A Conflict Layer Cake
To have a substantial second act, your story needs multiple layers of conflict. To have a powerful third act, they need to come together into a single significant external action with enormous risks attached.
If you prefer to see the ideas in action before you read this theoretical post, or even as you read this theoretical post, open A Conflict Layer Cake: Example.
For some practical ways to apply these ideas, see A Conflict Layer Cake: Exercises
Conflict and contradiction give your story power
Powerful storytelling is built upon contradiction and conflict. Conflict and its hidden form, contradiction, are the engine of narrative. They cause the characters to act, and they cause the actions to have challenging consequences, which forces the characters to deal with those consequences.
They give your second act substance, and your third act punch.
The power of hidden conflict
Conflict isn’t always out in the open. Sometimes it’s lurking, waiting to ambush the characters when the time is right. Until it’s ready to spring, conflict lying in ambush hides itself as contradiction.
Make those potential conflicts visible as contradictions early, then keep them in reserve until you need them.
Four layers of conflict
To cover as many areas of potential conflict as possible, I look at conflict as living in four places:
1. The Uncaring Universe. Anything that is beyond human control. Hurricanes, earthquakes, plagues, car accidents etc. Fate, destiny, and coincidence. Power is strictly one-way.
Some societal institutions sit in this arena. The tax department. Speeding tickets. They are powerful, and big enough to be completely impersonal. Any internal worker an ordinary person can access has no power either.
You can sometimes take those institutions on, if you can find enough of the right allies.
2. Society. People and institutions that interact with you, but don’t really care about you. You have some power, but not much.
All human societies have rules governing the exercise of power. Those rules are both written and unwritten. They are also contradictory – clear until they’re not.
3. Intimate Others. People with whom you have reciprocal relationships. You care deeply about them, and they care deeply about you.
Psychologically healthy people depend on their relationships with others. They work to stay in tune with how others feel about them, and care about how others think of them.
Only psychopaths and two-year-olds don’t have to balance their needs against the needs of others. We often can’t do exactly what we want without affecting the people we care about. And what affects them affects us, which impacts our freedom of choice.
Most of us deal with these constraints on our free will by dividing the world into us and them. We treat those we call ‘us’ with empathy and give and take, and expect the same from them. On the other hand, we expect ‘them’ to treat ‘us’ with Darwinian harshness, and apply the same to ‘them.’
4. Our divided self. Our inner conflicting needs and desires.
Few of us are completely integrated emotionally. Most of us have unresolved conflicting desires, often stemming from our childhood and our upbringing.
We want unconditional love. But at the same time, we want to get our own way. We want to be in loving relationships, but fear the pain of rejection. And so on.
These contradictions cause us to make bad choices. To act in irrational and often self-destructive ways. They distort our view of the world and corrupt the choices we make in all those other arenas.
The second act problem.
The meat of your story is in the second act. For your story to have substance, it needs a strong second act. And a strong second act needs a range of conflicts to fill it out.
Those multiple kinds and levels of conflict can be found by consciously making your story explore all four areas of conflict, particularly the last three:
1. Society,
2. Intimate others, and
3. The Divided Self.
Although the Uncaring Universe can still meddle in the second act, by then we are much more interested in the way conflict from the Uncaring Universe creates conflict in one of the other areas.
Planting the seeds of conflict.
Even though most conflicts only come to the surface in the second act, they need to be present in the first act. They may not be immediately visible, but in retrospect, the audience should recognise that they were always present – usually in embryonic form.
The embryonic form of conflict is contradiction. Contradiction is a conflict that is present, but temporarily inactive because it is locked down and hidden or suppressed.
Deal with conflicts one by one
Good storytelling doesn’t play out all the conflicts in one enormous rush. Don’t fire all your cannons at once.
Play them out one by one. Consciously explore all the levels of conflict. Society, intimate others, the divided self. And then go around again at a deeper level until you get to the core inner contradiction.
In the vast majority of stories, the inner conflict is the last, because it’s the deepest, most powerful conflict, and the most difficult to face and overcome. After all, your character can withdraw from even the most oppressive society, and can break off even the most intimate relationship, but they can’t run away from themselves forever.
The final confrontation is always external.
But, even though facing up to Internal Conflict is the toughest challenge, it’s not the final one. The final climatic confrontation is always external.
Because if it isn’t external, it’s only theoretical. To us, to the other characters in the story, and to the protagonist themselves.
It’s not enough for a character to say that they have overcome their fear of heights – we have to see them climb that wobbly tower to rescue the kitten before we (and they) know that the change is real.
Which eventually delivers your premise
This final choice and act takes us to the meaning of your story, not by having a character say it aloud, but by seeing it play out in dilemmas, choices, actions and consequences. Across the full spectrum of life.
