The Conflict Your Story Needs Is the One You're Avoiding

Your story probably doesn't need more conflict—it needs the right conflict.

One of the most common mistakes writers make is replacing emotional confrontation with external obstacles. The result is a story where plenty of things happen, but very little actually changes.

In this episode, Zena Dell Lowe explores why audiences connect most deeply with relational conflict, how external events should intensify—not replace—the emotional journey, and why so many climaxes leave viewers feeling strangely unsatisfied.

Through a real story consultation, she illustrates how writers accidentally dodge the very confrontation they've spent the entire story building toward.

If your middle sags, your ending feels flat, or your climax never quite lands, this episode may help you discover why.

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CHAPTERS

00:00 Why stories manufacture the wrong conflict

00:48 A story pitch that reveals a common writing mistake

02:20 The bus isn't the real problem

03:20 What the climax should actually be

05:40 Why writers replace emotional conflict with logistics

07:10 Situational conflict vs. relational conflict

08:35 Why writers avoid emotional confrontation

09:35 How Hollywood often dodges its own climax

10:50 One question that diagnoses your entire story

11:40 Why emotional truth matters

13:20 How to know if your story is avoiding itself

14:00 Final encouragement for writers

Transcript

[00:00:00] Writers know they need conflict, so they manufacture it. But in doing so, what often happens is that they avoid the actual conflict that they've [00:00:10] set the audience up for, and the result is that the story starts to feel flat or frustrating or emotionally unsatisfying, even though technically stuff is [00:00:20] happening.

I wanna talk about a storytelling mistake that came up the other day after a young gal pitched her story idea to me, but it's a mistake I see often. It's not [00:00:30] just from beginners, it's from experienced writers, too. Now, the feedback I shared with this gal perfectly illustrates the problem, and honestly, once you see [00:00:40] this issue, you're gonna start seeing it everywhere.

It's in movies and television and even books. Hello, and welcome to the Storyteller's Mission with Zena Dell Lowe, a podcast for [00:00:50] artists and storytellers about changing the world for the better through story. So here's the setup. The writer pitched me a story about twin sisters, one of whom dies. Now, [00:01:00] the surviving twin and the deceased sister's best friend decide to complete the dead sister's bucket list before graduation [00:01:10] because the surviving sister is supposed to give a speech at their upcoming graduation ceremony honoring her dead sister.

But she keeps putting off writing the speech because she's [00:01:20] in denial apparently that her sister is dead, and she's apparently struggling very badly with this death, but she won't really admit it. In the meantime, the [00:01:30] best friend has secretly accepted a job that's gonna take her out of the country, and she's gonna start that job after graduation, but she hasn't told the [00:01:40] living sister that she's going to be leaving.

Okay, so this is all pretty good setup. It's rife with conflict. There's good emotional material. There's lots of potential. But then [00:01:50] as the story kept unfolding, I noticed that the writer kept avoiding the emotional confrontation between the two characters that would inevitably need to [00:02:00] happen. Both characters had secrets that they were keeping from each other, but it never really got brought to a head, or when it did, it wasn't done in a way that was really [00:02:10] satisfying emotionally.

At one point in the story, as the sister and best friend are trying to complete the last bucket item on the list, [00:02:20] suddenly there's a deadline to get back to where the ceremony is gonna take place. And so now they're trying to catch a bus, and they've gotta get to the bus stop on time to catch the bus so they [00:02:30] don't miss the ceremony, da, da, da, da, da.

You see the problem? This is an external problem. Will they catch the bus? Will they make it back in time? Will they miss the [00:02:40] ceremony? And I'm like Why are we worried about the bus right now? And so I tried to explain to her that she was manufacturing [00:02:50] conflict that is far less dynamic and engaging and interesting than the relational conflict that she's already set up between these two [00:03:00] characters.

