Without conflict you have no story. Vivian Otoo shares four types of death that create conflict and tension in your work.

Conflict in your story has to be an emotional ride for your readers. Conflict keeps your readers engaged and turning the pages. You may know this, but you’re still wondering how to implement the information.

What is conflict? A conflict in a story is a problem the main character needs to solve to achieve their goal. Without conflict, there is no story and no character development.

Conflict and high stakes relate to one another. If the character doesn’t resolve the conflict, what is at stake? What would your character lose? This is the question you should ask yourself when you’re thinking about the conflict in your story.

Stakes are essential in a story because it keeps the plot moving, challenges your character, and keeps readers turning the pages. Without stakes your plot will become flat, the pacing of your story will slow down, and the conflict will be non-existent.

Now, with deciding what your story stakes will be, it is important not to overdo it. When the stakes are too high, you risk your plot becoming unbelievable and comical.

To keep your readers engaged in your story, tone it down. Use the pull-back method. If your stake is over the top, write it down anyway. After reading it pull back 30-25% and write it again. This method will help keep your stake high but also prevent your story from being overly dramatic.

There is another concept for conflict, and that concept is death.

Why is death a great concept for conflict and high stakes? Because nobody wants to die. The ultimate fear in our society is death.

We know our time in life is limited and we don’t know when we will die, so we try to live our best lives every day. When something or someone threatens that hope, we try everything we can to prevent that from happening.

Physical death is obvious. It is the death we are all familiar with, but today I will introduce four types of death you can use when you sit down to write your story again. They are professional death, psychological death, social death, and ego death.

1. Professional Death

Professional death is when your lead character’s career or life purpose is at stake. In our society as children, they often ask us, “who do you want to be when you grow up?” Or “What do you like to do?”

There is a saying, I’m sure you’re familiar with: Life is not worth living if you’re not doing what you’re passionate about. Being fulfilled and living your life’s purpose is important in our world. There are claims having a purpose or doing the line of work you love prolongs your life.

Example: Let’s say a detective who's sober for many years has lost his daughter. He has broken his sobriety and is under the influence at his job. His boss has given him a warning he will fire him if he doesn’t get it together.

Your character loves being a detective, but he is going through a hard time. He doesn’t want to do anything else in life. His boss hands him a case giving him one last chance to prove himself; a murder that may link to his daughter’s disappearance. He takes up this case hoping that it will save his job and give him closure in life. If he does not solve this case, he can lose his job and career and when you lose something you enjoy it can feel like death its self.

2. Psychological Death

Psychological death is when a part of your lead character will die if they don’t win the conflict. The most common one is love. This death plays on the emotions of your readers.

With love stories, you know at the end of the story the two characters will be together. During the story, to keep your readers turning the pages, create an illusion of your character experiencing psychological death throughout the book.

To achieve this create obstacles and complications that would keep your lead character from getting their true love.

Psychological death applies not only to love. It could be anything that your lead character believes they can‘t live without and holds your character together. Another example, Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye is trying to remain authentic in his life and believes if he doesn’t he will die.

3. Social Death

Social death refers to the condition of people not accepted as fully human by broader society. Diverse scholars applied the expression to describe racial slavery, political economy, and other examples of social ordering.

A loss of social identity, a loss of social connectedness, and losses associated with the disintegration of the body.

Social death is when a group of people have their identities taken away and forced to assume a new more degrading identity. The person being ostracized will adopt the new identity and believe who they are and they deserve to be getting the treatment they’re getting. They will blame themselves why they’re ostracized.

Example: You can have your main character be part of an ostracized group in your story. With their new identity living everyday life living less like a human. Then your character realizes that this isn’t who they are, and they used to be somebody, and the way he and his people are living isn’t right.

First, your main character will have to reject the conditioning the people in power gave to him and adopt a new identity. This will show internal conflict, then he would have to convince his own people of his revelation. Some people will follow and some wouldn’t.

