From Edie: Zena Dell Lowe shares insights into why your story may feel flat. Learn the difference between emotional and external conflict and discover how to write fiction that grips readers from beginning to end.
Why Your Story Feels Flat: The Difference Between Emotional and External Conflict
by Zena Dell Lowe @ZenaDellLowe
Writers know they need conflict. They understand instinctively that scenes require tension, pressure, obstacles, and stakes. But instead of allowing the conflict to emerge naturally from the emotional and relational dynamics already present in the story, they often manufacture external problems that are far less compelling than the conflict they’re avoiding.
The result is a story that technically has “stuff happening,” but it somehow still feels flat.
I was reminded of this recently during a critique session with a student. Her story centered around twin sisters. One of the sisters died, and the surviving twin is struggling to move forward. Before graduation, she and the deceased sister’s best friend decide to complete the dead girl’s bucket list. At the graduation ceremony, the surviving twin is supposed to give a speech honoring her sister—but she keeps putting it off because she’s drowning in grief, anger, denial, and unresolved emotions.
In other words, the setup already contained powerful emotional material. But as the story progressed, every time the characters got close to the emotional confrontation the audience was waiting for, the story swerved into logistical conflict instead.
- Would they catch the bus?
- Would they make it back to the gym in time?
- Would they miss the ceremony altogether?
I kept thinking, “Why are we worried about the bus?” Because the real story wasn’t about transportation. It was about two people clinging to each other because neither one knows how to let go of the person they lost. That’s the conflict the audience cares about.
Not All Conflict Carries the Same Weight
One of the biggest misconceptions writers have is believing that all conflict functions equally within a story. It doesn’t. There’s a massive difference between asking “Will they catch the bus?” and asking “Will this relationship survive the truth?” One is logistical. The other is devastating. And audiences instinctively know the difference.
This is why some stories feel emotionally gripping even when very little is happening externally, while other stories can be full of movement and chaos and still feel strangely hollow.
Motion is not the same thing as emotional progression. A story may include car chases, ticking clocks, storms, interruptions, missed flights, technological failures, or endless external obstacles, yet still avoid the actual emotional confrontation at the center of the narrative. In fact, writers often use these things to avoid it.
Why Writers Avoid Relational Conflict
Writers often manufacture external conflict because relational conflict is much harder to write. It requires vulnerability. It requires characters to finally say the thing they’ve been avoiding saying. It requires irreversible emotional consequences. Once certain truths are spoken aloud, relationships change permanently. And that’s frightening, not just for the characters, but for the writer too.
It is far easier to create traffic jams, interruptions, deadlines, bad weather, dead phone batteries, or endless situational complications than it is to write genuine rejection, shame, betrayal, grief, resentment, abandonment, or painful truth. So what many writers unconsciously do is stall the story at the exact moment it should explode emotionally.
They create activity instead of confrontation.
And audiences can feel it. Even if they cannot articulate why a scene feels unsatisfying, they instinctively recognize when a story is avoiding its own emotional center.
What-if?
From the moment my student’s premise was introduced, the audience was naturally going to anticipate a painful emotional reckoning between the surviving twin and the dead sister’s best friend. Why? Because the friend has likely become a surrogate for the sister who died. She represents the last remaining connection to the person both girls lost. That dynamic is emotionally combustible.
At some point, the surviving twin must confront the terrifying reality that this friend cannot permanently replace her sister, and the friend herself will have to reveal that she feels trapped by the emotional burden of becoming a stand-in for someone who is gone. That’s where the climax belongs. Not in whether they catch public transportation.
Imagine instead that right before the graduation speech, the best friend finally says, “I can’t stay here anymore. I took a job overseas. I’m leaving.”
The surviving twin is stunned. “What do you mean? You’re leaving me? How could you?”
And the friend finally says the thing neither of them has wanted to admit. “Because I’m not her. And I can’t keep trying to be her for you.”
Now the story detonates emotionally. Grief, abandonment, fear, identity, denial, and dependency all collide at once. And then, right in the middle of this emotional breakdown, someone enters and says, “They’re ready for you on stage.” Suddenly the external pressure works beautifully, because now the ticking clock is intensifying the emotional conflict instead of replacing it.
In a strong story, the external pressure squeezes the emotional wound. It does not distract from it.
A Helpful Diagnostic Question
When evaluating your own story, ask yourself: If I removed every external obstacle, would my story's central conflict still exist? If the answer is yes, then you’ve likely identified the true heart of your story.
The bus isn’t the story. The deadline isn’t the story. The ceremony isn’t the story. Those things may create pressure, but the real story lives in the emotional fracture underneath them. And if you avoid that fracture, your audience will feel the absence of it whether they consciously recognize the problem or not.
The Stories That Stay With Us
At its core, storytelling is about conflict. Eventually, the characters in the story must deal with the conflict in some kind of final confrontation, which allows them to finally change.
Weak storytelling often comes from trying to avoid that confrontation while still creating the illusion of intensity. But audiences know the difference. They know when a story is killing time, and they know when a story finally tells the truth. That’s usually the moment they remember long after the plot details are forgotten.
So if your story feels flat right now, ask yourself whether you’re manufacturing conflict. And if you are, ask yourself why. Is it because you’re avoiding the harder emotional confrontation underneath it?
Chances are, the strongest conflict in your story isn't something you need to invent. You simply have to let your characters confront it.
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To find out more about Zena or her current courses and projects, check out her websites at WWW.MISSIONRANCHFILMS.COM and WWW.THESTORYTELLERSMISSION.COM
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