Like, if we want that dynamic of the ticking time clock, don't have it be from the fact that they might not make the bus. That's a different sort of [00:03:10] story. What the writer set up is a relational story with high emotional stakes, so the conflict needs to come from there. So here's what I suggested instead.[00:03:20] 

Why not have them be backstage waiting for the sister to be called out to give her speech, and just before her name is called, the best friend [00:03:30] finally blurts out that she's leaving? Because in this story, what the writer has set up is that the surviving twin is basically emotionally [00:03:40] dependent on the dead sister's best friend now because the friend has become a kind of replacement for the sister she lost.

But eventually, the relationship has to break. It [00:03:50] has to because the friend cannot permanently be a stand-in for the dead twin. So now the pressure is because the sister and the best [00:04:00] friend are finally forced to have that moment of truth conversation where the best friend says, "I can't stay here. I can't be [00:04:10] your replacement sister.

I have to go on with my life. I've taken this job." And now the surviving sister is blindsided, and she can be like, "You can't do that. You can't [00:04:20] just leave me here. Why are you doing this to me?" And the friend says, "Because I'm not her, and I can't keep trying to be her for you." That is [00:04:30] conflict. Now suddenly, grief, denial, abandonment, identity, codependency, all [00:04:40] of this fear that the sister's experiencing internally but has not articulated or even admitted, it all collides at once.

And [00:04:50] then right in the middle of this emotional meltdown, someone knocks on the door and says, "Hey, they're ready for you on stage." Now that is a [00:05:00] clock pressure, but it works because it's no longer replacing the emotional conflict, it's intensifying it. The sister can't even go [00:05:10] on stage because she's in the midst of a full-on emotional meltdown.

She's finally feeling the full weight of her loss, which has been triggered now by the [00:05:20] best friend admitting that she's not gonna be there, that she's leaving. And so with that news, her carefully crafted world of denial finally [00:05:30] crumbles. That is the story, not public transportation, not the speech even.

It's about them and their relationship and how they're [00:05:40] both dealing with this terrible loss, this terrible grief. Now, before I go further, let me say why this happens. The mistake usually [00:05:50] comes from a good instinct. Because see, writers know intuitively that stories need conflict. We know that our scenes have to [00:06:00] have tension, that things need to happen in those scenes.

There has to be conflict in every single scene. There should be pressure and stakes and urgency. And [00:06:10] so what we start doing is we start adding obstacles, because there has to be conflict. And by the way, we're trying to build towards a momentum, that [00:06:20] climactic moment when they have to face something. Then instead of letting the conflict come from the character relationships, the [00:06:30] writer will manufacture a different conflict that just doesn't matter.

In fact, it lowers the stakes because it's just not as important. What the audience [00:06:40] cares about are the relationships. What we care about is the truth finally coming out, is that the demons are finally being [00:06:50] confronted, if you will. And so at this moment in the climax, you don't want it to be about whether or not they catch the bus.

Because if it does become [00:07:00] about that, then you're completely missing the point. So again, the problem isn't that the obstacles are bad. The problem is if the obstacles start replacing the emotional conflict with [00:07:10] simply logistical conflict. They are not the same thing. That is a reality of story. Not all conflict carries the same emotional weight.

There is a [00:07:20] huge difference between will they catch the bus and will this relationship survive the truth? One is an [00:07:30] inconvenience. The other is devastating, and audiences feel the difference. They know it. They feel it while they're watching it. If you're [00:07:40] watching a movie or a TV show, you can almost sense the story dodging itself.

The characters start arguing about meaningless things, or they run around solving [00:07:50] side problems. You don't wanna just keep introducing interruptions right when the emotional confrontation should happen, and subconsciously then we start feeling like they're [00:08:00] wasting our time because emotionally we already know what the story is actually about.

If you get nothing else from this episode, I want you to [00:08:10] take this away. Never replace relational conflict with situational conflict. You only wanna use situational conflict to intensify [00:08:20] relational conflict. That's what good storytelling does. The external pressure should squeeze the emotional wound, [00:08:30] not distract from it.

Now, here's a deeper issue, and I think it's something that people don't really talk about enough. It's the reason why writers avoid it, [00:08:40] and the reason they avoid a relational conflict is because it's uncomfortable even for them because it requires vulnerability. It requires [00:08:50] characters to finally say the thing that they've been avoiding saying, and that means that the writer has to emotionally go there, too.