Then he will have to face the conflict with the people in power who don’t want your main character to fight back but want to keep things the way they are. With the example of social death, there is conflict coming from all sides.

4. Ego Death

Ego death is a loss of subjective self-identity. It is a term with significant ties to spirituality, mythology, and mysticism.

Ego death is a symbolic transition that results in a person being spiritually awakened.

The ego is our identity which we have created for ourselves. The ego is made up beliefs of ourselves like our personality, talents, and skills. When we form thoughts about ourselves that we agree with we form a self-image which contributes to the ego.

Ego death is where you have a dissociative experience of self. Everything you’ve identified with fades and a person panics and tries to hold on to these beliefs because without them they would cease to exist.

Example: There are ways to create conflict with the concept of Ego death. You can create a lead character that has everything he/she wants in life, but then realize their self-identity is a false illusion. Now your character doesn’t know what to do with themselves and wants to find answers.

The character is experiencing conflict because everything they once knew and believed can’t be trusted. You can go further and brainstorm how this new realization creates conflict with your character’s family, friends, job, and environment. How does your character resolve the conflicts?

How do you create conflict in your stories? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Vivian Otoo has been writing since she was ten years old. She has been writing her first novel since 2012. After she graduated from University in 2014, she went for her author dreams. She is a blogger and owner of Just Write Now where she helps writers learn the craft of storytelling and publishing. In her spare time, she likes to binge Netflix, get lost in a good book, and spend time with loved ones.

[Man sitting alone image courtesy Ben White and Unsplash.]

When you feel your creativity isn't flowing easily, what do you do to get things moving again? Marc Graham shares tools and ideas for tapping into all your levels of consciousness to banish writers' block forever.

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

One minute you’re writing along, the Muse is singing, your characters are cooperating, and even the cat is giving you room to type your fast-flowing words.

The next moment, you’re stalled. You’ve written yourself into a corner, your characters have rebelled, and the Muse has ditched you for a bender in Vegas.

Been there? I sure have.

Writer’s block is something we’ll all encounter from time to time. But by understanding the psychology of the creative process, exploring the nature and source of Story, and adding a few tried-and-true tools to your writing kit, you can open the floodgates to your creativity and crush writer’s block.

Sound good? Let’s dive in.

The Psychology of Creativity

Storytelling is as old as humanity itself. Even before speech developed, people used drawings and gestures to communicate. At first, the stories were practical and cautionary.

Og forgot his spear and got trampled by a mastodon.
Don’t be like Og. —Anonymous

The experiences of others could be harnessed and added to one’s own knowledge without having to learn those (sometimes fatal) lessons herself. How to hunt and gather successfully. How to integrate within the tribe. What lay beyond the distant mountains.

And then something magical happened: Someone awoke with a dream. Suddenly, events that no one in the tribe had physically experienced—not even the dreamer—now entered their collective consciousness. A new story had arisen out of nowhere, and the first shaman entered the scene.

The human mind is hard-wired for storytelling. As a species, we have the capacity to ask What if? and to create myriad answers to that sublime question.

To understand how this works, we need to dig a bit into philosophy and psychology.

Fair warning: This is a highly subjective field, and I’m cherry-picking theories to match my personal outlook. I’m also distilling this broad topic down to a minimum of terms and considerations. I don’t claim any of the following as complete or absolute fact, but it works for me. Your mileage may vary.

Story engages the human mind at three primary levels:

• Ordinary Consciousness — This is where we spend most of our time, the normal, everyday, waking consciousness that helps us communicate and navigate the physical world. This is the seat of our intellect and emotions. I’ll also refer to this as simply the Intellect.

• Higher Consciousness — This is the realm of transcendence, of the ability to consider the immaterial and abstract. This level of mind defines us as humans, as homo sapiens sapiens: the human who knows that she knows. This is the seat of ideals, inspiration, and spirituality. I’ll also refer to this as the Superconscious.

