“Every scene needs conflict.”
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve come across this on Instagram and TikTok. It’s also a popular topic in workshops, blog posts, and craft books, and the last three especially can be interesting.
But still, this particular piece of advice made me uneasy for a long time before I could pinpoint why. So I let my brain go rogue and obsessed over it for a week or two (ok, maybe it was a month — but I did some stuff in between!).
It was supposed to be this quick research for an Instagram post. Reddit was the first stop, and it was pretty much useless, because every thread spiralled into the same pointless arguments. After multiple threads that all looked fundamentally the same, I went on to writer forums. Then writer forums in German, in case the Germans had figured something out (yeah, they hadn’t; they were just having the same arguments in a slightly different flavour).
I’m not sure why it took me so long, but somewhere during a YouTube binge I started suspecting the word itself was the problem. That sent me into a reading marathon of craft books, and then into interviews and essays by the people who wrote them — Weiland, Maass, Hardy, Burroway, Le Guin. Especially Le Guin’s words, combined with the social media chaos, made me realise people interpret the word “conflict” in completely different ways. I found people in genuine fights about what the word and the advice even meant (the writer world can be scary!).
Somehow, after looking into cosy fiction trends and other genres where something else is clearly doing the work, I ended up completely absorbed in Japanese narrative structure at 2 am, with my laptop trying not to suffocate on all the open tabs. I found an entire genre where conflict isn’t even supposed to be the engine. By that point I’d read things in three languages and still came away more confused than when I started. So much for quick research for an Instagram post.
The short version: what scenes actually need is engagement. And that can come in many forms.
So… What IS Conflict, Exactly?
What hit me was how rarely anyone was actually arguing about scenes anymore. The whole fight had become about the word itself, and every discussion circled its definition harder than a helicopter and never landed, which seemed like a pretty solid sign that the advice wasn’t doing the job it was supposed to do.
So I went looking for the source. Who said it first, and what did they actually mean by it?
It turns out the authorities don’t agree either. They just have the disagreement in essays and interviews (which, you know… looks more respectable).
Two definitions kept showing up, and they’re doing very different things.
The first one is the version most writers actually picture when they hear “every scene needs conflict.” It’s confrontation. Something pushing back. Character against character, character against system, character against self. A specific, concrete thing that a writer can actually look for in a scene.
The second one is a lot broader. In this version, conflict means any gap between what a character wants and what they currently have. Any unmet desire, any small ache for something to be different. By this definition, a character waiting for the kettle to boil is technically in conflict with the kettle, which, you know, is a bit of a stretch.
The sneaky bit is that the advice uses both definitions, depending on what the moment needs. “Every scene needs conflict” borrows its urgency from the narrow definition, because “you need confrontation” is the version that tells you what to actually go and do in your scene. But the moment someone says “wait, what about all the scenes that work without any confrontation,” it slides to the broad definition, where conflict is just what it means to have a character on the page and the advice becomes impossible to argue with. Prescribing: narrow. Defending: broad. Nobody flags the switch.
The narrow version is wrong as a universal rule — plenty of scenes work without confrontation. The broad version is too wide to mean anything specific, because it could mean obstacles, character work, longing, internal contradiction, almost any kind of want. The same word covers both, and the advice survives by sliding between them. (I looked for this specific observation in craft books, blogs, and writing communities across three languages. As far as I can tell, nobody has named it.)
What happens when good craft teachers actually try to make this advice useful in their own work is pretty interesting. They quietly reach for more specific words.
Janice Hardy’s framework is called Goal, Conflict, Stakes, but the questions that actually help a writer are about goals and stakes and specific obstacles, not about conflict in the abstract. Donald Maass needed a more precise word for what he was pointing at and ended up with micro-tension — the moment-by-moment emotional friction in good prose. His teachings are genuinely useful for a lot of writers and a lot of books, depending on what you’re trying to do. But notice what then happens to tension in his framing: it becomes its own universal rule. “Tension on every page.” The same shape of advice, just one word over. And the same definitional collapse starts again, because what does tension even mean once it has to apply to every page of every kind of book?
Personally, I’m more with Le Guin on this. She rejected the conflict framework entirely and argued that what stories actually need is change. (Conflict, in her view, is just one of many kinds.) But even change would probably develop the same problem if you tried to make it a rule.
Which is the actual issue, when you look at it. It’s not really about which word is the right umbrella, but more about the universal-rule shape itself that doesn’t work. Every scene doesn’t need conflict, or tension, or change, or any single thing, because what a scene needs depends on the scene. You can’t just hand a writer a generic rule and expect it to fit every book they’re ever going to write. It’s more nuanced than that. Don’t throw complexity and nuance out the window.
If you’re someone whose brain takes language at face value (hello, neurodivergent writers), this gets especially tricky. “Every page” means every page, and “every scene” means every scene. So you look at your quiet scenes, the ones that engage through atmosphere, subtext, or some quiet connection between two characters (or anything else that’s less obvious than confrontation), and you think you’re doing something wrong. You force “conflict” in (in whatever way you interpret it) where the scene doesn’t need it and end up breaking what was actually working. Or you’re like me, questioning the meaning and effectiveness of the whole thing and marathoning your way through half the internet and a stack of craft books.
OK, So What DO Scenes Actually Need?
Maybe instead of “does this scene have conflict?” we should ask “why should the reader keep reading this scene?”
