Maintain the Conflidiction
Conflict is often said to be the essence of drama. But unresolved conflict lasts longer.
Don’t Burn all your Fuel at Once
Open conflict burns fast. Unresolved conflict smoulders. And rumbles underground.
It’s that smouldering — the sense that something could erupt at any moment — that gives stories their depth, tension, and longevity.
Potential conflict is often more powerful than out-and-out conflict. It’s dramatic foreplay. It allows you to delay the climax, to work through multiple layers of meaning, and to keep the audience leaning forward rather than bracing for impact.
I use the artificial word conflidiction — a fusion of conflict and contradiction — to describe this condition: conflict that exists, but is not yet fully expressed; pressure that is present, but not yet released.
Conflidiction allows a story to breathe. It keeps conflict alive without exhausting it.
Conflidiction: conflict buried as contradiction
The kind of conflict that sustains a story is often not initially obvious. It’s buried within the world and the characters, as locked-away contradictions.
I think of these contradictions as being sealed into separate compartments. You can open either box alone without things getting out of hand. But open both at once and out come the flying monkeys. Things become too confronting, too dangerous, or too destabilising.
So we do the rational thing. We only open one box at a time.
Instead of breaking out into open conflict, the contradiction is suppressed, rationalised, or politely ignored.
This is how people live. And it’s how stories work.
There are far more unresolved contradictions in the world than open conflicts. Within individuals. Within relationships. Within institutions. Most of the time they’re contained. Occasionally one breaks out. But usually they remain latent — active, but unexpressed.
That latent state is dramatic gold.
Why maintain the conflidiciton?
Because once conflict is fully exposed, it tends to resolve quickly. That’s not a flaw — it’s a property.
You can’t keep overt conflict going indefinitely without it becoming repetitive. We’ve all seen:
- battle scenes that drag on long after tension has been replaced by spectacle
- films about toxic relationships that replay the same arguments with minor variations
When conflict stays open for too long, the story loses momentum. We get forced to escalate noise and violence to compensate. Eventually, the story has nowhere left to go.
What gives a story substance is layered conflidiction — multiple unresolved contradictions, revealed and confronted one at a time.
If we do our work well in the first act, the audience will sense those buried pressures early. They fear what will happen if the contradiction breaks into the open.
And at the same time, they want it to break.
They want the excitement, and they want the release. That tension — fearing the outbreak of conflict while hungering for it — is the balancing act at the heart of good storytelling.
Excavating the layers
To create that depth, we need to build contradictions into multiple layers of the story:
- the central character
- other major characters
- key relationships
- the society or world they inhabit
Writing as excavation, then reburial.
Stories usually begin at the surface — with social rules, public behaviour, and visible tensions. As the story progresses, those outer layers are peeled back, one by one, until what’s finally exposed is the innermost contradiction shaping the protagonist’s identity.
In most stories, that deepest layer is internal: the contradiction that defines who the protagonist is, and why they struggle to act with integrity.
Those contradictions must be planted early. Ideally, the first act contains the seeds of everything that will later emerge — even if neither the characters nor the audience fully recognise them yet.
When the story is over, the audience should feel that nothing came out of nowhere. The ending should feel inevitable, not because it was predictable, but because the contradictions that drove the story, and demanded resolution, were always there.
That’s what gives a story coherence.
In practice: spotting and planting contradictions
At minimum, you need:
- a powerful external contradiction in the character’s world
- and a matching internal contradiction that prevents the character from addressing it directly
One simple way to spot these contradictions is to look for ideas that can be expressed as:
“This is true… but at the same time…”
For example:
- A society that publicly condemns homosexuality, but at the same time privately tolerates it — so long as it remains invisible.
- The same society that abhors public displays of queerness, but at the same time celebrates flamboyance and theatrical excess.
- A man who is flamboyantly gay, but at the same time craves mainstream fame and public validation.
- Who deals with that contradiction by turning his flamboyance into an over-the-top performance, but at the same time insists that it is no more than a performance, that he is not actually gay. And sues anybody who says so.
- The same man who longs for a stable, loving relationship. And begins one, but disguised as a ‘valid’ relationship.
- And a partner who enjoys the wealth and glamour of that relationship, but at the same time refuses to remain hidden.
Each of these contradictions can be contained — for a while. Together, they cannot.
If you’ve seen Behind the Candelabra, you’ll recognise how these locked contradictions eventually rupture into open conflict, and how the story’s power comes not from the explosion itself, but from the long period of suppression that precedes it.
Conflidiction and the writer
It’s hard enough for characters to confront the contradictions that shape their lives. It’s often harder still for the writer to perceive them.
As the saying goes, whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish.
Your job as a dramatist is to identify the contradictions that govern choice and behaviour:
- within society,
- within relationships, and
- within individuals.
Then create a situation that forces a character to peel back and confront those layers, one by one, situation by situation.
To turn an abstract philosophical tension into lived experience.
Where DOES THIS LEAVE us?
Contradictions can be found in three arenas:
- society and the larger world
- intimate relationships
- the individual psyche (sometimes described as person and persona)
Strong stories engage all three during the second act, before finally confronting the core contradiction at the heart of the premise in the third.
But everything rests on what you establish early. The conflidiction planted in the first act is what sustains the story, gives it depth, and allows conflict to emerge with meaning rather than noise.
That is the conflidiction you must establish — and maintain.
