Each chapter of the story has to have it's own, specific conflict (starts with a goal, middles with a new obstacle, ends with the characters deciding what to do next) in addition to being one of the steps in resolving the larger conflict. Context: my characters haven't been cooperating for a while I just realized last week that combining two of my ideas for a climax would work better than trying to settle for one or the other, but I'm abut 6500 words into the actual text and my character's actions have been making it harder to see a way back to my idea for the ending. I've never felt comfortable winging thousands of words and hoping that a compelling story happens by accident, but I wasn't sure if it would work better to re-work my text in favor of my original ending or if it would work better to come up with a new ending that would work better for my new text... until I restarted my outline from scratch and tried to sum up each of my completed / in progress chapters as simply as possible. It turned out that each chapter had a distinct conflict in addition to being cogs in the larger one, and trying to phrase potential next chapters in the same way has given me a complete, final outline that I do not need to change anymore, merely fill in the details. I've had the bare bones of my story for almost a year now, I've been working from a general outline for a couple of months, but outlining from a perspective of a strict 1 Chapter : 1 Conflict showed me what the entire story would look like in a matter of minutes
Hey, that's awesome! I'm not entirely certain that every section has to have its own complete conflict cycle - it's possible that sometimes a conflict could arise in a certain chapter to be resolved later, but it's important to recognize that all of the pieces of our stories have to be significant contributors to it.
