As a follow up from the blog post I made about narrative, I wanted to think about conflict within a story. Does it give the story its drive? Is it crucial to making a good story? I’m going to go with yes, in most cases, if not all. When I try to think of films without some kind of climax, I not only find it hard to think of any, but the ones I can imagine are ones I hated. These are films like Sofia Coppola’s ‘Somewhere’ which, to my recollection was boring and had no story whatsoever.

Even shows and movies that are particularly low-key, or appear that nothing really has changed from the start to the end, have some sort of subtle 3 act structure. I’m thinking of shows like The Office – overall, what happens? Not a lot. It’s just about boring every day work life. But each episode has a theme and within that theme there’s some kind story that has a conflict and resolution.