Conflict is the engine of a story. It forces characters to make choices, confront limitations, and reveal who they are under pressure. The Conflict Thesaurus helps writers create meaningful challenges that test characters, raise stakes, and move the story forward.
Part writing guide, part brainstorming tool, this book is packed with obstacles, adversaries, and inner struggles designed to challenge your characters in meaningful ways.
What This Guide Helps Writers Do:
Create Conflict That Feels Purposeful
Random problems stall a story. This guide helps writers choose conflicts that will arise naturally from the situation and the character’s needs and goals, ensuring each challenge reveals something important about those involved.
Keep Readers Emotionally Invested
The strongest conflicts force hard decisions, which is why this guide teaches how to raise stakes through moral dilemmas, pressure, and no-win situations. This keeps readers engaged as characters struggle and adapt, or fail.
Layer Consequences to Escalate Tension
Setbacks create realism and often snowball into major problems. Learn how to plot consequences such as relationship strain, time constraints, danger and more, so the character’s situation becomes more precarious and failure more costly.
Understand and Use Internal Conflict
External obstacles matter, but internal conflict gives them meaning. Deepen your understanding of internal conflict, why it’s essential, and how to weave it into challenges so readers feel close to characters and agonize with them.
Explore a Range of Adversaries
Not every nemesis is a villain. This thesaurus examines different adversary types, from rivals and frenemies to supernatural forces and beyond to give writers plenty of ideas on where to take the story.
What’s Inside The Conflict Thesaurus, Volume 1?
In addition to exploring conflict from all angles, each entry provides:
- A clear description and example of a conflict scenario
- Possible consequences, from minor setbacks to disastrous outcomes
- Internal struggles likely to emerge in a situation
- Personality traits that will help or harm the character’s ability to navigate the challenge
- Story-worthy ideas for realistic problems and unmet needs this situation could lead to
- Positive outcomes and lessons that could result in the aftermath of a challenge
With 100+ conflict scenarios, writers will have endless options to create trouble that produces fresh plots and one-of-a-kind character arcs.
Format and Availability
The Conflict Thesaurus, Volume 1 is available in print, ebook, and PDF. This book is part of a two-book set and while it can be used on its own, most writers pair it with the second volume to have a broader range of conflict options.
