The significance of plot without conflict (2012)
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Its use as the central structure for an entire 1.5-2hr movie, or a whole novel, say, is what's rare.
[EDIT] All the examples on Wikipedia are very short, too. Is such a structure common as the central plot of a longer work anywhere? Its super-common in the West in the above use—maintaining interest in scenes that lack conflict—but again, not as the main plot structure of anything. Also, the "argument" version on WP made me realize that the thing this all reminds me of that I couldn't quite place is the syllogism
Sometimes, probably, though conventional theories of screenwriting hold that each scene must have and be defined by a conflict whose resolution advances the plot related to the wider conflict of the piece, and that a scene which does not have a conflict or whose conflict doesn't fulfill a role in advancing the wider plot should be excised.
> Also, the "argument" version on WP made me realize that the thing this all reminds me of that I couldn't quite place is the syllogism
It also has some similarity to the Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis style of rhetoric/argument, possibly closer than to the purely-deductive syllogism. But, yes, I can see that similarity, too.
Interestingly, the Western 3-Act structure has been described as a special case of T/A/S structure; so, in a way, this structure may be more relatable to Western structure than the superficial differences suggest.
- How is Ender going to save earth in space army academy? (Ender's Game)
- Who killed Mr Ratchett? [EDIT: or rather How will Poirot figure out who killed Mr Ratchett?] (Murder on the Orient Express)
- How was Rome formed in the early days? (History of Rome, Livy)
- What's going to happen to Seth Brundle? (The Fly)
- How did Warren Buffett become who he is today? (Snowball)
- Are Mr Knightly and Emma going to hook up? (Emma)
- Who is Ted Mosby going to marry? (How I met your mother)
Conflict can be the basis of the question, 'Who will win the fight'. Kishōtenketsu can be the basis of the question, 'Who are these people and how are they related?'. I don't agree that 'in the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict' because many plots do not have the outcome of a conflict as the main question.
But you're right, not all plots are about conflict. Plots about conflict, and especially inner conflict, tend to be fascinating if done right though.
Toula feels ugly, ignorant and trapped in an uninterested job. She begins to study, changes her clothes and make up, changes job. She still remembers that she was rejected by the other girls when she was a child, but now in college, she tries again and is accepted. She likes a man, he likes her back. Her father doesn't accept a "xenos", but he tolerates him. He's not catholic orthodox, he gets baptized. And the last part of the movie lacks any conflict, and nevertheless, we're thrilled to see the happy ending materialize because we got to like the main characters.
But it's very common for stories to include both kinds of problems.
Many good jokes are conflict-less stories, that create a contradiction for the reader to resolve with a double take.
To me, humour based on conflict, even between expectation and reality, falls more into the category of irony, mocking, or slapstick, where someone (or something) is the “butt of the joke”.
If they dropped forwards, they would land in the boat.
Kishōtenketsu specifically doesn't set up a problem in the classic western sense. There is no apparent obstacle that the protagonist needs to overcome. There are no "stakes" that we are worried about (what happens if she doesn't get what she wants?). There is no antagonist. There is no rising action where conflict+stakes increase over time. It's just a totally different structure.
There is a twist at the end, but a twist is not a conflict.
Some stories are intentionally more difficult to understand until you've read far enough. In this sense, the author is setting up a problem and resolving it.
I feel you're been needlessly pedantic here. Sure, the reader always has to parse each sentence and understand it. But that's pretty different from the author deliberately introducing a non sequitur that cannot be understood until the later resolution.
> It's just a totally different structure.
What skybrian is saying is that, yes, at one level the structures are different, but at the next level of abstraction there are commonalities. In both cases a tension is created in the reader which is then later resolved.
In conflict-based stories, most of the tension comes from the reader sympathizing with the protagonist who is directly experiencing the tension. In kishōtenketsu, the reader experiences a tension the characters do not because it's not "in world".
Even in Western literature, this technique is used all the time. Foreshadowing is common. Many stories shift viewpoints between multiple characters so that the reader has access to insight the characters do not, and that's used to deliberately create tension and anticipation in the reader.
More recently, Arrival, which I like even better has a similar effect.
The author's first example is an instance of formal conflict. Once we reach panel three we question where the panel is going because it introduces a radical element (as the author observes) that seems disconnected from the first two elements of the sequence. This is enough to establish a formal conflict for us as it subverts the form established prior--it creates a narrative question, 'why is this here, what is the point, where is this going?' The final panel then resolves this conflict by reintegrating the material from the first two panels with the third.
