Character Is Conflict

How Internal Need and External Pressure Drive Every Great Plot

A Radical Reframe

There are no plot-driven stories. There are no character-driven stories. There are only character-driven plots. Story emerges from people in action—what they want, what they fear, what they do under pressure. Plot is the trail left behind by a character pursuing something, failing, recalibrating, and pursuing again. When a character changes direction, the plot does too. The best plots are not designed—they are inevitable, because the characters can’t do otherwise.

Character Is Action Under Pressure

Most early character work focuses on traits—flaws, quirks, backstory. But character is not personality. It is not what the character is, but what they do under pressure. Jim Butcher and Deborah Chester emphasize exaggeration and exotic position: amplify something recognizable, then make it strange. Give us a monk with anger issues. A CEO in a ghost town. Start not with realism, but legibility—a character who broadcasts themselves from their first moment on the page. Robert McKee and Donald Maass take this further: to live on the page, a character must pursue an external goal that awakens an internal need. These two forces in tension are the story that generate the events of the plot.

The external want is the plot. The internal need is the story. Put them in collision and the narrative writes itself.

Masterwork Arcs: Desire vs. Dissonance

In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby wants Daisy. But what he needs—to be worthy, to belong—is unreachable through money or reinvention. In Jane Eyre, Jane wants love and home. But she needs self-respect. In Beloved, Sethe wants safety for her children. But she needs to face her own past, and the guilt that has haunted her into spectral form. These characters act not to resolve neat arcs but to survive impossible contradictions.

That is character.

Design Principles for Dynamic Character

Designing strong arcs starts by defining where the character begins: not just in circumstance, but in worldview. A character arc isn’t just about growth—it’s about dissonance.

A well-designed protagonist cannot solve their story problem with the tools they possess at the beginning. The journey forces them to evolve—or shatter. Complexity comes from contradiction: characters who say one thing and do another, who want safety but act recklessly, who love deeply but betray compulsively. Internal conflict is not flavor—it’s fuel.

Do we always design characters that change? It depends. In genre fiction—thriller, romance, fantasy—we often crave the satisfaction of a rupture: the moment when the character breaks through their internal resistance and becomes something new. The arc ends in change.

But literary fiction is its own genre, with its own rules. There, stories often end not in rupture but in exposure. A mask slips. A truth is revealed. The arc ends in illumination, not transformation.

The deepest masterworks—The Godfather, The Age of Innocence, Disgrace—use both: exposure leads to rupture. Revelation drives the character to an irreversible choice. And that choice completes the arc.

To build this depth into your characters, and to let it shape your story, use these five design principles:

1. Exaggerate Something True
   Exaggeration isn't cartooning—it's clarity. Characters don't need many traits; they need one thing too much. Captain Ahab's obsession isn't a flaw; it's the plot. Choose one dominant trait and dial it past reason. Lisbeth Salander's genius. Emma Bovary's hunger for romance. The reader enters the world through what is heightened. Exaggeration makes a character not more fictional but more legible. And in narrative, legibility is realism's better twin.

2. Place Them Where They Don't Belong
   Exotic position is dissonance. A character's setting should reflect or defy their internal state. Consider Bigger Thomas in Native Son, a young Black man boxed in by a racist system that both defines and denies him. The setting becomes antagonist. Think of this as character vs. world—and let the world hit back. In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro turns this inward: the exotic position isn’t geographic but existential. What does it mean to be human in a system that doesn’t believe you are?

3. Show Them in Motion
   The characteristic entry action is a defining move that reveals who a character is. Don't introduce your thief thinking about a job—show them stealing from the wrong mark. Introduce your idealist in a moral compromise. Readers form impressions instantly; use action to anchor empathy. Think of Montag in Fahrenheit 451, burning books with professional satisfaction—until a woman chooses to burn with her library. From there, his identity fractures.

4. Tag, Trait, Trigger
   Use tags (appearance), traits (behavior), and triggers (emotional tells) to maintain character continuity. Not just physical detail, but recurring reactions: a tremor when lying, a ritual before risk. Over time, these become the reader's shorthand for identity. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood’s descent is charted not just in decisions but in tonal detail—objects and actions that shift meaning as her internal state darkens. These anchors create a fabric of continuity that makes even shifting or morally ambiguous characters feel real.

5. Make Them Choose
   All character development is choice under pressure. The choice must hurt. Force the protagonist to pick between what they want and what they need. Jay Gatsby could let Daisy go. Sethe could ignore the ghost. Montag could keep burning books. They don't. And that refusal—that irrational act of self—is what makes them unforgettable.

Narrative as Consequence

A character’s past matters, but it is their present that defines them. Readers don’t attach to backstory but they do attach to behavior. They watch a person make a series of choices in real time and ask, would I do that? Could I? Why did they? That questioning is the bond between reader and character, and it is forged in conflict.

Character is not built by backstory but by narrative design. The shape of a character is the shape of the story. Conflict doesn't reveal character: it is character. Everything else is furniture.

Want to deepen your protagonist? Map out their external want and internal need. Find the moment where these collide—then turn that moment into your climax. Use the Character Development Guide to structure the transformation.