606 – Conflicts Without Character-Antagonists

Authors generally know what to do when their hero is threatened by an assassin. The resulting sword fight may not be easy to write, but there’s an understanding of who needs to be stopped and how. But what about conflicts where the “antagonist” is a force of nature or simply people’s apathy toward buying baked goods? That last one can be a real problem for heroes who are trying to save their school through a bake sale. This week, we talk about how to write conflicts in which there isn’t a conscious force pushing back. ## Show Notes - Antagonist - Agency - Legends and Lattes - The Skin Map - Turning Point - The Spellshop - Sandman Fight - The Character Goal Model ## Transcript **Generously transcribed by Steve.** Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. **Oren:** And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.  **Chris**: And I’m Chris.  **Oren:** Uh-oh, there’s a flood coming, and I’m going to sword fight it. And then after that, we have to put on a bake sale to save the school, so I will argue with the brownies to be more delicious.  **Chris**: Oh, no, those brownies. They are very malicious, always trying to be as disgusting as possible.  **Oren:** ‘Cause that’s how conflict works when you don’t have an obvious human or human-equivalent antagonist, is that you just personify whatever is around, and then you use the same tactics against it as you would against a human enemy, right? **Chris**: Did you know that we only sink in the water sometimes because the water’s very angry with us?  **Oren:** Yeah, it’s actually a character flaw on the water’s part. It is malice in the form of H2O. So today we are talking about conflicts with non-character antagonists. I’m probably gonna slip and say non-human throughout the episode. That’s not technically accurate because a character can be an animal in certain circumstances.  **Chris**: A character needs intent. An animal can have intent. You could say a robot has intent if you want. But we’re talking about, you know, antagonists that do not have intent or any kind of awareness or sentience. **Oren**: Right. And, a protagonist needs to be a character, as far as I know.  **Chris**: Correct, because if they don’t have intent, then they don’t have agency. We could get into lots of theoretical stuff of what happens if you’re not using tension as your primary plotter, but this is about conflict, so we’re talking about tension here. And so we do need to have points where a character or protagonist has agency, and they don’t have agency unless they have intent.  **Oren**: Yeah, so barring some extremely weird edge case that I haven’t considered, the main character, your hero, needs to be a character of some kind, but the antagonist, the force opposing them, doesn’t necessarily have to be a character.  This can be obvious in the form of a natural disaster, or in, maybe in the case of a panicked crowd, which isn’t a character. It’s technically made up of people, but it doesn’t act like a character. Or, it could be that you need to make money at a bake sale or something. Or, maybe in the more specific example, at a bake sale it would be that people are kind of suspicious of your brownies ’cause they look a little odd ’cause you used non-standard ingredients.  But they’re actually very delicious, and so you have to overcome people’s hesitancy to try the odd-looking brownies. Something like that, right?  **Chris**: Yeah. Those are some great examples, but I think this instance of the odd-shaped brownies making people hesitant really highlights kind of how artificial this concept of a quote-unquote, “antagonist” is.  Because really what these are, are just plot problems, right? They’re obstacles. And so treating them… When we say antagonist, treating them that it’s a thing- or like it’s one thing – is in all cases very artificial. Like in this scenario with the brownies, is it the odd shape of the brownies that’s the antagonist?  Is it the people? Is it their hesitancy itself? **Oren**: Is it the social construct of money?  **Chris**: \[Laughs]. Capitalism. Capitalism was the antagonist all along.  **Oren**: Uh, excuse me. You can’t give capitalism credit for the concept of exchanging money for food. Wow, that’s super capitalist of you. Really capitalist-centric. Pardon me. **Chris**: Oh, no. Maybe the antagonist is my capitalist-centrism.  **Oren**: Yeah, exact- very. I don’t know what we’re talking about anymore.  But yes. **Chris**: Yeah, yeah. But the point is that when you have a conflict, you have your protagonist Who is facing, and they could actually face a variety of obstacles which we could all call antagonists, right?  And they can have more… It’s not like there’s just one antagonist. Like, when you have a villain, usually what happens is your hero does something, the villain does something, and the villain is directly responsible for most of the obstacles your hero faces. But I find in a lot of  non-antagonistic conflicts, they appear as often a little bit more like bad luck, where there’s not just one antagonist.  