Conflict Thesaurus Entry: Doing Something Stupid While Impaired

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.