And so even though there's no 'conflict' in the western traditional sense of the characters of the story combating, conflict still drives the story. It's actually pretty difficult to argue that stories don't require any conflict, as conflict is often an imprecise and overloaded category (think of all its different varieties) and really when people advocate for conflict they are advocating more generally for flux and change--e.g. the idea is you couldn't tell a story if every panel were the same image--you'd perhaps be saying something--making a statement or a proposition, but it wouldn't be a story. While a poem or a painting can often take the form of a one-line proposition, a story as I conceive of it is something more like an argument--it operates on the premise that certain bits of information are out of scope as we read and that patterns are interrupted then resolved into different forms as we glean new information--all narrative arts are necessarily time bound arts and thus more often called experiences rather than objects (e.g. a film is an experience b/c it relies necessarily on a time factor, where as the totality of an object might be consumed at a singular moment T, ignoring history--)
Western conflict is psychological and heroic. A jarring or unexpected element in the text is not enough. The standard pattern is that the protagonist encounters challenges, and either overcomes them through heroic effort, bravery, and self-discovery - or (less often) is destroyed by them.
The prototype is martial and egotistical, in that the plot revolves around the protagonist's goals and actions.
External influences are either enemies, helpers, or ambiguous distractions, as seen from the protagonist's point of view.
Kishōtenketsu seems to have a more meditative and less confrontational approach. The protagonist is one character among many. They encounter other characters of equal interest and value. These other characters are not compressed into the enemy/helper dichotomy. Similarly, situations are unexpected but may be neither harmful nor helpful.
This seems less abstracted and closer to real life, where other people and events are just there without having to be shoehorned into positive or negative roles within our personal dramas.
I suppose Western audiences have set expectations, and it's not obvious that plots that take this approach will satisfy them. But it would still be interesting to see where this plotting style could lead in a Western context.
I seem to remember The Magic School Bus [1] (kids' science show) having stories – that is, a series of related events – but only sporadic (and generally incidental) conflict. "Magical bus takes school kids on memorable – if ill-advised – journey, and Arnold makes jokes" sums up pretty much every episode.
Seinfeld I would venture to say also deviates from the western norm, in that the conflicts (of which each episode has several) are rarely, if ever, overcome. Half the time the conflict reaches a climax at the end of the episode. In fact the entire series ended with unresolved conflict. But the stories are nonetheless memorable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_School_Bus_%28TV_ser...
I also recall Robert Graves' writing, in 'Goodbye to All That', of one of his fellow soldiers saying that after the war, he would read the whole of Trollope's Barchester chronicles, as nothing happens in them, though that is not strictly true.
"There's no plot to speak of--things happen, and then it ends. There's no conflict to speak of until the last chapter. Most of the book consists of detailed descriptions of civil engineering projects and the magical techniques used for them. The characters are ludicrously overpowered special snowflakes. The language is nigh-impenetrable, and the innocent comma is tortured beyond all reason.
But you know what? To hell all that. I loved it.
This is a story about where legendary sorcerers come from. Five young people (ages range from late teens to early thirties) with magical talent take part in a highly experimental training program. Talent is hazardous; absent training, none of them are expected to live to see fifty. Traditional training, which runs along the lines of "spend several years sweeping floors and learning control before moving on to lighting candles", has a roughly fifty percent survival rate. Their program, in contrast, starts with completely reconstructing a square mile or so of geography and scales up rapidly from there."
It is, in fact, an extremely good story.
I also suggest Nathan Lowell's Solar Clipper series, a far-future space story in which nothing much happens and it is fascinating. Excitement is largely provided by superior coffee making and people management skills.
That's true about the first book, perhaps the second (is clothes shopping conflict?), but the third is completely different.
I don't disagree in general that stories can be conflict-free. But, good stories usually have character development, and character development almost always entails overcoming some internal conflict.
Which certainly does allow for a conflict free story. The important thing is that a story has events which are causally related. Otherwise it really is just a list of unconnected statements.
By this logic, it seems that a recipe is a story. (Maybe that's intentional!)
I'd almost view the definition of a story as more about the intention than about the content—rather like art, which can (arguably) be created simply by the act of presenting it as such (in the sense of "found art" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object )). So too, surely, can one have a "found story".
When I learned 2nd person is indeed real I was pretty mad about that. Of course I should have already known it was real, reading Choose Your Own Adventure books, but I just didn't make the connection.
Had to google. Was delighted that I got to go to TV Tropes. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging
I'm not fond of this approach, because it sets up conflicts and limits the view of events to the specific, when really, as someone far away, the specific isn't useful in understanding how it is actually news.
