Conflict connects readers to a story or story’s characters. Since all readers are familiar with conflicts in their own lives, it can greatly help deepen readers’ engagement with a story or characters and provide profound meaning to the story.
To create conflicts for your main characters, you need antagonists that work against them. Antagonists can be the arch-villains or any oppositional element that is hostile to your character.
In designing these conflicts, it’s helpful to remember the following basic principles:
1.The stronger the antagonists are, the more well-developed your character will become.
Imagine there is a hungry wolf and an evil dragon in a supernatural world. Who would be a better arch enemy for the powerful protagonist? Obviously, the dragon. If the biggest enemy in a story is just an ordinary being or something can be easily defeated, the conflicts would be flat and boring.
2.The conflict should be tailored to main character’s main desires.
This means the conflicts should be relevant because we need conflicts to push the story forward. What would an irrelevant conflict do to the story? Nothing but distracting. Note that this is different from Red Herring (something unimportant that distracts attention from the real issue, usually used in crime and mystery writing).
3.The amount and level of antagonism should increase with time
In many stories, the main character gets stronger and stronger through endless efforts, eventually becoming powerful and immortal. If you are writing stories like this, your character must have some opponents that can match his/her power as time passing by. If not, reader could easily lose interest.
Conflicts are vital for the success of a story. Stories and characters with no twists are boring. On the contrary, well-designed antagonists could bring so much potential to your stories.