Internal vs. External Conflict in Fantasy

Ok, here we go--the last of my sort of "Theory of Fantasy" posts, at least for now. Apologies again if it gets a bit academic. Required reading is my previous post on Fantasy Worlds, but to sum that one up: fantasy worlds are generally representative of the hearts of minds of normal people. Either trust me on that one or go read my post to find out why ;-p.

Most of that post was concerned with explaining how external conflict in fantasy is representative of internal conflict in the hearts and minds of normal, everyday, live-in-the-real-world people. I ended it by saying that in the best fantasy, the characters are undergoing this same internal conflict.

To take a rather canonical and widely-known example: in The Return of the King Frodo struggles (and eventually, in one of Tolkien's best moments, fails) to overcome evil in himself (his desire to keep the ring) even as Middle-earth at large struggles to overcome evil in the form of Sauron's armies.

And that larger struggle, of course, is representative of the struggle between what we see as good and evil ourselves, as normal live-in-the-real-world human beings. So we have an internal conflict (in Frodo) that mirrors an external conflict (in Middle-earth) that mirrors an internal conflict (in ourselves).

That sort of double set of mirrors is, I think, what really makes fantasy hum. It's what makes it difficult to put down, and what makes it stick in your mind long after you finally do. The first mirror (the internal conflict in a character that mirrors the external conflict in his/her world) gets you looking for mirrors, and also lends the character's internal struggle much greater urgency---since often the outcome of the external struggle depends on the outcome of the internal.

Once you see the first mirror, you see the second. You have a, "Wait a second, if there's this link between internal and external struggles for this character that I love and identify with, maybe there's one for me, too?" You start to look for ways that the book mirrors your own life, and it's there that fantasy really serves its most useful purposes.

My experience with this, as a budding author, is that I initially did it unconsciously. In creating a story that I thought was cool and exciting, and characters that I thought were interesting, I wound up putting my characters in exactly this type of mirror-of-a-mirror-of-a-mirror situation. But recognizing that that's what I'm doing has given me a much greater degree of control over when, where, and how it happens, and as a consequence made my writing much better.

So to others doing the same thing---look for it in your work. You don't have to be conscious that you're doing this in order to do it, but once you are you can do it much better.