In the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict: a confrontation between two or more elements, in which one ultimately dominates the other. The standard three- and five-act plot structures—which permeate Western media—have conflict written into their very foundations. A “problem” appears near the end of the first act; and, in the second act, the conflict generated by this problem takes center stage. Conflict is used to create reader involvement even by many post-modern writers, whose work otherwise defies traditional structure.
The necessity of conflict is preached as a kind of dogma by contemporary writers’ workshops and Internet “guides” to writing. A plot without conflict is considered dull; some even go so far as to call it impossible. This has influenced not only fiction, but writing in general—arguably even philosophy. Yet, is there any truth to this belief? Does plot necessarily hinge on conflict? No. Such claims are a product of the West’s insularity. For countless centuries, Chinese and Japanese writers have used a plot structure that does not have conflict “built in”, so to speak. Rather, it relies on exposition and contrast to generate interest. This structure is known as kishōtenketsu.
I’m not sure I can agree with the author’s main point. And I don’t understand tumblr so I couldn’t figure out how to respond to him directly.
At their most basic, plot is equivalent to the creation and resolution of tension. All conflict is tension, but is all tension conflict? No, it isn’t; the tension of two plates in the Earth’s crust that will eventually lead to an earthquake cannot be said to be a conflict. Likewise, good music is, in general, good because it contains cadences that create and resolve harmonic or melodic tension. This, again, is not conflict.
However, we’re talking about stories here. Would it be accurate, then, to say that all narrative tension is conflict?
The author of the cited piece states that the tension is created in kishotenketsu stories via the juxtaposition of two apparently-dissociated elements in the first three acts of a story, and then resolved by unifying those two elements during the fourth act. The little comic that he includes illustrates this point very well, and he claims this to be “a story without conflict.”
(As an aside, you can tell a story without conflict, and without tension, very easily — but it’ll be a pretty boring story. The resolution of tension is what draws us in, and without that, you don’t really have a story.)
The trouble is, there is conflict in his story. The conflict is that Mr 3rd-panel doesn’t have a soda and wants one. By the end of the story, he has gotten it, via the events in panels 1, 2, and 4. The story isn’t a story without conflict, it’s just that the story is focusing on a fraction of the larger, implicit narrative.
One thing that you really shouldn’t do as an author is ignore the frame of your story. That’s what leads to plot holes and Fridge Logic moments. The story focuses on a tiny sliver of the narrative framework, but nothing exists in a vacuum — the events in a story have risen from, and will have impact upon, that frame. Ignoring that is why, for example, the world of Harry Potter would be a nightmare to live in. I don’t think it’s fair to argue that your story is a story without conflict if conflict exists somewhere in the narrative framework — ultimately it’s still conflict driving your story, even if that conflict isn’t directly portrayed.
It might just be that the story presented is a bad example. Maybe it’s possible to tell a kishotenketsu story that legitimately doesn’t contain some kind of conflict as a background. I would be delighted to see such a thing, but I suspect that, wherever there’s a story to be told, somewhere buried in the narrative structure there will be a conflict at the heart of it.
Said what I was thinking, it better words.
Key and Teeth 