Internal vs External Tension: Two Layers of Conflict in Character

Internal vs. External Tension: Two Layers of Pull in Characterization","slug":"internal-vs-external-tension","meta":"Internal and external tension are two layers of pull in a story; with examples from Dostoevsky, Hemingway, and Chekhov, you'll learn where to apply pressure on each layer and how to bind them together.","excerpt":"Many writers build only one layer of tension: either a fast-paced event with a hollow character, or a mind full of conflict in which nothing happens. This article shows what external tension and internal tension each do, where they work, and how they can be stitched into a single fabric.","tags":"tension, characterization, drama, fiction writing, conflict","content":"

Honestly, the events that befall a character do not, by themselves, make him believable. What keeps the reader in the chair is the gap that opens between the event and the character's mind; a place where an external occurrence awakens an internal question. A novel with only incident is a car with the gas pedal pressed and no driver; and a narrative with only interiority is a person who sits all day thinking about himself. The writer's job is to build the gearbox between these two.

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External Tension: The Engine the Reader Sees

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External tension has three components: a clear goal, a stubborn obstacle, and a deadline that cannot be escaped. In Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the old fisherman faces a giant fish, a thin line, and a wounded hand. In The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantès is confined in a cell and is hatching a plan. This layer has the task of propulsion: it tells the reader why to turn the next page.

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But the condition for its effectiveness is that the obstacle cost the character dearly. If the hero can ignore the cost or escape the predicament with a simple decision, then what we have built is an acrobatic show, not suspense.

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Internal Tension: The Battle Raging in the Dark

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Internal conflict is the confrontation of two incompatible desires in a single mind: safety versus freedom, loyalty versus truth, preserving reputation versus desire. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment faces an external investigator, but his real war is with a question he himself has posed: Did I have the right to kill? Porfiry applies almost no physical force to him; he talks, and Raskolnikov collapses under the weight of those very words.

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Persian literature has also tested this layer powerfully. The narrator of Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl has no significant external event; all the pull comes from the gradual disintegration of a mind that cannot be trusted. In Houshang Golshiri's Prince Ehtejab, the external decline of a dynasty becomes merely a mirror for the narrator's internal decline. This same pattern is repeated in Asghar Farhadi's cinema: in A Separation\n