Writing Conflict Quotes

#1. There are no rules. You can write a story, if you wish, with no conflict, no suspense, no beginning, middle or end. Of course, you have to be regarded as a genius to get away with it, and that's the hardest part - convincing everybody you're a genius.

Fredric Brown

#2. Plot, or evolution, is life responding to environment; and not only is this response always in terms of conflict, but the really great struggle, the epic struggle of creation, is the inner fight of the individual whereby the soul builds up character.

William Wallace Cook

#3. Required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you're really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn't usually work out that way.

Ted Conover

#4. Conflict. Conflict. Where art thou conflict?

Buffy Andrews

#5. The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

William Faulkner

#6. Sometimes, God doesn't send you into a battle to win it; he sends you to end it.

Shannon L. Alder

#7. There's a moment when you say, "Okay, I'm not going to become a dancer. I'm not going to become a painter." So in a sense, I ended up writing about those big conflicts that I felt.

Roselee Goldberg

#8. Till the time I found a creative outlet, I was trying to be extra creative at business, which would always put me in a situation of conflict with other stakeholders. The moment I started writing, my creative impulses were finally channelised.

Ashwin Sanghi

#9. The need to express one's self in writing springs from a maladjustment of life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action.

Andre Maurois

#10. Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

Ralph Ellison

#11. I spent a good part of the nineties roaming the Earth writing about conflict. It was very grueling. I was beginning to find this way of life was, wow, addictive and deeply meaningful.

Janine Di Giovanni

#12. I like writing about teenagers because it's a time of great change and conflict. Up to then, you accept what your parents tell you.

Joan Lingard

#13. New dramatic writing has banished conversational dialogue from the stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange: any story, intrigue or plot that is too neatly tied up is suspect.

Patrice Pavis

#14. The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.

James Frey

#15. When we write stories that are happy, with little conflict or inference of sin, then we are creating portraits of the world that perpetuate a sort of "soft universalism," the idea that no one is truly lost but rather that all are actually saved.

Gene C. Fant Jr.

#16. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds

Randy Mitchell

#17. I've been in a long and happy relationship for 22 years and it's never inspired me to write anything. It's too good - nothing to say. Problems, conflict, that's what makes for good stories.

Emma Donoghue

#18. The conflict each day is whether to immerse in books or writing. I can't do one without the other, but I can't do both at the same time. It is the writer's paradox.

Patricia Hickman

#19. I was interested in writing something that has meaning in the larger context of global conflicts anywhere.

Ru Freeman

#20. Conflict is the microscope of a book. When it's trained on a character, you see what's underneath the narratives of physical description. You see whether someone is strong or weak, principled or apathetic, heroic or villainous.
(J.R. on writing the BDB series)

J.R. Ward

#21. When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petting the KAT keeps it purring.

Don Roff

#22. I've always taken that as my guiding principle and the rest is just set dressing. You can have dragons in it, or aliens and starships, or a western about a gunslinger, or even literary fiction, and ultimately you're still writing about the human heart in conflict with itself.

George R R Martin

#23. During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump.

Madeleine L'Engle

#24. I've always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they're still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.

George R R Martin

#25. The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution.

Terry Brooks

#26. A fully-realized and known world is also a boring world. Mystery, alongside conflict, is another of those vital vittles that feeds the reader and keeps them hooked. Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason, I say
so leave lots of questions.

Chuck Wendig

#27. When I write, it feels like there are two little creatures that sit on each of my shoulders. One whispers, "You can do this. You've got what it takes." The other sounds like my mother-in-law.

Carla H. Krueger

#28. Life is a book that someone else is reading - and you, a key character - hence the need for continual conflict and resolution. We can't have any boring books.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#29. Rabbi Kushner writes from a wealth of Jewish wisdom and pastoral devotion, but his theology is, I find, is wholly in keeping with contemporary Christian thought. So far as there is an answer to the conflict between the goodness of God and the bitterness of suffering, this is it

Gerald Priestland

#30. I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.

Flannery O'Connor