The best stories have two kinds of conflict: internal and external. Internal conflict occurs between your hero’s opposing beliefs or values. In “Die Hard”, the hero, John McClane, is cocky and arrogant. By being cocky, yet skilled, he can logically defeat an army of terrorists one at a time. Yet by being arrogant, he risks losing his wife.
Internal conflict pushes the hero away from others.
External conflict occurs between your hero and the goals the hero wants to achieve. Often times what keeps the hero from achieving a goal are other people (the villain) but sometimes it can be nature itself (such as in “127 Hours” where the hero is trapped in a canyon).
External conflict keeps the hero from achieving goals.
Too often, Hollywood tries to “improve” a story by adding more external conflict. This rarely works and just winds up creating lots of action that means nothing. Watch any bad sequel (“Die Hard 2”, “Babe: Pig in the City”, “Sister Act 2”) to see how sequels strip away the hero’s internal conflict in favor of more external conflict.
To improve a story, always focus on enhancing the internal conflict. Not only will internal conflict be far more interesting as we watch a hero wrestle with two conflicting beliefs, but internal conflict is the driving force between character interaction. The greater the hero’s internal conflict, the greater their conflict with others.
In a scene from “Little Miss Sunshine”, the hero, Olive, is torn between wanting to win a beauty pageant and eating ice cream (which might make her fat and cause her to lose in a beauty pageant). This internal conflict appears when she’s given a choice to eat ice cream in a restaurant, but her father warns her that it will make her fat.
Now the external conflict is whether Olive will listen to her father (and not eat the ice cream) or eat the ice cream because that’s what she really wants.
When you create clear, deep, and meaningful internal conflict, external conflict lets us visualize the battle between the hero and other characters. When you have a strong internal conflict, we can also see the hero battle themselves and see how they choose to resolve this internal dilemma.
In “Green Book”, the hero (a white man) must make a tough decision when he sees his boss (a black musician) being denied to eat in a whites-only restaurant. The hero’s dilemma is to either get the black musician to play that night (and suffer the humiliation of not being able to eat in the dining room where he’s supposed to perform) or protect the black musician’s dignity and leave. Because the hero wrestles with this internal conflict, we can see how it defines his actions when trying to resolve the external conflict of the black musician being denied entry.
So basically if you’re story doesn’t seem full or complete, always (yes, always) focus first on strengthening your hero’s internal conflict. By doing this, it will be much easier to create external conflict that enriches your story rather than feel like pointless action tacked on to the story simply to create more visual conflict.
Ultimately, internal conflict is the key to creating better external conflict.
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