Internal vs External Conflict: How They Are Used in a Story

You know that feeling when you're reading a book and a scene is technically "exciting," something's blowing up, someone's chasing someone, but you just don't care? Nine times out of ten, that's a conflict problem. Specifically, it's usually a story leaning too hard on one kind of conflict and forgetting about the other.

There are two basic kinds at work in almost every piece of fiction: internal and external. Most writers can name them if you ask, but actually using them well, together, is a different skill. That's what this is about. And if you're getting a manuscript ready to send out, this is honestly one of the first things good book editing services end up flagging, because it's so easy to miss in your own work.

Internal conflict is the stuff a character is dealing with that nobody else in the book can see. It's not dramatic on the surface. It's a person wanting two things that can't coexist: staying loyal to their family or finally living their own life. It's guilt that's been sitting there for years. It's the fear that quietly stops someone from doing the one thing the story needs them to do.

Elizabeth Bennet isn't fighting a villain for most of Pride and Prejudice. She's fighting her own pride. That's it. No swords, no countdown clock, and it's still one of the most beloved conflicts in English literature.

This is the kind of conflict that makes a character feel like a person instead of a plot device. Readers don't just want to see someone win. They want to feel what winning (or losing) costs them.

External conflict is everything happening to a character rather than inside them. It's the part you'd put in a one-sentence pitch. A rival. A flood. A government that's hunting them down. A deadline they can't possibly hit.

It's the easiest kind of conflict to spot, because it's loud. It's also what keeps a reader physically turning pages — but by itself, it tends to feel thin. You can watch a lot happen to a character and still not really care about them.

A story that's all external conflict can feel like watching somebody else play a video game. Stuff is happening, sure, but you're not in it. And a story that's all internal conflict can feel stuck — lots of brooding, not much actually moving forward.

What works is when the outside pressure forces the inside stuff into view. Take a firefighter deciding whether to run into a burning building. That's already tense on its own. Now add the detail that this same firefighter botched a rescue a year ago and has been carrying that ever since. Suddenly, the fire isn't just a fire. It's a second chance, or a confirmation of everything they're afraid is true about themselves.

Start with what's wrong with your character before you think about plot. What are they afraid of? What lies do they believe about themselves? What do they want that contradicts something else they want? That's your internal engine, and it should exist before you pick a single external event.

Then choose the external conflict specifically because it presses on that wound. Don't grab a random obstacle off the shelf; pick one that wouldn't work nearly as well on a different character.

From there, escalate them together. As the outside trouble gets worse, the inside choice should get harder too. And when your character finally changes, show it through something they do differently than they would have done back in chapter one. Don't just write a line telling us they've grown — that's the kind of shortcut readers notice, even if they can't say why a scene feels hollow.

One more thing that helps: let other characters say the quiet part out loud. A best friend, a rival, even a stranger can call out what your protagonist is avoiding, which saves you from doing it all through inner monologue.

The most common issue is internal conflict that feels bolted on rather than built into the bones of the story — as if the writer remembered halfway through that the character should have feelings about things. Close behind that is solving the external problem and just... forgetting the internal one was supposed to resolve, too. And then there's the pacing killer: pages of introspection where one good line of dialogue would've done more work.

This is genuinely a lot of what a developmental edit catches, which is why writers working with a book editing agency often hear the same note repeated across totally different scenes — usually some version of "we need to feel why this matters to her specifically."

Literary fiction tends to lean internal, with the plot acting more like a trigger than the main event. Thrillers go the other way — external conflict for pace — but they still need something personal underneath, or the reader checks out between action beats. Romance usually braids them tightly together, where the outer obstacle (distance, family disapproval, bad timing) mirrors an inner one, usually some fear about getting hurt. Upmarket fiction tends to sit in the middle, using plot to surface bigger questions about who the character actually is.

None of this is a rule — just a tendency worth knowing before you decide how much page space each kind of conflict deserves.

Does your main character have a fear or flaw that the plot is actually pressing on, or is it just sitting there unused? Is the external pressure getting worse in a way that forces the internal issue, or is your character conveniently avoiding it scene after scene? Would the ending feel a little empty if the inner stuff never resolved? Are other characters helping pull that internal struggle into view, or is it all stuck inside your protagonist's head?

If more than one of those gave you a shaky answer, that's usually where revision or a second pair of eyes does the most good.

It's almost impossible to see these gaps in your own manuscript. You already know why everything matters, so you can't tell when it's not landing on the page. That's the real value a solid book publishing services team brings to the table — not just fixing sentences, but checking whether your internal and external conflicts are actually working toward the same thing from the first page to the last.

A good developmental editor keeps coming back to one question, asked in a dozen different ways: what does this person want, what's stopping them out there, and what's stopping them in here? When those three line up, the story holds. When they don't, even technically well-written scenes can feel strangely flat.