How to Combine External and Internal Conflict in a Climax

Hola, readers! Before I talked about the importance of internal and external conflict in a climax. However, to create a strong climax with both elements may sound difficult. You might be tempted to separate external and internal conflict in a climax, which is not necessarily bad, but when both are combined, it creates a punch in the stomach for the readers (in a good way. From an author’s pov).

It takes some effort to combine these elements, but if you have a good antagonist or a difficult choice for your character, it shouldn’t be too hard. First of all, think about the antagonist. Is the antagonist a real person that is opposed to the protagonist? If so, then use him to challenge the main character.

Let’s go back to the other analogy with the knight and the princess. Our knight––Joe––wants to save Princess Mary, and he wants to marry her as well. One problem with that: Mary doesn’t like Joe, and wants to marry someone else––Bob. Let’s say that Joe is fighting against this bad guy who is holding Mary captive because he wants his own daughter to marry Bob, who is a prince in another country. Joe makes friends with Mary and is trying to get her out of the tower. Now, Joe (like the sweet knight he is), realizes that he has to confront the bad guy to save Mary. When the bad guy starts fighting Joe, he tells Joe that he will let Mary go, on one condition. Joe and Mary have to get married. Now, Joe has a decision to make. Should he listen to the bad guy to get what he wants? Or should he try to overpower the bad guy and help Mary get together with the guy that she would probably do better with?

This internal conflict can work to challenge the main character’s weakness, but what if there is not a real person to challenge him or her? Present a choice to the main character that is hard to refuse. If it is not a choice, connect an internal struggle along with the external struggle. If the protagonist has to fight a thunderstorm to protect his family, maybe bring out his fear or desire to protect himself. He’s not only struggling for survival; he’s also struggling with the desire to save himself first.

A.D. 30 by Ted Dekker is a great example of this combination (although a very intense and mature book sometimes!). Again, mild spoiler alert! I am not giving away what happens completely, but I will describe some information towards the end of the book. To give some background, the main character, Maviah, is trying to bring justice for her people and revenge for her own sorrows. Her external conflict is between several people, but one is her half-brother, Maliku. Her internal conflict is the feeling that she is worthless and weak. She struggles with this throughout the entire book. As she fights Maliku in the climax, she struggles to gain the advantage. But there is more to this than a clash of two people. Ted Dekker puts both of these conflicts next to each other in the climax and this contrast is clearly seen in a few sentences that are next to each other. “[Maviah] was only a hobbled woman for Maliku’s blade. This is who you are, Maviah. Only the shamed daughter of a whore” (Dekker 424). Do you see the juxtaposition? Dekker uses the outward struggle and the inward struggle to show how desperate and out of control Maviah feels. He combines both into a compelling moment.

When you push the character externally, it raises the stakes. The reader will keep reading because they want to know how the character will get out. But the internal conflict also drives the story, for it shows what the character is really struggling with. In this moment, there is a decision to make within the character which will likely decide the outcome of the physical conflict. Isn’t that strangely beautiful? The main character must come to terms with what he believes in this final showdown, and he must do something. Will he have the courage to fight a little longer? Will she have the strength to let go of something that is holding her back? As the conflict pushes the protagonist on the outside, it should force him to make that decision inwardly that will change everything. Although this is not always the way it happens, a powerful climax weaves these together. If it’s merely a fight that may end in death, or loss of a job, or disgrace, or the ruin of the world with no deep effect on the main character, what will that teach the reader? And if it’s merely a struggle in the mind that has no stakes, no effect on others, no reckoning of any kind, then that’s not the real world. Our decisions have consequences and there will always be people we affect or people that want to affect us.

There will always be antagonistic forces until Jesus makes the world new. This is because there’s really two forces we can fight against: the kingdom of darkness or the kingdom of light. Man against Man, Man against God, Man against Society, Man against Himself boils down to this: good and evil. External conflict deals with flesh and blood, life and death, poverty and wealth, etc. Internal conflict deals with right and wrong. Nothing else. The external conflict pushes the main character to the point of asking how far is he or she willing to go for this? Will the protagonist choose righteousness if he loses his family, wealth, social standing, friendship, even life? Will the main character continue in a foolish but enticing path if it begins to hurt those around her? Another question is what is good and what is evil? These moral questions get to the heart of what the character is battling, and this conflict drives even the external choices that the character makes.

The external conflict pushes the character to see what he or she is truly made of. The internal conflict reveals the moral struggle of the heart. Both are needed, and combining them in the climax creates a powerful scene for the reader, where they can see the struggle both outward and inward coming to a head with the most dramatic impact. The character is stretched to the limit and he or she has to make a choice. What is the protagonist going to do? That is the question the writer has to answer.

Keep writing and reading, y’all!

~Evelyn Knight

Biographical information:

Dekker, Ted. A.D. 30, Center Street, 2014.