• Lower Consciousness — This is our root operating system, consisting of base instincts, natural urges, and information storage and retrieval. It also serves as the filter that selects which of the millions of sensory inputs we receive each second get passed along to the Intellect. According to Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconscious, this level of the individual mind also contacts a broader field of awareness that all human minds can access, the source of myths and symbols and archetypes. This is the seat of intuition and creativity. I’ll also refer to this as the Subconscious.

Creativity requires a solid connection between all three levels of consciousness. Without the ability of the Lower Consciousness to draw information from outside our regular awareness, our stories can only be about what we directly experience.

Without the inspiration and purpose derived from the Higher Consciousness, a story has no meaning beyond the exchange of information.

When we’re blocked, it’s the result of these interconnections being somehow disrupted, or possibly of receiving conflicting information from the various levels.

The solution, then, is to strengthen those connections, to find tools that quickly restore them when they are temporarily blocked, and to learn how each level of your mind communicates so that your ideas come through clearly.

The Source of Story

Now that we have a cursory understanding of how the mind works, let’s take a look at the nature and source of Story.

I contend that Story exists independently of the storyteller’s mind. This is not a new idea. Plato expressed something similar with his Realm of Ideals. It has echoes in Jung’s Collective Unconscious, Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth, and in certain theories of quantum physics.

Rather than being a product of the Intellect, Story is an infinite natural resource that the other levels of consciousness can discover and harvest.

To be fair, Intellect plays a critical role in crafting and shaping the story, in turning abstract ideas into effective communication. But Intellect is no more responsible for the raw materials of Story than a blacksmith is for his iron ore.

Understanding this is valuable in a couple of ways.

First, it gets rid of pressure, self-doubt, and guilt. Intellect (that part of us we most often identify with) is solely responsible for crafting the story, for shaping the raw materials into a functional and pleasing end-product.

If the raw material ceases to be imported, it’s not the fault of the storyteller, no failing of the Intellect. It’s a simple matter of reopening the trade routes.

Second, the storyteller now has access to an inexhaustible supply of ideas, the raw material of Story. She doesn’t have to rely on her experience, to wait for inspiration, or to have a vision. At any time, she can send her Superconscious out to prospect, followed by the miners of the Subconscious to gather the ore.

So how do we ensure these other levels of consciousness do their jobs? How do we establish a steady, reliable flow of ideas?

For that, we need to turn back the clocks.

Shamanic Tools for Storytelling

Among the ancient tribal cultures—and even among indigenous peoples today—shamans were the storytellers, the keepers of the lore. They held responsibility for the health and well-being of the tribe, and they preserved the myths and history of their people.

While Western society has generally lost its connection to the mythic past, the role of the shaman has passed to you and me—to the storytellers.

Indigenous shamans journey in trance state to other dimensions, to Upper World and Lower World, to find whatever might be helpful to their tribe.

Storytellers, too, travel to other planes of reality to discover our stories and bring them back to our tribes of readers. So, how do we do this even more effectively?

Shamans and latter-day mystics developed a number of practices and tools to empower their Higher and Lower Minds, and to more readily travel between the worlds.

One outgrowth of this practice is the Tarot, as described by Corrine Kenner in Tarot for Writers.

[Note from Joanna: You can listen to Caroline Donahue discuss using the tarot for writing on this episode of The Creative Penn podcast.]

Far more ancient are the Norse Runes. Both tools rely on the interplay of the three levels of consciousness to draw from the wellspring of Story to craft an individual story.

So, how exactly do these tools work?

In addition to filing away your mother’s birthday, your childhood address, your telephone number, and where you left your keys, part of your Subconscious is constantly swimming in the Collective Unconscious, the sea of creativity that is the Source of Story.

An example of a World Tree. Image copyright Marc Graham

Just as failed communication between parts of your mind can have you turning the house upside-down to find your keys, a similar failure to communicate is the main cause of writer’s block.

What’s the usual first step when we’ve misplaced our keys? I generally start retracing my steps, using my short-term memory and Intellect (both housed in the Ordinary Consciousness) to solve the problem.