Sometimes the answer genuinely is conflict, in the narrower sense. It can be an effective way to bring intensity and engagement to a scene, and there’s a reason it gets taught so much. But I think part of that reason is convenience. “Add conflict” is a simple instruction (well, at least the narrow definition!). It’s easy to give and it feels like it should be easy to apply. The trouble is that easy and simple can destroy nuance and complexity, and what your scene actually needs always depends on the scene, and on what that scene is doing within the larger structure of your book. So it’s one useful tool. But still only one.
Which means there has to be more than one way to keep a reader on the page.
Picture a couple discussing what to have for dinner. That’s all they’re saying out loud. But the reader knows the relationship is over, and so do they. They’re talking around it in that specific, coded way only the couple can understand, like they’ve been doing every evening for the last six months. Sure, call it conflict if you want. But that label doesn’t tell you what’s actually making the scene work. The word that does is subtext — the gap between what’s being said and what’s underneath it.
These tools overlap, by the way. Subtext creates tension, tension can turn into conflict in the narrower sense, and conflict raises the stakes. They feed into each other, and that’s how stories actually work — not one tool per scene, but several at once, in combination. What matters is noticing which one is carrying the scene.
Take the Shire. Tolkien spends pages on hobbits eating, gardening and bickering about relatives (and yes, some of that bickering is conflict — but how much of that is actually on the page?). Conflict isn’t the thing carrying those chapters. Readers keep turning pages because they want to be there, and that’s called atmosphere.
Or those scenes where two characters finally sit down and just… be with each other. A slow burn romance where they’ve stopped circling and are just together, doing something fun. Friends around a campfire, talking about what they actually believe. The reader doesn’t want the moment to end, and that has nothing to do with conflict. That’s connection.
And then there’s voice. Scenes where nothing much is happening, a character going about their day, noticing the world, thinking about it. As an editor, I also tell writers to cut scenes like that – if nothing carries them. If something does, it can be the way a character sits with a thought, or the kind of sentence you slow down and reread because it said something true. And that’s the voice earning the scene its place.
We’ve had a closer look at subtext, atmosphere, connection and voice. But there are so many more tools we have at our disposal: curiosity, wonder, beauty, rhythm, competence (watching a character do something well), recognition (the “oh god, that’s so true” feeling), dramatic irony,…
If a word has to exist for what scenes need, engagement is probably the least bad one. But engagement as a replacement rule would be just as useless as conflict — both are too unspecific to tell you what your scene actually needs. What engagement does is name the goal: the reader staying on the page. How you get them there is up to the scene, and all of those tools above are ways of getting there.
Conflict Is Cultural
So far, I’ve been talking about this within Western storytelling, but the assumption that stories need conflict as their engine is actually a cultural one. (My Japanese & Culture studies finally come in handy, ha!)
In East Asian storytelling, there’s a four-act structure built around introduction, development, twist, and reconciliation. It exists across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean traditions, and in Japanese, it’s called kishōtenketsu. Finding it in my research got me a bit excited. Then a bit frustrated, when I realised most English-language writing blogs simplify it as “the conflict-free Eastern story structure.” That’s… not quite right.
When I looked at Japanese sources, kishōtenketsu is more or less the default framework for how people think about story structure. They use it for everything: action manga, romance novels, slice-of-life, anime, light novels, and even business presentations. Nobody in Japan is calling it the conflict-free alternative to anything.
Kishōtenketsu doesn’t require conflict as the organising principle. The twist (転, ten) is a shift rather than a confrontation — something unexpected that reframes what came before. It’s built around contrast and revelation instead of opposition and resolution. A world-ending battle and a four-panel manga about a girl buying a soda for a stranger on a bench sit within the same structure. Conflict or no conflict, all it asks for is a shift.
Which means a storytelling tradition that’s been around for centuries, used across multiple cultures and hundreds of millions of people, doesn’t treat conflict as the organising principle. That’s worth noticing.
There’s also nichijō-kei or iyashikei (daily life and healing type), a Japanese genre that deliberately removes dramatic events and narrative tension. Engagement runs on atmosphere, gentle character interactions and just the simple pleasure of being in a world that feels good. The genre grew out of a cultural shift in 1990s Japan, when audiences began wanting stories that helped them recover from daily life, and it’s been commercially relevant ever since. (This one deserves its own post. It’s fascinating.)
Closer to home, the cosy fiction boom is doing something similar. Legends & Lattes went from self-published to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Goodreads catalogues over six thousand books shelved as cosy fantasy alone. These books do have conflict in them, but the scenes readers love most, the scenes that define the genre, are the ones where nobody’s fighting anyone. Coffee shop scenes, found family dinners, quiet conversations, someone learning to bake a really good cinnamon roll… Conflict provides the stakes, and everything else provides the reason to stay.
So What Do I Actually Think?
Writers deserve to be trusted with complexity. They deserve the depth to actually understand what their scenes are doing and learn to see it for themselves — to become better writers and better at self-editing.
But I think the problem goes further than one piece of advice. We’ve built a world where oversimplification wins over complexity for the sake of clicks. Our attention spans and our capacity to absorb depth have shrunk, and social media rewards punchy hooks and easy-looking rules, advice that fits on a slide. “Every scene needs conflict” is perfect for that world. Easy to remember, easy to repeat. And completely inadequate for the actual work of figuring out what a scene needs.
I think that’s tragic. There’s a difference between simplifying something so people can understand it and oversimplifying it so they don’t have to. Maybe it’s my neurodivergent brain revolting against that, but I couldn’t just accept the rule. I had to pull it apart until I understood why it didn’t work. And what I found was that the complexity is the point, because stories are complex and the craft is complex. What makes a scene work depends on the scene, the book, the writer and the reader. And learning to see that is the goal.
Helping writers work out what their scenes actually need is one of my favourite parts of editing.