A few weeks ago I wrote about how insufficient the idea of all stories being rooted in conflict is – actually, I mostly wrote about how our assumption that conflict is the core of stories affects the way we design games, but most readers seemed more interested in whether stories inherently need to be about conflict. While I never claimed the conflict model of storytelling was worthless, I raised questions about why it was assumed that conflict was regarded as inherently and uniquely necessary to create and tell a story. Discussing and thinking about this afterwards, I think we tend to focus on conflict because it’s the most readily available way to create tension, which is, perhaps, a necessary component of storytelling – or, at least, we can define tension in such a way that that’s a defensible assertion. And, reading this, you might say “okay, conflict, tension, same thing right? A rose by any other name yada yada yada,” and for many kinds of tension that’s basically true. In many cases, even if we split hairs about conflict and tension and which arises from the other and which is a better word for the thing we’re describing, it’s entirely a semantic argument. The reasons why I choose to say ‘tension’, though, are twofold: First, because ‘conflict’, though it can broadly describe any two forces in a story that work against each other, tends to push us towards the idea of interpersonal conflict – so the choice of words matters here. Tension is an inherently vaguer term with less power to dictate the form the action of the story takes. Second, because there are forms of tension that simply cannot be readily described as conflict – foremost among these are what I’m going to call external tensions.
As I see it, every story has internal and external tension. Internal tensions are the places where the forces in the story aren’t aligned and push against each other in some way – sure, there’s good versus evil, but there’s also Denise trying to make an early appointment versus traffic and daylight savings, or Gordon trying to clean his apartment vs his apartment being extraordinarily gross and also he’s still kind of hung over. These map fairly readily, albeit in a somewhat tortuous way, to the idea of conflict – whether “man vs man”, “man vs nature”, or “man vs self”, these have been described as conflict. I would argue that that’s not a very good or intuitive description, but I wouldn’t bother writing about it if that was my only critique of the model.
External tensions, on the other hand, are those places where the story and the reader’s understanding of the world we live in do not agree with each other. It’s why portrayals of flawless beauty or a utopian world are almost painful to experience, because they scrape up against our understanding of the limits and expiration of beauty and our knowledge of the deep and ugly flaws of our world. External tension is how a story can be compelling with nothing approaching what we would call conflict, simply by pushing against our expectations or beliefs in some way. When we look at it this way, stories begin to look like physics energy diagrams, where tension is never really resolved, just converted. Happy endings don’t erase the internal tension of the story’s conflicts, just convert that tension into an external tension against our knowledge of how much rarer and more complicated happy endings are in our world – that they are seldom uncomplicatedly happy, and never really endings.
However, because external tension is contextual, its nature depends on the reader. If the values of the story and its understanding of the world line up fairly closely with your own, you won’t experience much external tension, and if they don’t then you will. Unlike internal tension, external tension produces an implicit demand on the audience to consider why they feel this way and whether to change their understanding of the world, or their understanding of the story, to resolve this tension. This is why stories can be powerful agents of change, because of this implicit demand for action. However, the author can’t know exactly where this tension will fall or how it will be perceived, so attempting to change minds this way can be a risky business – A tension against fascistic elements in a story can frequently be resolved just as easily by embracing as by opposing fascism, and the same story may lead different people to either or neither.
In all likelihood, this is still a flawed way of viewing a story, flawed in ways I haven’t yet noticed, but it still seems at least more encompassing and accurate than declaring that a story is based on its conflicts. It’s a lens, a way of viewing a story: What here generates internal tension? What here generates external tension? And these start to map pretty closely to genres: Drama and suspense and action stories are built on internal tension, on the conflicts between the characters and their aspirations and the world. Satire, science-fiction, and comedy rely more on the external tensions, absurdity and surprise and commentary on real things and events.
The conflict model is valid inasmuch as it’s a smaller version of this model, which encompasses more story possibilities. It’s highly likely that this, too, is a small part of a greater whole, that this still shuts out a great number of possible stories, stories without tension. I don’t know what those look like, yet.