An interesting conflict came up today when we were working with our Hegelian stories (Hegelian stories, you remember, are stories where two equally weighty points of view come into conflict. We discussed this structure in "The Moon and the Son" post.)
Many of you had written stories from your own life, so often one side (the student's own) was more heavily weighted than the other side. One side drew more sympathy from the reader than the other.
When one side is more sympathetic than the other, it tends to reduce conflict. If the problem is easy to solve, the conflict suffers. So we often went into the stories and changed them around in order to give both sides equal weight. But when we did that, some of you said, "But that's not how it happened."
Here is a tremendously important rule about stories. It's a good idea to start from your own life to begin a story, but after that, if you want good conflict, you need to sever all ties between the story and your life. Because a good story is a story with good conflict. It is your job as a storyteller to create compelling conflict, not to defend your life.
Remember that: a storyteller's job is to imbue a story with conflict. Look for how you can increase the conflict at all times.
