Story Plan Checklist: Plot Conflicts

[ladyseishou]

The greater difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it.
Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.

- Epicurus



What storms will your character survive?

External plot conflicts are the outer story elements that stand in the character's way of realizing or obtaining what it is that he or she desires above all else.

Further, as Karen Wiesner advises:

Plot conflicts must be so urgent as to require immediate attention. The audience must be able to identify with both the internal and external conflicts the character faces in order to be involved enough to care about the outcome. Plot conflicts work hand-in-glove with character conflicts. You can't have one without the other...

For my protagonist, he must discover who or what is responsible for the inconceivable death of a woman, promised to one man, loved by another, to prove his own innocence and prevent a war that can not be won by either side. Standing in his way is the girl's father who guards a dark secret, the protagonist's own men who have been ordered to arrest him and an unknown enemy who has framed him for the girl's murder.

And you, Nano Writer, what external forces are working against your character? What stands in his or her way of achieving their goal?

Tomorrow, we're going to review the work we've done this month and put our novel checklist together... until then, keep writing!

Comments

[dragonscrawl]

The external forces standing in the way? Corsairs ready to raid what seems to be a merchant airship, storms and mountains that must be navigated around/through, and the less concrete dangers involved in rescuing someone from a somewhat hostile nation.

[facet]

What my main character must survive:

Political factions that want him DEAD. (This includes high caliber assassins.)

Public opinion of him that is 70% raging gossip. (Some of which is true.)

Convincing the bloody-minded, isolationist king of a small yet strategically important country to open his borders to a new railway and trade.

Raising a teenage son.

[lea_hazel]

Well, Kasha has to knock up his wife before her period of fertility ends and their marriage is automatically dissolved. Orane has to find a way to make some money, because she can't mooch off of Kasha forever. Ulla... well, he can pretty much do whatever he feels like, as he's a retired spy with a horn of plenty pension plan. Well, you could say he has to get over society's prejudices towards him, I guess.

[brutal]

My characters are facing a combination of the elements and eachother.

And pirates.

[twistingthetale]

My two protagonists have to stay alive until the end of the novel - as one of them is a vampire I guess he just has to stay undead - and in spite of the obstacles that I'm going to be putting in their way their friendship must also survive.

The main antagonist will (hopefully) do everything he can to make their goals impossible, and depending on a combination of his success and how I write the story perhaps they'll have a happy ending. But not together - romance is completely off limits!