There’s a variety of things that go wrong, and every time there’s a problem or obstacle that’s technically an antagonist. So again, for simplicity, it’s convenient to use the word antagonist because we have to talk about what is opposing the hero, but it’s also kind of a very artificial concept, especially when you don’t have a villain who’s actually opposing the hero on purpose. **Oren**: Yeah. And so it’s worth asking, why does it matter? Like, why are we talking about this? And the reason is that as I have edited manuscripts over the years, I have discovered that authors…it’s not like they are always great at writing a traditional conflict with a human-ish villain, but they tend to have an easier time with that than when the conflict lacks a character antagonist.  Because when there’s an enemy, there’s an assassin, and they’re trying to get you, so you punch him. That’s pretty straightforward. Or if it’s a social conflict, you argue the chancellor down so he doesn’t pass the evil tax cut bill, or you mind meld with the alien rock monster so it doesn’t eat the town, et cetera. That’s… Not like there aren’t a billion ways to mess that up, but I have found that writers tend to get it better than the bake sale example that I mentioned. They will often…I will read stories where there is a bake sale, and it’s important. The bake sale is gonna save the school maybe.  But how? How is that going to work? And it’s very difficult for a lot of authors to make that real enough to be a satisfying conflict. And so you often end up with conflict where stuff just kinda happens And it’s like, yeah, I guess we made enough money, or we didn’t make enough money. But why? What was the turning point? What was the dramatic effort? What made that compelling other than just watching things happen? Authors struggle with this a lot.  **Chris**: Yeah. I feel like we’ve read a lot of cozies and we have an obstacle, and then the protagonist just tries one thing and it automatically works, right?  Like in Legends and Lattes, oh, I know, we’ll just… We need customers. Let’s just do this one thing. Oh, look, we have tons of customers, right?  **Oren**: Yeah, it worked actually.  **Chris**: It worked.  **Oren**: \[Laughs]  **Chris**: That was super easy. Barely an inconvenience. Yeah or my favorite one of course was in that story where they had the bread maker.  God, Skin Map.  **Oren**: Yeah, The Skin Map. Not a title for a book you would think was about a bakery.  **Chris**: \[Laughs] **Oren**: There is also a skin map in it.  **Chris**: Yeah. There’s multiple POVs in that book, and the bakery was just the best POV where it’s basically a side quest. But again, we had problems getting customers, and then we just did one thing.  Oh, wow, it’s so easy, you know? We have sweets that people will buy ’cause the coffee’s too bitter, nor why people wanna buy coffee.  **Oren**: Yeah. Don’t worry about it. And then it can go the other direction too, and I don’t know of as many published examples of this just because readers are sensitive to failure.  The character can also be like, “We’re gonna save the school with this bake sale.” And then the bake sale happens, and it didn’t work, right? We made a big thing about it, and they just didn’t make enough money. And it’s like all right, well, that’s frustrating. Why didn’t you make enough money?  What occurred that made that not happen? And that doesn’t happen as often in published stories I think ’cause it tends to get weeded out more, but I see it a fair amount in my unpublished manuscripts that I work on. And so the end result of all of this is that you end up with characters that are just kind of milling around.  They don’t really know what they’re doing. The reader doesn’t know what it is they’re trying to accomplish, and that hurts tension, and then it hurts satisfaction. And if you do that too many times, you won’t be able to create tension again ’cause the readers won’t believe you, and it’s a vicious cycle. **Chris**: All right. So how do we do this? How do we create a detailed conflict when we have a non-character antagonist?  **Oren**: Well, in some cases, if it’s something like a natural disaster, you can sort of treat the natural disaster the same way that you would treat a character antagonist. Like, “Oh no, there’s a flood.  We have to escape the flood.” Well, that’s a life and death situation. It’s fairly straightforward. You still need to create the back and forth that Chris has described a few times.  **Chris**: Yeah. So I’ll get specific about the back and forth. So in a conflict, we should see a pattern where both the protagonist and the antagonist are acting, and this kind of reflects tension structure.  