Justine: New Year, New Writer — Conflict

When I started the McDaniel program over a year ago, I came in without any formal (or informal, for that matter) instruction about writing fiction. I’d neither taken a creative writing class, nor studied the basic elements of good fiction. In other words, I was a blank slate, which is great in some respects because there weren’t any bad habits/knowledge I had to purge from my brain. But it’s bad when my instructor tells me to identify the goal, motivation, and conflict for my protag and antag…I was left saying, “Huh?”

Of all the things we covered at McDaniel, conflict was one of the topics that tripped me up the most. (Well, okay, so did goals and motivation, which go hand-in-hand with conflict.) I thought I knew what conflict was. I mean, I read romance novels, right? Those books are chock-a-block full of men and women arguing about something or…