Types of Conflict in Literature, and Where the List Comes From

The types of conflict in literature are the kinds of opposition a character can face: person vs person, person vs self, person vs nature, person vs society, person vs technology, person vs the supernatural, and person vs fate. Person vs self is the internal conflict, the struggle inside a character. The other six are external conflicts, struggles with something outside them.

Most novels use more than one. The list is a modern classroom taxonomy, and no single writer drew it up. Its roots are in a French critic's 1894 essay on drama, and its three-part core was in American books on fiction by the 1950s. That history is set out below, with every quote checked against the original book.

What Is Conflict in Literature?

Conflict is the opposition a character meets while trying to get something they want. Laurence Perrine's textbook Story and Structure, used in schools and colleges since 1959, defines it as "a clash of actions, ideas, desires, or wills."

Conflict matters because it is what a reader follows. Dwight V. Swain, in Techniques of the Selling Writer (1965), builds the whole scene around it: "A scene is a unit of conflict lived through by character and reader." No opposition means no scene, only a report of events.

What Are the 7 Types of Conflict?

Older lists say "man vs" where newer ones say "person vs" or "character vs". The categories are the same.

Person vs Self

The character fights something in their own nature: a fear, a craving, a divided loyalty, a belief they need to lose. This is the only internal type. It is what drives most character arcs, because the outer story forces the inner choice.

Person vs Person

Two characters want things that cannot both happen. Lajos Egri's test, from The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946), is that "compromise is impossible." If they could split the difference, there would be no story. A strong opponent is the subject of how to write a villain.

Person vs Nature

The opposition has no will at all: a storm, a mountain, a desert, a disease. It tests endurance, and it cannot be argued with.

Person vs Society

The character stands against the rules of the world they live in. The antagonist may have a face, such as an official or a party, but the real opposition is the system behind it.

Person vs Technology

A creation turns on its maker, or a machine stands between the character and a human life. Most lists file this under science fiction.

Person vs the Supernatural

Ghosts, gods, curses and monsters. The conflict often doubles as person vs self, because the character first has to believe what is happening.

Person vs Fate

The character fights a destiny that has already been decided. Greek tragedy is the model: the harder Oedipus runs from the prophecy, the faster it comes true.

What Is the Difference Between Internal and External Conflict?

Internal conflict happens inside a character's mind. External conflict comes from outside: another person, nature, society, technology, the supernatural or fate.

Perrine's textbook made this the standard frame. The main character, he writes, "may be pitted against some other person or group of persons (man against man)". Or he may face "some external force", which Perrine lists as physical nature, society or fate ("man against environment"). Or "he may be in conflict with some element in his own nature (man against himself)." That is three types, not seven. The longer modern list mostly splits his "environment" into its parts.

Where Does the List of Conflict Types Come From?

The fullest early version comes from the theatre, not the novel. In 1894 the French critic Ferdinand Brunetière published "The Law of the Drama" as the preface to a yearbook of the French stage. In Philip M. Hayden's 1914 English translation, he says that what we ask of the theatre is "the spectacle of a will striving towards a goal, and conscious of the means which it employs."

William Archer's Play-Making (1912) gives another passage from Brunetière, from his Études critiques in Archer's own translation, which reads almost like the modern list: drama "is one of us thrown living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against social law, against one of his fellow-mortals, against himself, if need be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the malevolence of those who surround him." Fate, society, another person and the self are all there.

Brunetière even sorted plays by their opponent. To classify them, he wrote, "it is only necessary to consider the particular obstacle against which the will struggles." An unbeatable obstacle such as fate makes tragedy. Obstacles made by other people, "as prejudice, for example, or social conventions", make serious drama, because they can be overcome. Two equal wills facing each other make comedy.

Not everyone agreed. Archer argued that "the essence of drama is crisis", not conflict, and pointed to plays like the Agamemnon where nobody really struggles.

The short list moved into books on writing fiction during the twentieth century:

• Irving Stone, in a 1957 Library of Congress lecture on the biographical novel, said the story "must emerge naturally and organically from the conflicts of man against himself, man against man, or man against fate."
• Phyllis A. Whitney passed it on as received wisdom. As "every beginning writer is told," she wrote, "there are three kinds of conflict in fiction: Man against man; man against himself; man against nature. I may use all three in a novel. I certainly use the first two."

Technology and the supernatural were added later, in classroom lists. No one source fixed the number at seven.

Who Really Came Up With the Types of Conflict?

No one person. Three claims about it are common online, and none holds up.

