How to Write Internal Conflict
A Literary Guide to Character Development with Dungeons & Dragons Ideals
Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you will know how to use the Dungeons & Dragons concept of ideals—core, non-negotiable beliefs—to drive (1) character motivations, (2) internal conflict, and (3) the story’s overarching theme.
Playing Dungeons & Dragons helped me sell my debut novel to Simon & Schuster. On a surface level, it’s easy to see how D&D might help a fantasy or sci-fi writer write better novels. From the depth of its setting, magic system, and combat encounters, playing a single session of Dungeons & Dragons can be a master class in worldbuilding and creating conflict for genre writers. But I write literary fiction. My debut novel, Good People, follows the story of a white girl who was raised by a Black family and must come to terms with her identity as she applies for a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. The book is a satirical campus novel that examines the intersection of race and class within the context of elite academia. Needless to say, nobody in my novel is running around swinging swords, casting spells, or slaying dragons. Literary fiction is often prized on its exploration of internal conflict, and yet D&D—a game rife with external conflict—has taught me everything I know about developing a character’s internal conflict.
Last month, we launched our D&D character development series. For the first post of the series, we did a deep dive into ability scores as a means to develop character traits, and we used Deep Cuts1 by Holly Brickley as our example. Today, we’re breaking down the D&D concept of ideals and how outlining our protagonist’s moral compass can motivate their external goals and tighten the story’s overall tension.
Before we get started you know what to do: take what’s useful to you and your writing life and leave what’s not behind.
The D&D Method for Better Character Development
Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you will know how to use core character creation techniques from Dungeons & Dragons to develop compelling characters for any story medium.
Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Reading
Two months ago, I received Poets & Writers’ Get the Word Out Publicity Fellowship. Since September, I’ve been working with publicist May Zhee Lim and this brilliant cohort of women and non-binary writers to build a publicity roadmap ahead of Good People’s release. Join us on Zoom for our reading on November 20th at 8 PM EST to get a sneak peek of Good People. This virtual event is free. Register here to receive the Zoom link.
Creating Internal Conflict with Ideals
In D&D, a character’s ideals are the non-negotiable beliefs that inform every action they take in the story. Ideals can often be boiled down to single-word concepts like glory, chaos, charity, and justice. An ideal is usually so ingrained that a character can often explain why it matters to them in a simple, single sentence. While ideals may motivate a character’s external goals, they are not goals in and of themselves. For example, in D&D, rogues are often professional thieves who are archetypically money-obsessed. This goal to acquire wealth by any means necessary is not an ideal but a product of the rogue’s deeply held value. In this instance, this value could be freedom or independence. A rogue who values personal freedom might explain this ideal with a sentence like this: “Wealth buys freedom, so in order to be independent, I must be wealthy, and I do not care how I acquire wealth so long as I do acquire it.”
The difference between ideals and goals is key to character development. A story and its antagonist might force a protagonist to abandon a goal, but the protagonist’s inner life and worldview would remain the same after they give up the goal. To abandon an ideal—on the other hand—would be to abandon a core belief. Letting go of that ideal would irrevocably change the protagonist as a person. Whether we write genre or literary fiction, we can use ideals to flesh out our protagonist’s moral compass and internal convictions. Once we understand what core beliefs are (allegedly) non-negotiable for our protagonists, we can create external conflict that backs them into a corner and compels them to make difficult decisions. Stories are most effective if every decision the protagonist makes has consequences that challenge the protagonist’s deeply held beliefs.
In western storytelling, effectives stories are about transformation. Their narratives create situations in which the protagonist must change internally in order to literally or metaphorically survive until the end of the story. More often than not, the internal thing that needs to change for the protagonist is a deep-seated misbelief about the world and their place in it. In order to unearth this misbelief, we have to develop our protagonist’s holistic belief system to find the misbelief that won’t hold up against the reality of their story world. Here are 12 guiding questions to help you develop your protagonist’s ideals and internal conflict.