What if Your Novel Has No Conflict?

It might surprise you to learn that while most stories have some conflict to resolve, not all of them do. Or that conflict might be internal rather than external — something notoriously hard to “show” in written form, even one that is performed as a screenplay. The most recent example I can think of for this is the wildly popular animated musical Encanto.

To greatly oversimplify, Encanto tells the story of a group of people who bandits set upon in a kind of fantasy Central America setting. They escape and end up in a magical valley where one family is granted magical powers (which they use to help the people of the valley. When the family members experience inner emotional turmoil, their powers start to fail, resulting in the collapse of their magical house. Resolving to face their emotional problems, they reconcile, rebuild their house, and discover that their magical powers have returned. Now, tell me: What’s missing from that story?

I can tell you what’s missing, and it bothered me for days after first seeing the musical until I finally figured it out: Encanto’s no external conflict. The characters feel bad until they decide to stop feeling bad (as prompted by the collapse of their magical home). In a conventional screenplay or novel, traditional plot beats almost demand that the bandits from the film’s prologue reappear at the end of Act 2 so the family can rally together and fight them in Act 3. If I were writing that screenplay, I’d have the family members rally the townspeople without their magical powers, the theme being that the family is powerful because they are a family and not because they had or have magic. But in the actual movie, of course, none of that happens.

The result is that when you describe this story to other people, the best way to describe it is that it is a meditation on family. Many stories that defy description can be summed up as mediations or ruminations on a theme. Often, people don’t “get” them because they don’t conform to the most commonly employed plot beats and archetypes. Yet Encanto (partly because it was a musical with very good performances) succeeded despite refusing to conform to the most successful story templates.

This means that your story doesn’t necessarily have to contain external conflict to be overcome. Your novel could encompass a character’s inner struggle, a mental or emotional arc that resolves itself entirely within the character’s head or in conversation with other characters. This means that the “roller coaster” plot arc will be much less pronounced (although, for your character to be dynamic, he or she would change in some way, and that resolution would come at the same point as the climax in a more traditional plot). In other words, if your story is a rumination or meditation on a theme, not a slam-bang actioner, tragic drama, or slapstick comedy, that’s completely okay. How well you execute that story and whether it holds the reader’s interest matters.