What kind of external problem is your MC facing?
Is it one that affects only your protagonist? Or is it a problem affecting others in her world as well?
I recently worked with a writer whose protagonist has a whopper of an internal problem via an emotional antagonist, but as I read through the draft I discovered something vital was missing. As a result, the final resolution wasn’t coming together as strongly as it could have.
After evaluating the manuscript together, we determined that there was no external conflict that made the internal struggle make sense, which in turn troubled me as a reader.
One of the struggles early drafts face is a lack of conflict. Maybe the author is more focused on the external challenges blocking the protagonist from reaching the final goal, and readers are left in the dark about the character’s true motivations. Or perhaps the writer is so caught up with some inner issue the MC needs to resolve that the rest of the story is little more than set dressing that serves no real purpose.
But, just as real life is filled with a web of interlaced inner and external conflicts that sometimes line up with each other and sometimes are at odds with each other, our stories need both in order for them to rise off of the page and leave a mark on the reader.
The power of storytelling at work
Once the author of the aforementioned story and I homed in on the external conflict, she was able to go back to the manuscript and rework it with great success. Not only did she add in that missing element, but she found a way to increase the internal conflict for several of her characters as well.
When she sent me back the revision to see what I thought, I found myself leaning into my laptop screen and wrestling with some of the same emotions that the MC was feeling—even though I myself had never experienced the exact sort of struggle the protagonist was experiencing.
When I got to the end, I had chills. Not only because the story was so much stronger, but because of the chord it struck with me. Like some of the other characters in her story, I saw that there are times when I’m so caught up with what’s going on in my life that I completely miss what someone else may be struggling with because they’re unable or unsure how to voice their pain out loud.
And it caused me to pick up my head and look around my home community a little more closely to see if there are others in my sphere who may be wrestling with the same outwardly quiet/inwardly screaming struggle that all but one of the characters in the story had been too busy to notice.
And that, my friend, is the power of storytelling at work!
—Jen