So the antagonist strikes first, creates a threat. The protagonist has to scramble to sort of respond to that, and then the antagonist responds to the antagonist. This is very much just like a conversation where people respond to the last thing that the other person said. That’s kind of ideally what you want to happen, and you want both sides to go back and forth. We’ve seen a lot of stories where this happened in “Skin of the Sea”, where we had kind of a situation that was supposed to be a conflict but wasn’t really. More like “Calamity”, where the character is out and they’re fighting a storm, but there’s… The storm is happening to the protagonist, but there’s no sense the protagonist can actually intervene in events and do anything, right? And that’s the purpose of the protagonist. That’s what the protagonist is for. And then what happens in that sort of scenario where, oh, we’re being buffeted by the wind, and the waves are crashing over us, and all of these things are happening…but there’s no sense of the protagonist responding to them and doing anything, is that we kind of start to tune out because it just doesn’t feel like it matters anymore.  There’s no edge of our seat, you know, will the protagonist make it or will the antagonist make it? The antagonist is just gonna get to do what they want, and we’re just waiting till it’s over. And this, I think, is one of the things that people find tricky when they have a non-character antagonist, right? So, oh, the wave is in the boat. All right, now the boat is sinking ’cause it’s full of water. Okay, so the protagonist has to intervene in order to avoid complete disaster. So okay, I’m gonna grab something that can hold water and start trying to bucket out the water. And then we have something else happen, and again, it can be hard to think of if this is not…’Cause, like, a villain or something with intent can always choose how to respond, whereas it looks more like luck when it’s a non-villain antagonist. So what bad thing can happen? Oh, well, maybe when my protagonist was leaning over the side to dump out water, they accidentally tipped over, and that’s kind of…It looks like accident, it looks like bad luck, but it’s also they would be less likely to tip over if they were not in the middle of a storm, and that happened because of their last action, because they were trying to get the water out of the boat, and that went wrong.  **Oren**: Could do the classic thing where you’re putting the water off the side of the boat, and then because of the shift in the wind or whatever, the big spar that holds the sail swings around and bonks you right in the head.  That’s classic scenario. Uh Yeah.  **Chris**: So in any situation, that’s kind of what we’re looking for. Like, in “Legends and Lattes”, what if we’re like, “Hey, customers, I’ve got this magic elixir. Come into my coffee shop. I know you don’t understand what coffee is.” They’re like, “Ooh, we like magic elixir that makes us awake.”  And then, you know, they try it like, “Oh, gosh, this is bitter. You’re trying to poison us.” **Oren**: \[Laughs] **Chris**: Right? What kind of bad luck, what can go wrong to kind of create those obstacles and create that kind of back and forth between the protagonist trying to intervene in some ways. And again, the protagonist doesn’t have to do good things when they intervene.  They’re trying to… they should be trying to succeed generally. But they can do the wrong thing and get a bad result, as long as they do something and change what happens. And that’s why a protagonist, of course, needs to be a character and needs intent.  **Oren**: Yeah. And so with this one we have a fairly straightforward set of stakes and/or thresholds that the character has to meet in order to succeed.  And the issue with this kind of conflict with a natural disaster or with having to climb down a steep cliff face or something like that, is that writers often have a difficult time creating that back and forth that Chris was describing when there isn’t a character-level enemy doing that stuff.  And Chris has described how you get past that.  The next stage of difficulty is the kind of conflict that doesn’t have the inherent clear-cut what success or failure looks like. And these are the things I’ve been talking about. These are the things like the bake sale, or writing a paper, or making a sword.  What does success at the bake sale look like? That’s not as obvious. Or how do you know if you have succeeded at “sword”? How will the reader know that you did good or bad?  **Chris**: If you accidentally create a shield, you have failed at “sword”.  **Oren**: Yeah, if you did, if you did a bad enough job, you’ve created a different implement. **Chris**: \[Laughs] **Oren**: And if it’s, like, really short, it might not be a huge thing. I’m remembering the swordsmithing scene in the Prydain books, and it’s pretty short. He doesn’t spend a lot of time smithing, so it’s not as big a deal that we don’t know what it means to make a good sword. But if you were doing that as an extended thing, and making a sword can take a while, you would need some way for the reader to be able to judge how you’re doing.  Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of question marks. Yeah, I guess the sword is being made, presumably. I’ll take your word for it.  **Chris**: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And in particular when we’re talking about, okay, what does success look like, obviously conflicts need tension, so this should have stakes of some kind, right? So what disaster, what bad thing are we trying to avert by doing the bake sale, by making the sword, or whatever else it is? If we have to make a sword to impress somebody who will then train us in sword fighting, what is the threshold that the sword has to meet in order to avert getting kicked out? **Oren**: Yeah.  **Chris**: And not having any training, for instance. Or for a bake sale, assume that we’ve got some issue with money involved. And you can, of course, be sneaky and do a little switcheroo later. Conflict doesn’t always have to work out exactly the way it looks like it’s going to, and often it’s more fun that way.  But for example, with a bake sale, a pretty standard way of trying to make so readers can understand how your characters are doing is to set an amount of money you need to raise and have the character be able to have an idea of how close they are to that goal. They’re not necessarily tracking every dollar and cents, but know that you have to make $5,000.  And then you can have an idea of how close you are. And once you can do that, then you can set child arcs and try turning points to get different things done. You can do the back and forth that Chris has described. And then you might end up with a different result. You might end up that they don’t make the money actually, but they tried so hard, and that impressed someone enough that they’ll put in a good word at the school board meeting or something. So there are different ways you can change what ends up happening, but readers need some idea of how well your characters are doing, otherwise nothing that’s happening matters.  **Chris**: Yeah. So again, at the end of the day, do we avert the stakes or the worst case scenario, or do we not? And the goal itself, though, can change, right? So our goal is to, for instance, we’ve got a bake sale and we’re trying to make $5,000. And so we can actually fail and not make the goal, but then if we still find another way to avert the stakes, oh, we didn’t make $5,000, but that’s ’cause we were really nice and didn’t wanna use unethical sales tactics.  Somebody then really liked us and then wanted to donate a bunch of money after the bake sale, so we still averted the stakes. That all works.  **Oren**: Yeah.  **Chris**: So I had another situation that I think is a good example of this not going quite right is at the end of “The Spell Shop” where we have a storm that’s for the climax, and I think the problem they have is we establish, okay, they did a good job of establishing why this storm is bad. And why it’s gonna cause havoc, because we have storms earlier in the story that cause damage, almost kill somebody, and there are storms that are happening because usually magic now has to be used to kind of manage the island and the ecosystem. And since they’ve been deprived of magic workers to take care of the weather, now these storms have started. So we kind of have a chance to establish the storm’s the threat before we have a big storm happen at the climax. And then they have this method, their kind of plan for what they’re gonna do during the conflict to try to take care of the storm, is that they have to cast, like, a group spell together.  But then their issue is they make this spell to try to establish why this is gonna be difficult.They make the spell very finicky, so supposedly you have to pronounce every syllable correctly, and the group all has to say it together perfectly. Then what happens during the conflict is it doesn’t feel like there’s any room for setbacks without complete failure. So you’ve got two options. Either they can just say it perfectly and it looks too easy, or they can say it not perfectly, but keep going, and it feels like not saying it perfectly didn’t matter after all. **Oren**: Yeah.  **Chris**: Right? And so we don’t really have a, some way to have, like, actual setbacks happen built into this spell system. I still think there is more that could have been done. I think the author could have had somebody maybe pause first or say it in a squeaky voice because something is blown at them. **Oren**: Uh-huh.  **Chris**: Something that would’ve been more forgiving is if they need a certain number of people saying the syllables or the spell could die. But if a person can’t say them correctly because the storm is doing something, they could stop chanting, but that starts to weaken the spell, and the storm starts to get stronger. So if something bad happens and too many people stop chanting, the storm starts getting more and more out of hand, so that we have some level of give and take that can happen. Again, just like if you had a villain, you don’t want your villain to be so fierce that they can just kill somebody with their mind. \[Both laugh] **Chris**: ‘Cause that just ends the conflict instantly, and we don’t want the protagonist to be able to do that. Again, that ends the conflict instantly. So it’s the same with our non-character obstacles. We need something other than complete success or complete failure. And this spell where you have to say every single syllable right or the spell supposedly goes wrong doesn’t offer multiple states where things can be going wrong or going right. **Oren**: Right. Because in theory if you mess up even one of those, then it’s over, right? So where is the ability for characters to fail and thus raise the tension that way? ‘Cause by the nature of this conflict, they can only ever win with a perfect score, which I’m not gonna say it’s impossible to do that, but man, that’s rough. That would be very hard.  **Chris**: Right. So what happens is they don’t say it perfectly and it’s clear, but it doesn’t seem to matter because as far as we know, but then at the end it turns out, oh, well we did get it quite right, but then like, ah, what was it? Flowers fell from the sky or something.  **Oren**: We, you know, we, we got some magical help, right? **Chris**: Right. The point is that we make it so that the actual obstacles are meaningless in effect, right? Because we can’t have those obstacles just instantly end the conflict.  **Oren**: Yeah. To use an anonymized version of one from a client’s story so that I’m not putting this client on blast as they say, have a conflict where the main characters need to have an auction to raise funds for their museum, right?  They need to be able to… If they don’t raise enough money at this auction, their museum’s gonna close. And so the first problem that we had with this conflict was that it was very unclear whether it was actually even possible to raise enough money at this auction to keep the museum open because everything was very nebulous and we knew the museum needed a lot of money, but not how much, nor if there was any rough estimate of how valuable the items they had for auction were. So that was weird going into it in the first place. You’re like, “Is this… Does any of this matter? Can we win here or are we already doomed?” Or potentially is this gonna be super easy because actually every item is worth five bazillion dollars? So you have no way of knowing. And then once we were in there, the auction continued to have problems where the auction just kind of happens and there isn’t any focus on what the characters can do to either succeed or fail. And so as a result, then at the end they find out, “Yes, we’ve made this much money.” And I’m like, “Okay, was that enough?” And then they’re like, “Yes, that was enough.” And, like, “All right, yay. We, we won, gang.”  **Chris**: Yeah. We definitely want in any conflict to try to communicate what are the implications of what’s happening, and help readers project ahead to what could happen, right? So … And this again happens with really complex conflicts that are social or magical is very common. If you have, like, a magical fight, it’s like, “Well, how does it even work?” Or technical, where if you have a sword fight and you see one character swing the sword at another character, we automatically know how bad that is, what’s gonna happen if the sword hits. We have some idea of how tricky it is gonna be to evade the sword or block it. Just, we know those things inherently. But if you get into things that…they’re very much social constructs where it just everything depends, or it’s magical, right? So it’s completely made up, that basic: what is happening?  What are the implications of what’s happening? Like, if the protagonist is doing something, why are they doing that? And if the antagonist is attacking or creating an obstacle or what have you, what are the implications of that, and how difficult is it gonna be to deal with? And what could happen if it’s not dealt with? And all of those things sometimes have to be explained in a lot more detail because we just don’t know that inherently, ’cause it’s not a situation that we’re familiar-  **Oren**: Yeah, it is interesting that with a sufficiently arbitrary magic system you can arrive at the same problem even with a human antagonist. “The Age of Myth” books are like that, or at least the one that I read was, where the big fight at the end is between these two elf wizards, and I have no idea what they can do. They’re dropping buildings on each other, and summoning ancient ghosts. And I’m like, “Okay, is that a problem?” **Chris**: Is that a problem? Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, as far as we know, their opponent is so powerful that summoning ancient ghosts, no deal. You know, no big deal, I’ll just summon an ancient exorcist… **Oren**: Right! **Chris**: … to take care of this problem.  **Oren**: The ultimate example of this, of course, being that weird fight in “The Sandman” show where Dream and…  **Chris**: Oh, God.  Yeah  **Oren**:… what was it, Satan? Who was he fighting? I think it was Satan.  **Chris**: Oh, man. I’m gonna… We’re gonna be talking about that one forever.  **Oren**: Yeah. Just took turns saying that they were a more powerful thing than the other person.  **Chris**: \[Laughs] **Oren**: It was just the most pointless scene I’ve witnessed in quite a while.  **Chris**: It really lost me when one person was like, “I’m hope,” and the other person was like, “I am the death of hope.” It’s like, really? You could just do that for anything. “I am a wolf.” “I am the death of wolf.” Like, okay. Well, “I’m the life of wolf.”  **Oren**: I’m the death of the death of hope.  \[Both laugh] **Chris**: I’m the death of death of hope. Oh, man.  **Oren**: That would be so great. Oh. I’d love that. So anyway, going back to my auction example, if you were going to do something like that, to create the back and forth you would first need some idea of how difficult this is going to be. And it should be difficult, but achievable. If it seems impossible, then there’s no point. So difficult, but possible. And then you might have an opening scene where the protagonist is able to drum up a lot of interest in this item, and hooray, they make a lot of money. Not all the money, but they make a decent amount off the item. Decent child arc turning point. But then, uh-oh, one of their most valuable pieces that they were going to sell has been stolen or broken. How are they gonna make up the difference? And so then they have to find something they weren’t planning to sell, but has, like, special meaning to a rich person in the crowd. And there you go. That’s an example of how you could do an auction sequence like that and have it be meaningful whether they succeed or not. **Chris**: Yeah. It’s also very helpful, again, if things chain together nicely, and this can be harder to do if you don’t have a villain. So you want one thing that happens to affect something else. So, ideally if you make that sale and you’re really excited, and just as you’re grabbing the item to give it away, the other item breaks. So we have a little bit of cause and effect relationship that ripples down as the conflict continues. Again, this is… I wouldn’t obsess over this because this matters more at a large scale, and we’re talking about usually very small scale things. But having some level of, all right, because I decided to sell this item in the auction at a discount, now everybody’s expecting discounts, and doesn’t wanna pay full price anymore because I set their expectations for the prices too low, and now I’m having more problems.  That kind of thing is just very helpful. It gives a feeling of the conflict evolving and changing, and that makes it so that everything that happens matters.  **Oren**: Yeah. You don’t usually want the conflict to feel like a smooth advance towards victory, which is another problem that can come up if you’re focused too much on, like, the goal of making $10,000, right? This is one of the reasons why Chris always mentions that the character goal model is not complete, because if your goal is to make $10,000, you might think it would work great for your character to make a series of sales that add up to $10,000, and great, but you don’t want that smooth progression. That makes it feel too easy and kind of boring.  **Chris**: Yeah, I think your last example, Oren, was actually a great way to address that. There’s multiple ways to address that. One is to have things go kind of miserably in the beginning and then get a whole bunch of sales at the end, but the other is to restore uncertainty, right? So what happens when the protagonist gets a success (at any scale) is it makes the whole conflict, the whole challenge look easier, which is why if we succeeded selling an item for $2,000, then we’re a step closer to getting our total goal of $10,000 that we need to avert the stakes, and then it just seems less difficult to do the next 2,000 and then the next 2,000, and then tension goes down and down because it looks easier and easier. Whereas, as you pointed out, okay, I managed to successfully sell one item, but while I was doing that, I was distracted, and then somebody made off with our most valuable item in the auction. Now it’s much harder than it was before. And what I’ve done there is I’ve kind of, even though successfully selling the item makes this whole auction seem less difficult, I’ve then raised the difficulty by having another obstacle happen so that we’re kind of restoring uncertainty. And so you can actually get incrementally closer to the total victory that way as long as something goes wrong to restore uncertainty and make it appear more and more difficult. It’s kind of this little trick we do with tension structure, where even as we get closer to victory, it looks harder and harder to get to victory, and we have to just make that happen. **Oren**: Speaking of which, I know it looked like it was getting harder and harder for us to end the podcast, but actually it’s time to do that, and we’re going to succeed by ending the podcast.  **Chris**: If you’d like to save Mythcreants from the twin antagonists of burnout and poverty, your turning point is to become our patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythgrants.  **Oren**: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Cathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.  We will talk to you next week.