Basic Vocabulary: Opposition = Conflict / Tension / Stress

You'll often hear writers talk about conflict in story. Conflict can be achieved in a number of ways, from outright physical action to complex emotional turmoil.

Make no mistake, conflict is the fuel that powers the engine of story. Without conflict, you don't have story, you have a character study. 

In terms of story, conflict is the result of characters not getting what they want / need. If Bob gets fired from his job and can't pay his rent, conflict would be all the things that frustrate Bob's efforts to get a new job or get his old job back. 

The word conflict brings to mind images of people fighting, combatants fighting on a field of battle. This is a great, vivid way to portray conflict in a story. It is not the only way to achieve conflict.

The goal of conflict is to frustrate the efforts of the protagonist and, possibly, the antagonist as well. This can be achieved without any physical interactions between protagonist and antagonist and even without a personified antagonist at all. 

For the sake of our discussion, we're going to use a compound phrase in place of the word conflict. Conflict / Tension / Stress. 

Stress is caused when forces act upon an object. These forces can be internal— in structural engineering, internal forces would represent the weight of a structure's mass acted upon by the force of gravity. This is why buildings to have load bearing walks and load bearing beams. These load-bearing features hold up the weight of the structure so that it doesn't collapse. 

Internal stress in a person can be created by the discrepancy between expectations and circumstances, between dreams and reality. This is a fertile ground for storytellers that's too often overlooked. Even in stories where a clearly-defined good guy is fighting a clearly-defined bad guy, a skilled writer can manage a carefully constructed internal conflict in order to deepen the overall impact of the story. 

External stress is much easier to see. It's the result of a car crash, where one object exerts force on another and damage ensues. In story, external stressed is caused by characters acting against other characters, by forces of nature or society or economy. 

It's often said in life our true character is only revealed under stress. This is especially true in story. Part of your job as a writer is to figure out what stressed your characters out and put them through worst-case scenarios and even worse. 

Tension is a pulling force. It's when your character is pulled in two opposite directions. Have you ever seen a scene where a character is forced to choose between two equally bad outcomes? In THE DARK KNIGHT, Batman is given the choice between saving the love of his life and the only man who can save the city, then later on,  Jim Gordon is asked to choose whether to save his wife out soon from a madman. 

Imagine a character forced to choose between obeying  his conscious or going to prison. This kind of tension is often internal, the drama played out less in terms of bullets and fists and more through abrasive dialogue and through bad decision making. 

The key to creating successful Conflict / Tension / Stress is to give your protagonist a powerful want or need and to frustrate their attempts to get what they want or need.

Over the course of the story, each attempt by the protagonist to get what they want / need should be met with a series of increasingly powerful opposition until the climax. The opposition may or may not be directly related to efforts of the protagonist, even though the climax needs to be a direct confrontation of the protagonist and antagonist.

Some writers break this opposition down into a series of opposition events, where the protagonist comes up with a plan to get what they want, that plan almost succeeds, then something happens to thwart the plan. The protagonist regroups, repeats, and is thwarted again. Then again. Then the climax.

Opposition doesn't have to be so missional. Think of this opposition as having your protagonist swim upstream against a current. The longer they swim, the more tired and stressed and desperate they become.

Your goal in creating opposition is not to drag the story out, but to make the protagonist more and more desperate so that the audience feels more and more desperate. If you've done your job right, all the opposition (conflict / stress / tension) you dish out onto your protagonist will be felt empathically by the audience. That's how you know you've written a good screenplay.

-The Illiterate Writer