The Conflict Characters Refuse to Say Out Loud

Conflict Isn’t Just Fighting

Photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash

I’m going to tell you something you already know: a story needs conflict. A story without conflict is no story at all.

But here’s what many discussions about conflict leave out: some of the most painful conflicts in fiction are quiet

Compare these two scenes.

Scene one (The Nightingale):

This time he hit her with an iron ruler across the cheek, so hard she felt her skin break open and blood spill.

He smiled and again said, “The Nightingale.”

She spat as hard as she could, but it came out as a dribbling blob of blood that landed in her lap. She shook her head to clear her vision and wished immediately that she hadn’t.

He was coming toward her again, methodically slapping the red-dripping ruler into his open palm. “I’m Rittmeister Schmidt, Kommandant of the Gestapo in Amboise. And you are?”

He’s going to kill me, Isabelle thought. She struggled against her restraints, breathing hard. She tasted her own blood. “Juliette,” she whispered, desperate now that he believe her.

Scene two (Love the One You’re With)

“I feel like I don’t know anything anymore …”

“Well, Ellen,” he says, as he hurriedly puts on his jeans and shoes and scoops his keys and wallet off the nightstand. “I guess that makes two of us.”

“Where are you going?” I ask through more tears.

“Out,” he says, running his hand through his hair as if to comb it. “I’m certainly not gonna sleep here tonight and kiss you good-bye in the morning like some kind of stupid chump.”

I look at him, overcome with heartbreak and desperation as I babble. “Andy . . . please try to understand. It’s not you … It’s me … I just … need to do this. Please.”

He ignores me and walks toward the door.

I get out of bed and follow him, my throat constricting as I say, “Can’t we talk about it more? . . . I thought we said we wouldn’t go to bed mad?”

Andy turns to me. “Yeah,” he says sadly. “Well, we said a lot of things, Ellen . . . didn’t we?”

In both scenes, we obviously have strong conflict. The first might be what we think of when we think of conflict. It’s physical. There’s a fight. One person is overpowering another. It captures us because we want to see what happens next. Is he going to kill her? Will she get away? The description alone of physical blows she’s enduring horrifies us, but keeps us reading.

The second scene is quieter, but no less painful. No one yells, yet the words cut deeper than a slap or a shouting match. The admission that they no longer know each other, the image of him grabbing his keys while she cries, the realization that promises once spoken no longer hold meaning; all of it lands with devastating emotional force.

Suppressed Conflict Creates Tension

Often, the conflict is expressed through actions rather than words. The reader feels the tension and knows that at some point it is going to escalate.

Think of a spouse who stayed out too late at night and is asked where she was. She may pause too long before answering or avoid eye contact. She may go on the attack and criticize something unrelated. “Since you were up late watching the clock to see when I got home, you might have taken the dog out. He peed on the rug again.”

Or the husband might not say anything at all and simply slam pans as he makes breakfast or wash dishes aggressively.

What we show in these types of scenes is emotional erosion and relational fractures. It’s conflict beneath the surface that is brewing as resentments grow.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

The conflict exists, but the characters are containing it, redirecting it, disguising it, or failing to articulate it directly.

The emotional energy leaks sideways through loaded silences or politeness that leans towards hostility (This might be seen in work relationships where coworkers must be polite even if they dislike each other.), or emotional distance and passive aggression.

What the Reader Feels

When you write this type of conflict, the reader isn’t instantly horrified the way they would be with a car chase, a gunman shooting innocent people in a bank, or a Nazi beating a woman to get information out of her, but you’re creating unease.

The reader feels the same discomfort as the character because you’re creating instability beneath normalcy, and we don’t like that.

You probably know what this feels like if you’ve ever upset someone you love, and they stop talking to you, or you ask if everything is okay, and they respond with, “Fine.” You know it’s not fine, and your anxiety rises.

When you place the reader into scenes with clear conflict that isn’t being fully expressed, they are as hooked as the ones with physical conflict. You’re tapping into our human psychology, which needs a resolution. When you think about it, a quick fight with a clear winner and loser loses its tension as soon as the fight is over. But prolonged subtle tension lingers. It stretches discomfort across scenes and often creates deeper emotional pain than a single explosive confrontation.

Why This Type of Conflict Carries So Much Weight

No conflict, no story is absolutely true. You are not writing a sequence of events. You’re writing about characters who face challenges that will transform them into better people. This kind of transformation often begins with emotional conflict. Long before lives collapse outwardly, they often begin unraveling internally, and that is what you need to capture in these scenes.

When we witness the emotional erosion of couples, friends, siblings, or parents with their children, we might not immediately see it as conflict, but we’ll feel it. We instinctively understand that relationships cannot be sustained when they begin to fracture unless someone moves to mend the cracks.

You are working at a deeper psychological level, allowing the tension to grow naturally from the relationships themselves rather than from manufactured conflicts designed solely to move the plot forward.

Today, I wanted you to look at conflict differently and to see how suppressed conflict can cause unease and curiosity in the reader.

But some of the strongest conflict in fiction isn’t hidden at all. Sometimes both the character and the reader know exactly what’s coming — and the anticipation becomes unbearable.

In my next blog, we’ll explore a different kind of tension: conflict that isn’t buried or unspoken, but looming just ahead, creating an entirely different emotional experience.