• "Arthur Quiller-Couch listed the seven basic conflicts." Study guides credit him with seven: man against man, nature, himself, God, society, "man caught in the middle" and "man and woman". None of them gives a source. The list is not in his Cambridge lectures On the Art of Writing (1916) or On the Art of Reading (1920). The nearest those lectures come is a passage he quotes from Maurice Maeterlinck, on "the determined struggle of man against man, and desire against desire".
• "Aristotle named four basic plots: man against man, nature, himself and the supernatural." Aristotle did no such thing. Chapter 18 of the Poetics does name four kinds of tragedy, but they are "the Complex", "the Pathetic", "the Ethical" and "the Simple" (S. H. Butcher's translation), sorted by how the plot turns, not by the opponent.
• "Brunetière said 'No struggle, no drama.'" The phrase is not in his essay. Clayton Hamilton, in Materials and Methods of Fiction (1908), calls it a "catch-phrase" that sums up Brunetière's view and had become "a commonplace of dramatic criticism."

How Do You Layer Different Types of Conflict in a Novel?

Give the main character an outer problem and an inner one, and make the outer problem force the inner choice. A novel with one kind of opposition reads thin. A novel where every scene fights on a different front reads scattered. The aim is two or three types working on the same character, each making the others worse.

Robert McKee gives a useful version in Story (1997). He draws three levels of conflict around a character: inner conflict, personal conflict (family, friends, lovers) and "extra-personal conflict", which takes in "all the sources of antagonism outside the personal". Genres sit at different levels. In action stories, McKee notes, "action heroes face conflict only on the extra-personal level. James Bond, for example, has no inner conflicts". A novel has room for all three.

Three rules help:

1. Pick a main external conflict. It drives the plot and decides the climax.
2. Tie an internal conflict to it. The outer problem should be one the character cannot solve without changing.
3. Let the others reinforce it. A storm, a rule or a rival is strongest when it presses on the same wound. A secondary conflict of this kind is often the job of a subplot.

A Worked Example

Ilse is a mountain guide in an Alpine village. Two winters ago her brother died on the north ridge.

• Person vs society. The guides' council strikes her name from its list. Women do not guide in winter.
• Person vs person. Brandt, a climber who wants the first winter ascent, hires her in secret, and hides the route he really means to take.
• Person vs nature. A storm closes the ridge, and they dig in under a cornice for the night.
• Person vs self. At dawn she reaches the place her brother fell, and she cannot move.
• Person vs person. Brandt cuts ahead on his hidden route.
• Person vs self. She has to choose: go down to safety, or go back for the man who lied to her.

The storm and the ban are what bring her to the ridge, but the climax is the inner choice. Every outer conflict pushes her towards it.

How Do You Track Types of Conflict in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app, and its Outliner is a board of cards, one for every document in the book, each with a synopsis. A label for each type of conflict shows where each one runs.

1. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add a card for each scene with Add › Scene.
2. In each synopsis, write who or what opposes the character in that scene.
3. Open one scene and make a label for each type you use, such as "Person", "Nature", "Society" and "Self" (the pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties opens Edit labels & statuses). Give each label its own colour.
4. Set the label for the main conflict on every scene.
5. Switch the Outliner to its list and read the colours top to bottom. A type that drops out for a long run is a conflict the book has forgotten.
6. To follow one conflict on its own, open Filters at the top of the Outliner and pick its label. The inner conflict on its own should read as an arc.

When a scene carries a second conflict, name it in the synopsis, such as "Self: she freezes at the ledge". The search box in Filters looks through card titles and synopses, so typing "Self:" lists every scene where the inner conflict surfaces. The same labels show in the binder, and organising scenes with labels covers other uses for them. To fix the order, drag the cards on the board until the conflicts build.

Common Mistakes

• Treating the list as a menu. Picking one type per book leaves it flat. Most novels need an inner conflict under the outer one.
• An internal conflict that never changes the plot. If the character's doubt makes no difference to what happens, it is decoration.
• Opposition that can be talked away. A conflict that one honest conversation would solve is a misunderstanding, not a conflict.
• Nature or fate with no human stake. A storm is only dramatic if someone wants something the storm stops.
• Confusing conflict with arguing. Characters can be polite and still want opposite things. Some of the strongest conflict is quiet.

Sources

Retrieved 26 October 2026.

• Ferdinand Brunetière, The Law of the Drama, translated by Philip M. Hayden, introduction by Henry Arthur Jones (Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 1914; first published 1894) (archive.org).
• William Archer, Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship (1912), chapter III, "Dramatic and Undramatic" (Project Gutenberg).
• Clayton Hamilton, Materials and Methods of Fiction (1908) (Project Gutenberg).
• Laurence Perrine, Story and Structure (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970 edition; first published 1959), read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (ReganBooks, 1997), p. 147 (archive.org).
• Irving Stone, "The Biographical Novel", in Three Views of the Novel (Library of Congress, 1957) (archive.org).
• Phyllis A. Whitney, Guide to Fiction Writing (The Writer, 1982) (archive.org).
• Dwight V. Swain, Techniques of the Selling Writer (University of Oklahoma Press, 1973; first published 1965), chapter 4 (archive.org).
• Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946) (archive.org).
• Aristotle, Poetics, translated by S. H. Butcher, chapter XVIII (Project Gutenberg).
• Arthur Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Writing (1916) and On the Art of Reading (1920) (Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg).