• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • About WHW
    • Press Kit
    • Resident Writing Coaches
    • Contact Us
    • Podcasts & Interviews
    • Master Storytelling Newsletter
    • Guest Post Guidelines
    • Privacy Policy
    • Charities & Support
  • Bookstore
    • Bookstore
    • Foreign Editions
    • Book Reviews
    • Free Thesaurus Sampler
  • Blog
  • Software
  • Workshops
  • Resources
    • List of Resources
    • Recommended Writing Books
    • WHW Descriptive Thesaurus Collection
    • Free Tools & Worksheets
    • Free Show-Dont-Tell Pro Pack
  • WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®
WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

Helping writers become bestselling authors

Conflict Thesaurus Entry: Doing Something Stupid While Impaired

Published: January 25, 2020 by ANGELA ACKERMAN

Conflict is very often the magic sauce for generating tension and turning a ho-hum story into one that rivets readers. As such, every scene should contain a struggle of some kind. Maybe it’s an internal tug-of-war having to do with difficult decisions, morals, or temptations. Or it possibly could come from an external source—other characters, unfortunate circumstances, or the force of nature itself.

It’s our hope that this thesaurus will help you come up with meaningful and fitting conflict options for your stories. Think about what your character wants and how best to block them, then choose a source of conflict that will ramp up the tension in each scene. For the full entry of this and 200+ additional conflict scenarios, check into our best-selling resources: The Conflict Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles, Volumes 1 and 2.

Doing Something Stupid While Impaired

Category: Failures and mistakes, relationship friction, moral dilemmas and temptation, loss of control, ego

Examples:
Telling the boss or coworkers what the character really thinks (about them, the company, personal beefs, etc.)
Calling up an ex in hopes of getting back together
Calling up an ex to tell them off…

Minor Complications:
Being hurt
Embarrassment or humiliation
Making a bad impression on someone…

Potentially Disastrous Results:
Discovering their actions while impaired were filmed and are now on the internet
Losing their job
Destroying a relationship over a bad choice (being unfaithful, sharing another’s secret and breaking trust forever, being caught in a big lie, etc.)…

Possible Internal Struggles (Inner Conflict):
Shame over their own actions while being angry at those who encouraged them to drink excessively
Guilt at losing control yet resenting the stress and pressure that led to the need to self-medicate
Embracing responsibility due to remorse while resenting others who never seem to suffer any consequences for similar behavior…

People Who Could Be Negatively Affected: Family, friends, co-workers, a business’s image, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were injured or had to witness something they would have preferred not to see

Resulting Emotions: anguish, appalled, bitterness, contempt, denial, depressed, devastation, disappointment…

Personality Flaws that May Make the Situation Worse: addictive, childish, cocky, confrontational, disloyal, flaky, foolish…

Positive Outcomes: 
Hitting rock bottom and being determined it will never happen again
A realization that one’s drinking has become a problem and making a choice to seek help
Making a mistake and realizing to do so is human, and this leading to them to let go of perfectionist tendencies…

Use Conflict to Transform Your Story

Readers have a lot of choices when it comes to selecting books, so make it easy for them to choose yours. Conflict will help you deliver a fresh story premise every time, drawing readers in through meaningful challenges that reveal a character’s innermost needs, fears, weaknesses, and strengths.

To assist you, we’ve created a two-volume resource with 225 possible conflict events. Each volume contains expert advice on how to use conflict to improve your story along with a plethora of scenarios to challenge your characters.

For more information, read up on these GOLD and SILVER editions. You can also view the books at Goodreads to see what other authors are saying about them.

ANGELA ACKERMAN
ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

Share this:

  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print

Related

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Dawn says

    January 28, 2020 at 10:49 am

    Haha! Been there done that. =-O I have a character who always likes to be in control. I have a story planned in his series where he has to smoke something in order to see something important (sci-fi/fantasy). So he struggles to decide between staying in control or risk looking like a fool. Fun!

    • ANGELA ACKERMAN says

      January 28, 2020 at 2:14 pm

      I know a few people who have major control issues so they abstain for that reason!

  2. Jan Sikes says

    January 28, 2020 at 9:27 am

    This is a great source for a varied amount of conflict! Thanks, ladies!

    • ANGELA ACKERMAN says

      January 28, 2020 at 2:15 pm

      Glad you like it, Jan!

Primary Sidebar


Welcome!

Writing is hard. Angela & Becca make it easier. Get ready to level up your fiction with game-changing tools, resources, and advice.

Subscribe to the Blog

Check your inbox to confirm! If gremlins tried to eat it, you might have to check your spam folder.

Find it Fast

Read by Category

Grab Our Button

Writers Helping Writers

Software that Will Change the Writing Game

One Stop for Writers

Join our Writers Helping Writers Newsletter

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of this content to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The legal copyright holder, Writers Helping Writers®, reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models. WRITERS HELPING WRITERS® · Copyright © 2025 · WEBSITE DESIGN BY LAUGH EAT LEARN

 

Loading Comments...