Moving from Conflict to Discovery
I've been playing on Arelith for a few years, and there's been something that been irritating me, like a grain of sand in your sock.
It's this idea, that we need conflict to drive narratives. That without conflict, we cannot tell stories.
Brian and Scott examine this idea on the website for their comic, Atomic Robo (https://www.atomic-robo.com/), in regards to how they approach storytelling. I thought it worth raising here for exploration and discussion.
The last two entries on their blog are quoted below, so you can see what I'm talking about.
You’re probably familiar with Three Act Structure since it’s the foundation of most literature in the West. Briefly, it goes like this...
(1) Introduction. You’re establishing your main characters, their status quos, their goal(s), and the first sparks of (some of) these characters coming into conflict with one another.
(2) Rising Action. This is going to be the bulk of your story where most of the conflict occurs as your main characters make their decisions, take their actions, suffer their setbacks, and learn their lessons while attempting to attain their goal(s).
(3) Resolution. We hit the final conflict you’ve been building toward from word one. Victory is achieved, the dust settles, and a new status quo emerges.
We’re told stories are about their conflicts — Man vs Man, Man vs Self, Man vs Nature, etc. You’ve seen the list and probably a couple memes.
I’m not a fan of this framing!
If conflict itself is the prime mover of stories, then stories become fundamentally about domination. This is worrisome insofar as our minds operate in stories. Seems to me that if we understand conflict to be the basic building block of all narrative, and if we understand reality through the lens of narrative, then making conflict and domination the center of our stories vastly narrows our imagination. A population taught to understand the world in terms of All vs All is less able to cooperate to improve their world.
Meanwhile, the familiar image of a lone genius/hero standing in opposition to the rest of the ugly/stupid world is why every billionaire is convinced they’re the hero of all reality even though this delusion is a major contributor to the capitalist psychosis that made them billionaires by rapidly destroying the Earth’s capacity to support human life.
It’s not great!
And the cracks are showing. Our culture is built upon stories about Man dominating foes/reality through sheer force of heroic will, yet here we are in the twenty-first century where rhetoric seems to have no effect on the ravages of a virus killing hundreds of people every day while the biosphere continues to quite inconveniently obey the laws of physics.
Maybe it's time to think about stories that are not centered on conflict? What would those look like?
Let's look at another kind of narrative structure. One employed by classic Chinese poetry. It goes like this...
(1) Qiju, 起句, or "bringing into being": Introduce a scene.
(2) Chengju, 承句, or "understanding": Add details about the scene.
(3) Zhuanju, 転句, or "changing": Alter our perspective on the scene to reveal new or unexpected details.
(4) Jueju, 結句, or "drawing together": Assimilate our preconceived notions of the scene as originally depicted with our newfound knowledge to learn a greater truth.
Each of these would represent one line of your poem, but there's no reason each one can't support a whole act of your story. And, as it turns out, I’d been writing ATOMIC ROBO stories roughly in this vein for years without knowing it.
(1) Issues 1 and 2: “Bringing into Being” / Introduce the Conspiracy, Discover the Conspiracy.
(2) Issue 3: “Understanding” / Chase the Conspiracy.
(3) Issue 4: “Changing” / Destroyed by the Conspiracy.
(4) Issue 5: “Drawing Together” / Triumph over the Conspiracy .
What I like about this approach is that it centers discovery as the indivisible unit of narrative instead of conflict. These stories can still have conflict of course. Hell, over a thousand years of wuxia stories follow this structure and they’re filled to the brim with conflicts. ATOMIC ROBO is an action comic and boy oh boy there are conflicts!
“But I thought you hated conflict?!?!”
No, I’m suspicious of a system of thought that centers conflict. I have no problem with conflict in stories when conflict in and of itself is not the engine of the narrative. Conflicts in this Four Act structure are instead among the events that happen as a consequence of what is discovered. Whereas the Three Act structure we're all taught as the foundation of Western literature is centered on domination, this Four Act structure is centered on revelation.
Oh, fun fact. This is also how mystery novels work!
(1) Discover a Murder.
(2) Chase the Murderer.
(3) Perplexed by the Murderer.
(4) Triumph over the Murderer.
Neat.
Imagine that; discovery as the centre of a story, rather than conflict.
What I appreciate about their stories, and about this approach, is that because it's not centred on conflict, but rather, discovery, it allows for there to be triumph and tragedy, winners and losers, without someone having to be completely dominated (unless they are unwilling to let go/bend/adapt, because some times, folks just refuse to accept an outcome). There's definitely a place for conflict, but it doesn't need to be the main driving force.
It's this sort of approach that can help storytellers to tell more collaborative stories that result in a richer thread overall, or at least, in my opinion.
What do others think?