Pitfalls when Resolving Conflict in a Story

My mind has a way of connecting most things back to writing. I’ll ruminate over something for weeks and find connections to an idea all around me, in books, movies, and in life. Recently, I’ve found myself preoccupied with story arc, and how many books and movies have a hero attempting to reach some sort of goal, but there’s a villain who stands in their way. Over halfway through the story, after the hero has overcome many obstacles, the villain redoubles his efforts creating what appears as an insurmountable obstacle for the hero. Just has it looks like the hero is making good progress and there’s hope that the obstacle is surmountable after all, the villain does something that crushes the hero and all hope is lost.

The trick for the writer is to have the hero rise from the ashes like a phoenix and muster every last bit of heart to bring what appears to be an irreparable situation to a satisfying conclusion where they find victory against all odds.

Discussing this common story arc with a friend led to an interesting conversation on some of the ways we’ve seen writers try to resolve this last hopeless situation. In particular, we found ourselves discussing traps some writers have fallen into when trying to end their story.

So, here’s a list of things to avoid when trying to resolve the “all is lost” moment in your story:

• Coming back from the dead. There are all sorts of ways to dance around this point, but let me start by explaining why this should be avoided. I’ve wrestled with killing off my own characters, especially the ones I’d grown quite fond of, but I resolved to keep them dead. There’s a reason in the story that they had to die, and if I brought them back at the end, it would undo that reasoning. Sure, I might feel better about the situation, the reader might even have a moment of relief, but ultimately the story would suffer. It ends up being a cheap, easy way to resolve things in a story. Things were so bad that someone paid the ultimate price by dying. It similar to the advice I gave in Pitfalls of Using Dreams in Stories, by undoing something as serious as the death of a character, you’ve wasted the time and emotions the reader invested in the character and in what happened to them. It’s a big, just kidding at the end of the story.
  • Having said that, there are stories where people coming back from the dead is appropriate for the genre, and makes sense for the story as a whole. The reader may even have an expectation of the character coming back to life. But if rising from the dead isn’t something that takes place at any other part of the story, and there haven’t been subtle hints throughout the story that this is a possibility, it’s probably best not to have it happen at the end in an attempt to resolve the horrible situation you placed your characters in.
  • If someone is brought back from the dead, they shouldn’t remain the same as before they died. There should be a price paid for coming back from the dead. It shouldn’t be a simple reset and everything proceeds as it normally would have had the character not died. Whether they come back as a zombie, or despite how happy and perfect their life was before their death, they are now miserable because they were ripped from heaven, or they’re damaged because they spent their death in hell. In some way, there has to be a significant change to the character if they’re brought back.
• Time travel. Don’t get me wrong, I love time travel in stories. But I’ve also seen it used too many times as a cheap way to resolve a story. If time travel isn’t a part of the story from the beginning and throughout the story, don’t use it to resolve conflict at the end of the story. We all have plenty of experience in seeing how time travel works in a story, and the main idea in these stories is that something small and seemingly insignificant that is changed in the past can have monumental consequences in the future. It then stands to reason that time travel could not provide a clean solution to a problem and should not be used to fix the mess the characters are in. Once again, this also serves to discount the time and energy a reader has invested in a story. To undo what has happened is like telling a reader they’d just wasted their time reading this story.
  • There are of course exceptions to this as well. For one, when time travel is a major part of the story, it doesn’t seem forced or like a cheap trick when it’s used to bring some sort of closure to the story, but even then it’s not reached by a simple act of going back and changing something and everything is fixed in the future. I’ve also seen it used effectively when there are hints that time travel was used throughout the story, but it is only revealed that the oddities and seemingly insignificant happenings earlier in the story were all as a result of time travel at the end. In other words, the evidence of time travel was there all along, the viewer or reader just wasn’t aware what the clues they were being fed meant until the end.
• Acts of God. Another error in resolving conflict is having what is called an act of God come and resolve the situation. To give an exaggerated example, the villain is struck down by lightning and thus the obstacle is gone. Any moment of extreme luck or coincidence that makes the problem easily resolved falls under this point. This isn’t to say that there’s never any luck involved in the hero overcoming an obstacle. For example, there might be a point where the villain becomes so overconfident of his victory that he starts making mistakes that the hero can then use to his advantage.
  • Always there’s an exception. Perhaps your story is a supernatural tale with God and angels at war with demons. Perhaps an act of God is just what is needed to tip the scale. Or perhaps there are gods at war and thus their interaction in the story is essential. Just don’t let one interaction or act resolve all the conflict. If it feels too easy, it’s not a strong ending.

The main takeaway: All the bad things that happened to the characters to get them into the dire situation that makes it feel like all is lost cannot be reversible. If there is nothing at stake, it negates the tension and the reader won’t take the story seriously anymore. Sometimes things are fixed in the end and everything returns to normal. Sometimes, it is a victory that came at a great cost and the characters who remain have to carry on with all they’ve lost.

There’s a common theme in the exceptions listed above for each point and that is that the element cautioned against plays a bigger role in the story than just the end.

I said it in one of the points above, but it’s worth repeating, if the conflict is easily resolved, it’s not a strong ending. Think of how much of the book was spent building up the tension and getting the characters into such a horrible state. The story will feel uneven if the reader thought there was no way out of the situation and then as a writer you go in and give it an easy solution. Give the solution some weight, just as you gave the conflict weight.

When it comes to a hero overcoming an obstacle, what other resolutions felt to shallow to leave you feeling satisfied as a reader? What was the most satisfying resolution you’ve found to a conflict?