can hold water and start trying to bucket out the water. And then we have something else happen, and again, it can be hard to think of if this is not…’Cause, like, a villain or something with intent can always choose how to respond, whereas it looks more like luck when it’s a non-villain antagonist. So what bad thing can happen? Oh, well, maybe when my protagonist was leaning over the side to dump out water, they accidentally tipped over, and that’s kind of…It looks like accident, it looks like bad luck, but it’s also they would be less likely to tip over if they were not in the middle of a storm, and that happened because of their last action, because they were trying to get the water out of the boat, and that went wrong. 

Oren: Could do the classic thing where you’re putting the water off the side of the boat, and then because of the shift in the wind or whatever, the big spar that holds the sail swings around and bonks you right in the head.  That’s classic scenario. Uh Yeah. 

Chris: So in any situation, that’s kind of what we’re looking for. Like, in “Legends and Lattes”, what if we’re like, “Hey, customers, I’ve got this magic elixir. Come into my coffee shop. I know you don’t understand what coffee is.” They’re like, “Ooh, we like magic elixir that makes us awake.”  And then, you know, they try it like, “Oh, gosh, this is bitter. You’re trying to poison us.”

Oren: [Laughs]

Chris: Right? What kind of bad luck, what can go wrong to kind of create those obstacles and create that kind of back and forth between the protagonist trying to intervene in some ways. And again, the protagonist doesn’t have to do good things when they intervene.  They’re trying to… they should be trying to succeed generally. But they can do the wrong thing and get a bad result, as long as they do something and change what happens. And that’s why a protagonist, of course, needs to be a character and needs intent. 

Oren: Yeah. And so with this one we have a fairly straightforward set of stakes and/or thresholds that the character has to meet in order to succeed.  And the issue with this kind of conflict with a natural disaster or with having to climb down a steep cliff face or something like that, is that writers often have a difficult time creating that back and forth that Chris was describing when there isn’t a character-level enemy doing that stuff.  And Chris has described how you get past that. 

The next stage of difficulty is the kind of conflict that doesn’t have the inherent clear-cut what success or failure looks like. And these are the things I’ve been talking about. These are the things like the bake sale, or writing a paper, or making a sword.  What does success at the bake sale look like? That’s not as obvious. Or how do you know if you have succeeded at “sword”? How will the reader know that you did good or bad? 

Chris: If you accidentally create a shield, you have failed at “sword”. 

Oren: Yeah, if you did, if you did a bad enough job, you’ve created a different implement.

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: And if it’s, like, really short, it might not be a huge thing. I’m remembering the swordsmithing scene in the Prydain books, and it’s pretty short. He doesn’t spend a lot of time smithing, so it’s not as big a deal that we don’t know what it means to make a good sword. But if you were doing that as an extended thing, and making a sword can take a while, you would need some way for the reader to be able to judge how you’re doing.  Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of question marks. Yeah, I guess the sword is being made, presumably. I’ll take your word for it. 

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And in particular when we’re talking about, okay, what does success look like, obviously conflicts need tension, so this should have stakes of some kind, right?

So what disaster, what bad thing are we trying to avert by doing the bake sale, by making the sword, or whatever else it is? If we have to make a sword to impress somebody who will then train us in sword fighting, what is the threshold that the sword has to meet in order to avert getting kicked out?

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: And not having any training, for instance. Or for a bake sale, assume that we’ve got some issue with money involved. And you can, of course, be sneaky and do a little switcheroo later. Conflict doesn’t always have to work out exactly the way it looks like it’s going to, and often it’s more fun that way.  But for example, with a bake sale, a pretty standard way of trying to make so readers can understand how your characters are doing is to set an amount of money you need to raise and have the character be able to have an idea of how close they are to that goal. They’re not necessarily tracking every dollar and cents, but know that you have to make $5,000.  And then you can have an idea of how close you are. And once you can do that, then you can set child arcs and try turning points to get different things done. You can do the back and forth that Chris has described. And then you might end up with a different result. You might end up that they don’t make the money actually, but they tried so hard, and that impressed someone enough that they’ll put in a good word at the school board meeting or something.

So there are different ways you can change what ends up happening, but readers need some idea of how well your characters are doing, otherwise nothing that’s happening matters. 

Chris: Yeah. So again, at the end of the day, do we avert the stakes or the worst case scenario, or