It is much easier to write [00:09:00] deadlines, missed buses, storms, interruption, anything. It is much easier to write that stuff than to tap into rejection and [00:09:10] betrayal, grief, shame. You see, relational conflict changes people. Once certain things are said, the relationship can't go back to what [00:09:20] it was before. It's terrifying for us as writers, and it's also terrifying to our characters.

We have to stop stalling. We have to [00:09:30] stop creating motion instead of progression, because they are not the same thing. And listen, Hollywood does it all the time. You'll see entire third [00:09:40] acts built around stopping the bomb, or catching the plane, or getting to the ceremony, or escaping the building, while the emotional conflict [00:09:50] that actually was promised in the story gets avoided and then rushed through in 30 seconds at the very end.

And then you leave the [00:10:00] theater feeling weirdly unsettled, but you don't know why. And it's not because the movie lacked action, it's because it avoided the emotional climax. [00:10:10] So the audience was waiting for truth. And spectacle has its place. I love spectacle. I am not anti-spectacle. But action [00:10:20] without emotional confrontation eventually just becomes noise, because humans are relational creatures, and that's why that's what [00:10:30] we really care about.

We care about reconciliation, forgiveness, betrayal, sacrifice, [00:10:40] identity abandonment, love, all of those things, all of that stuff that wrecks us. Which leads me to a great [00:10:50] diagnostic question, a practical question that you can ask yourself while you're writing. I think it's enormously helpful for you to [00:11:00] ask, if I removed this external problem, would the core conflict still exist?

And if the answer is yes, then that is your real [00:11:10] story. It's not about the bus, it's not about the ceremony, it's not even about the speech that the sister's giving at the end of the story. It isn't about the ticking [00:11:20] clock. Those things may add pressure, especially if you do it right, but the real story is always and forever the emotional fracture [00:11:30] underneath all of that.

And if you avoid the fracture, the audience will feel cheated whether they know it or not. The last thing I want to say today is that I [00:11:40] believe the issue goes even deeper than story structure, because this comes back to what I've been harping on since I started this podcast, which is that our duty as [00:11:50] storytellers is to tell the truth about the human condition.

And in order to tell the truth, it requires us to dive deep into the human [00:12:00] psychology of personhood. We need to uncover what's really going on inside of our characters, because that's how we change the world. That's [00:12:10] how our stories resonate with audiences is when we tap into the truth of humanity. We are fundamentally telling people what is true about human persons, and [00:12:20] it's a credibility issue.

If you avoid that, then your characters aren't believable. And remember, storytelling is about [00:12:30] conflict, conflict with self, with God, with others, with reality in general, with pain and the suffering we're going through. Your character is in conflict [00:12:40] from the moment your story opens until the moment that the story has inevitably brought them to, which is that moment [00:12:50] of confrontation.

Weak storytelling often comes from missing the true conflict or trying to avoid that final confrontation. The [00:13:00] writer wants the appearance of intensity without the cost of emotional honesty. But guess what? Audiences are smarter than that, [00:13:10] and they will know when a story dodges itself. Even very quiet scenes, by the way, can feel enormous if the relational stakes are [00:13:20] real.

You want your audience to feel it because the scene ultimately lands emotionally. If your story feels flat right now, [00:13:30] or if your middle is dragging, or if your climax feels weirdly unsatisfying and contrived, then ask yourself if you're manufacturing conflict, [00:13:40] and if you're doing it because you're avoiding the harder emotional confrontation that needs to take place.

Because the chances are the strongest conflict in your story is [00:13:50] already there. You're just afraid to let your characters walk in it. Honestly, it's usually where the story finally becomes worth watching. So if you've [00:14:00] enjoyed this episode, please, please subscribe, leave a review, share it with another writer, and of course, check out my courses and resources [00:14:10] online at thestorytellersmission.com.

Thank you for listening to The Storyteller's Mission with Zena Dell Lowe. [00:14:20] May you go forth inspired to change the world for the better through [00:14:30] story