@digitig conflict is, by definition, a clash. Two sides - one prevails. She understands it as man vs man because it is a cultural thing: Man vs God had always been a one way street, and Man vs Himself is a very, very dubious position to start with. Inner conflicts (for example: urges vs ethics) are almost always "backed up" in narration by outer conflicts... @Lewdog I never actually understood this type of argument: "it's a hard book, don't use it as an example". It's completely arbitrary. If you discuss a subject you can't just ignore examples that don't perfectly fit the expected. In this context: yes, there are books of profound literary significance which don't fit nicely into dogmatic modernist views on structure. They exist. They may not be everyone's cup of tea, that's fair. But that is certainly not a disqualifying factor.
I suspect that if you wrote that story, the reader would interpret it in a way that introduces conflict, because otherwise they wouldn't feel that it was a story. They'd decide that the guy has a boring life but fails to realize it and when will he wake up and seek something more? Or that he fails to appreciate his life of safety and comfort and when will he wake up and learn to appreciate it and help others achieve it?
Technically, yes... But if there is a conflict in the story a resolution of some sort is inevitable. And as I understand the struggle/conflict is always what the point is in a story: sure, you want to see the wedding/detective point finger/couple reaching orgasm/evil wizard finally burned to death/Death Star explode, but the story is always the road to resolution, not the necessity of the resolution itself. One of the worst writing advice I've recently read actually says that you need to show the resolution because you need to reward the reader. Like readers are train dogs, or literature is sex with prostitutes.
That's interesting - and I agree with you. I call these non-stories 'vignettes.' A piece where a character or situation is explored, sometimes quite thoroughly, but then that's it. Life is wonderful or life's a bitch. The narrator sits on a special rock beside the sea, remembering her childhood ...that sort of thing. My dog was very cute and cuddly, and then she got old and now she's dead. Unfortunately, I think the insistence on SHORT short stories, as required by short story contests, encourages this sort of thing. If the contest limit was, say 10,000 words instead of 2500 words, it would be difficult to sustain a vignette that long. I've been in writers' groups where people truly can't tell the difference between a vignette and a story. Especially when the best vignette wins the local contest! I feel sometimes like I'm on a different planet. Yoo hoo.
Agreed. Vignettes are a nice writing exercise, but a story should encompass some kind of journey or transformation.
That's extremely broad: a journey/transformation = motion/change, which is basically the same thing (by moving we change by changing we move). This could be easily reconciled in "motionless" vignettes by: a)syntaxical motion, from the first capital letter to the final fullstop; and b)receptive motion, through the act of reading itself. I know you'd say that it is the character that should be in motion, but consider that the "character" is a (con)textual construct, not an autonomous entity. We all felt the illusion of some sort of perceived autonomy of characters in our stories, but we should always remember that this is, by all means, just an illusion: we don't actually probe into any sort of parallel universe and spy on them. So the motion (journey, change,etc), being a property of the text as a whole (and being intrinsic to language as a temporal phenomenon) could just as easily "belong" in the meta-world of the narrator or even somewhere in the triangular writer-text-reader relationship. This allows for, say, Borges stories to be enjoyed as stories. If you insist on "character conflict" as a neccesity, you dismiss many of his best writting.
You can play with semantics all you want, but if the story fails to go somewhere in a substantive way, it remains weak no matter how you justify it.
The story: yes. But you are moving in circles. 1) Motion is neccesary for a story. - However, there are different kinds of motion, and there are stories that utilize this. 2) But no motion makes a weak story. - However, there are many literary significant stories in this group. So you can say: 3) I don't like those stories (they are dull, incomprehensible, pretensious, kitch, overrated etc) - However, your personal preferences are irrelevant. In a way, if an element (conflict, character, plot, etc) is THE ultimate neccesity to call a text "a story", you cannot use lack of this element for evaluation. If a text has no conflict, by your logic, it is simply NOT a story. Thus: it cannot be a WEAK story. A weak story, because it is not a story.
She's making a common mistake. She's reducing conflict to "aggression and competition." That's not it at all.
Opposition works. There's always opposition. But that doesn't mean "aggression and competition." And it certainly isn't absent in "relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing." All of which Ursula K. Le Guin is implying.
I feed all birds and squirrels equally... The conflict seems to be in the existence of the misperception. The narrator seems to resolve it.
Conflict doesn't have to be about somebody fighting somebody else. It can be as subtle as taking a decision, or avoiding taking one. As everybody knows, making a decision moves things forward. Not making a decision IS also a decision—it allows fate to move things forward for you, although maybe not in the direction you hoped for. This makes a story. But if all you're doing is describing a character, place or thing, even at great length, with many tangents and convolutions, then you're writing a vignette. This doesn't make it a boring or useless piece of work, in fact it can be fascinating to read ...but sorry, it's not a story! Any more than it's a poem, an essay, or any other type of writing. I quote the Wikipedia definition of a literary vignette: a vignette is a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, idea, setting, or object.
In my opinion, conflict is not necessary to a story. It is there to make the story interesting. Without some conflict, the story becomes dull, and no one likes that. However, no story is free of conflict. Even if the conflict is not a major part of the story, it exists every time a character has to make a decision.