The trouble is, it wasn’t Intellect who decided to leave the keys in the freezer, something that makes no sense and of which we have no memory. We’re using the wrong tool for the job, and the typical result is failure.

It’s only after we’ve given up the hunt or passed out from the exertion, only after Intellect has given up and moved on to some other task, that the solution comes through another level of consciousness.

Sometimes it comes as a burst of inspiration from the Superconscious: Oh yeah, they’re in the freezer. Sometimes, more subtly through the Subconscious: I could really do with a bowl of ice cream. Either way, once the Ordinary Consciousness is out of the way, the other levels are empowered to speak up.

Tools like Tarot and the Runes work on this principle. They engage the Intellect by inviting it to classify a Tarot card or a particular Rune by shape, number, meaning, etc. While the Ordinary Consciousness is thus distracted, the Superconscious and Subconscious are free to locate and collect an abundance of raw materials from which you can craft your story.

Putting It into Practice

Now that we understand how the mind works to put a story together, how can we use this to enrich our storytelling?

1) Empower All Levels of Consciousness

An active intellectual and emotional life are crucial to navigating the day-to-day world of work, relationships, and surviving in physical form. It’s also important to exercise the Higher Consciousness through art, inspirational reading, and other uplifting activities. Equally important is strengthening the connection to the Lower Consciousness through meditation, free writing, etc.

2) Reduce Your Stress

Stress triggers the Ordinary Consciousness, which works in real time to craft solutions to keep us alive, to the exclusion of all other aspects of our mind. We live in a world shaped to place us in a constant state of stress and lock us into our intellect and emotions (the manipulation of which is the bread and butter of ad agencies and cable news outlets). Removing or reducing stress allows the Intellect to take a breather and gives the Superconscious and Subconscious more freedom to engage with you.

3) Stay Healthy

This is a corollary to item (2). The healthier you are, the less stress is on the physical mechanism of your body, and the more the Intellect can relax. Get plenty of rest, fresh air, and natural light. Exercise and eat wholesome foods. Play with your pet and spend time with loved ones. All these things will improve your general health and just make you happier. Who doesn’t want that?

4) Develop a Mindfulness Practice

As with the shamanic practices of old, storytelling is a sacred art. Taking time out from busy-ness to sit, reflect, meditate, or simply listen to your heartbeat and your breath—any practice that connects you to your inner self and that helps you center on your place in the world will be time well spent.

5) Build Your Shamanic Toolkit

While strengthening the connections between the three aspects of your mind will help proof you against writer’s block, your stories will still not simply write themselves. There will still come times when you hit an impasse, when your characters are being stubborn, or when you’re just not sure what should happen next.

Grab a set of Tarot cards—there are dozens of options available, with themes to match whatever genre you like.

Odin's Lots. Image copyright Marc Graham

Or find a set of Rune cards, tiles, and/or dice. The instructions and suggested layouts that come with sets like these—if they’re not already geared specifically toward writers—can be easily adapted to the storytelling process.

Tools like these are fun to use and can give great results right out of the box. As you build your rapport with the tools—perhaps even create a little ritual around their use—your Superconscious and Subconscious will quickly learn that you’re serious about connecting with them, and those lines of creative communication will gain strength.

6) Give Your Gift to the World

Story has the power to transform lives and shape our world. The world needs your story and your unique way of presenting it. The more you give of that gift, the more the Muse will see you as a vital partner in breathing life into Story, and the more ideas and inspiration she’ll send your way.

Like a pyramid scheme, but not gross.

What tools to you use when your writing is feeling blocked or stuck? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Marc Graham is a novelist, speaker, story coach, and the developer of the Runes for Writers creativity system. His debut novel, Of Ashes and Dust, is available from Five Star publishing. A second book, Song of Songs: A Novel of the Queen of Sheba, will be released by Blank Slate Press in April 2019. A third novel and a companion book to the Runes for Writers system will be published later in 2019