Escalating conflict in fiction starts with understanding your protagonist’s stakes, not mining your own worries. Focus on what your protagonist stands to lose, and let the stakes drive everything: What are the risks? What are the consequences of failure? What does the protagonist long for, and how can you make it harder for them to achieve?
When you think of how to escalate conflict, do you start with what you’re worried about or what you’re afraid of? And the answer is no, I don’t.
Now, I might think of what my protagonist is afraid of or worried about, but usually I think about the stakes. What is the risk? What are the consequences of the protagonist failing? What does my protagonist long for? Yearn for? And then how can I make it harder for them to achieve that? That’s the stakes. And once I have a clear understanding of the stakes, then I can begin to focus on how to bring in various kinds of obstacles, some physical, some emotional, some mental, some spiritual, and some a conglomeration of all or several of those parts. That’s how I really like the idea of escalating conflict based on the situation and the person so that it’s not done in a vacuum. It’s done based on actual circumstances that are relevant to whatever the story is I’m telling.
What are the stakes? What is the overarching potential consequences of failure? And how can I use that to layer in the various elements that are in fact things that might worry them or that they might be fearful of, but it also might be things that never entered their mind.
They’re blindsided. How about you? How do you approach the challenge of escalating conflict?
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