There's a YouTube video where Ira Glass describes storytelling as asking a series of questions that demand answers.
[spoilers]
While the plot of the film has been described as ‘a computer malfunctions and tries to kill the crew of a spaceship’, in fact that part of the film lasts for about 40 minutes — or just over a quarter of the two and a half hour running time. The actual overt conflict is only about 30 minutes, arguably starting right before the intermission when we see that HAL can read the crewmembers’ lips through the window of the soundproof pod.
Many films have conflict-free exposition scenes or sequences, but 2001 is interesting because it has a single conflict-containing act within a larger non-conflict structure, which is primarily expository and/or revelatory in nature.
It'd be nice if the author gave examples of significant plots using the structure, like a novel or a film.
Indeed; I found a lot of pages talking about this concept, but almost none mentioning any examples of its implementation. In fact, the only long-form story (not a four panel comic strip or poem) I saw brought up as an example of it was Kiki's Delivery Service, which has plenty of conflict.
It seems more like something that people theoretically like the idea of. It's also interesting the way it's presented as an Eastern vs. Western dichotomy, with Westerners supposedly viewing conflict as central to a story and Easterners not viewing it as essential. I don't see any indication that Eastern stories are less conflict driven than Western ones (most of the major ones I'm familiar with, such as the Four Great Classical Chinese Novels, have plenty of conflict).
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-17-how-nintendos-b...
1) A game mechanic is introduced 2) The player is subject to slowly increasing difficult that requires the mechanic 3) The player is forced to demonstrate mastery of mechanic in some new situation, often by combining with other mechanics 4) The player has mastered the mechanic and has the option of using it whenever they want in the future
Sometimes I want to see a conflict that's an obvious blowout from setup to resolution. That can still be vastly entertaining with a little creativity.
But these components of conflict do not require an antagonist "character" per se. The conflict can be survival, overcoming disease, making that next promotion, getting the girl/guy, not knowing what happened to bring the world to the condition it's in, etc.
Or they can be applied in simple charm or humor, but those still need a setup and payoff of some sort. The "setup" here still sets up a conflict of some type, just not necessarily of the antagonistic flavor.
So I would disagree that there's no "conflict", but rather there is a lack of a specific antagonist character.
Does the author actually say what the significance of a plot without conflict is? Is this an experiment with meta-thesis where conflict is avoided by not actually concluding the argument?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinéma_du_look [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diva_(1981_film)
If you are interested in story structures I recommend this books -Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting bt Robert McKee -Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories that Resonate by Brian McDonald
Season 3 had no conflict, or it wasn't relevant conflict any longer. Just life in prison.
I did consider that dull, but I don't preclude that a plot can't be "good" without conflict.
I think that is entirely fine and possible. But in a story where a previous chapter or segment did follow that formula, and then the next doesn't, it looks like a dull accident.
EDIT: And now I see it's written and directed by the same guy as Slacker :)
It may be a plot, but is it a good plot? Does it makes you want to know more about the story?
"just world/character-building" would be if the plot was: a girl gets a soda from a soda machine, then take it to a boy. Kishōtenketsu is: a girl gets a soda from a soda machine. Meanwhile, a boy sits on a bench. The audience is confused at this point and that creates conflict in their mind. In the resolution, we see the girl was getting the soda for the boy.
This conflict underlies almost all the narrative structure. For example, the reader should be obsessing about the stakes as they read: what happens if the girl doesn't get what she wants? Who else loses? Does anyone die? This is what drives people to read on. Without conflict, this structure falls apart.
World and character building can occur in either of these cases. But in the classic conflict case, the world and characters are usually designed to heighten conflict (ie. the character has a flaw that leads to them to more direct conflict).
At a point it felt like a conspiracy.
You don't need an antagonist to make an interesting story.
Even in this conflict structure, the best antagonists are the ones that believe they are doing good. It's not a trite good vs. evil construct. They have their own desires and a philosophy that can be a logical way to solve a problem (but in conflict with how the hero wants to solve it).
Ghibli films do this best. For example, in Princess Mononoke, the antagonist (Lady Eboshi) is initially presented as the evil forest destroyer, chopping down trees to make villages and industry. But then, you find out she does this to provide shelter and work for social outcasts. It's a moral dilemma with no clear right answer.
Creating conflict is an element of every story. Drama is the process of reconciling conflict.
I would guess that kishōtenketsu is a loanword from this, qĭchéngzhuănhé.