The Power of Conflict: 3 Types of Obstacles That Build Heroes

Are you unsure how to build obstacles that challenge your characters on multiple levels and drive the story forward? In this episode, Zena Dell Lowe breaks down the three key types of obstacles every character can face. Learn how to craft each obstacle to challenge your characters in unique ways, forcing them to grow, make difficult choices, and push the story to its emotional peak.

Watch now to discover these obstacles to create compelling, active characters and elevate your storytelling!


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Transcript

[00:00:00] Zena Dell Lowe: So what I want to talk about today are the three different types of obstacles that a character might face in a story and then how they might address those things or how we might actually navigate those things and use them to advance the story

[00:00:15] and to make the story richer and better and bring in all those elements that we've been talking about from the beginning.

[00:00:21] Hello and welcome to the Storytellers Mission with Zena Del Lowe, a podcast for artists and storytellers about changing the world for the better through story. 

[00:00:33] One of the things I've been saying from the get go is that a story is essentially about a character who has a goal and then they pursue that goal relentlessly over the course of the story.

[00:00:45] But naturally that brings in a couple of things because the thing is if they got it right away, the story would be over. Which means you have to have something called So what I want to talk about today are the three different types of obstacles that a character might face in a story and then how they might address those things or how we might actually navigate those things and use them to advance the story So let's start with talking about how the nature of the obstacle is essential to the work overall, because whatever that obstacle is, is going to inform the plot, right? It's going to inform what the character has to do to achieve his or her objective. So it's really, really important. And I see three different categories of obstacles.

[00:01:35] One would be a physical obstacle. Which means it's an actual physical obstacle that exists in reality with matter in that world, and I'll expand on that in a little bit. Then there's the obstacle of another person's will, 

[00:01:50] negotiations and how what you're trying to do is basically overcome somebody else's will. And that's very important. But that means that the obstacle is the other people or the other person in the story itself. And then the final category, which I'm sure you're familiar with, is an internal obstacle.

[00:02:09] That means an obstacle within the character, him or herself, something that they have to overcome internally to be able to achieve whatever it is he or she has to achieve. And I want to talk about each of these in turn. Now physical obstacles can manifest in a couple of different ways. One of them would be nature itself, right?

[00:02:29] If this is a story that's about survival, if it's an adventure story, then there's probably going to be a lot of external objects that exist that that character has to overcome. Maybe extreme cold, or a lack of water, or maybe it's an avalanche that they have to survive, or Something to do with the natural order of the world.

[00:02:52] A lot of adventure type stories have to do with that kind of a physical obstacle. If you think about the movie, the impossible, which by the way, I highly recommend it's about the terrible tsunami that occurred and this family who is literally swept up in this Tsunami and separated and they all have to try to find their way to each other and survive just the mass devastation that happened.

[00:03:19] It is a remarkable true story of that event. But very much the obstacles in that are physical things that are in the real world and their nature obstacles in a lot of ways themselves. But they're not always nature obstacles. Sometimes they're An obstacle might be, say, a lack of medicine or a lack of some sort of physical obstacle that has to then be solved in the story world.

[00:03:46] If you don't have something like Novocaine, but you have a tooth that needs to be pulled, that too is a physical obstacle that has to be overcome. The pain of that is a physical obstacle that has to be overcome or the lack of numbing the pain or whatever the case may be that can also be a physical obstacle that has to be overcome in that moment.

[00:04:10] So a physical obstacle is just something that actually exists in the real world that is preventing that character that is somehow blocking them from being able to move forward until they work through that obstacle until they get around it. Until that obstacle has been overcome and those are wonderful things to have in your story.

[00:04:30] And so you should be thinking about those The next one, of course, as we've talked about, are the obstacles of other people's wills. But now I want to talk about it in another, broader sense. Because we can look at this in a different way beyond a negotiation in a scene. Let's say it is a survival story.

[00:04:49] Well, one thing that we know is that in addition to, in a survival type situation, trying to scrounge for food, There are inevitably going to be the bands of looters or the bands of people that are going to steal and rob from you. So now that becomes the overcoming of other characters and their wills and what they want as opposed to you.

[00:05:10] You know, they're looking out for their interests and you're looking out for yours, but then it also becomes a way to reveal true character because how you handle those other characters becomes more important. So, for example, maybe it is a survival story and there's a band of people that come upon you and they want to steal your food.

[00:05:29] Well, if you kill them all and don't think twice about it and it's not in self defense, Now that reveals that you are actually worse than the people that are just hungry trying to get food. Yeah, so however you handle those situations is key. On the other hand, maybe you can't just leave them as they are.

[00:05:51] Maybe you have to disarm them. Maybe you have to somehow take their weapons away. But is that going to make it so that they can't survive? I mean, you have to think through those things. What is the right thing to do in that sort of situation? It's an opportunity to reveal deeper levels of character. So again, this falls into the category of an obstacle of another person's will, and that might be something that has to be overcome in story.

[00:06:18] Well, of course, the third kind is an internal obstacle, and this is an area that is interesting because, once again, I just keep finding this to be the case. We all know that we have to have characters that are flawed, right? We have to have characters that are flawed. Unfortunately, Time and time again, we're creating characters that are flawed, I think in the wrong kind of way.

[00:06:44] They don't have the right kind of flaws. So what happens then, is we have characters that are intrinsically selfish. I really, really, Really encourage you to avoid that. Avoid making selfishness the characteristic that they have to overcome. It is very difficult to do. And very few people do it successfully.

[00:07:06] And it usually takes a tremendously long time for that character to actually change over the course of the telling. So, you have to do something else that maybe it makes them appear selfish or whatever. But there are things that things that you can do that makes the character more noble, more heroic, that I think are valuable.

[00:07:28] Instead, I think it has to be about the character's weaknesses. It has to be about their weaknesses in terms of their humanity, not their moral deficiencies, but their human foibles. If you try to make it about their human foibles, I think you'll go much further. I think it will make your story much easier to write, and it will make your characters much more believable and much more likable.

[00:07:52] We will connect to them better as an audience. Now what do I mean when I talk about making it about their human foibles as opposed to their moral deficiencies? Well, I'm going to couch it in a different category here. Let's talk about brokenness versus sinfulness. So broken people in real life are those that maybe they're engaged in these harmful patterns of reenactment.

[00:08:24] Maybe they actually do these things, but their motive is different than somebody that is engaging in them in active rebellion or someone who engages in them simply because they like it. Right? So the broken person is deceived. The sinful person Engaged, and it is often tricky to know the difference. But here's the thing, sometimes people engage in things that they know are evil.

[00:08:56] Not everybody engages in sinful behavior because they're broken. A lot of people do, and that's I think, is one of the gifts of discernment that God gives us is the ability to be able to ascertain whether there is a spirit of evilness going on there or whether it is a spirit of brokenness. Because there is a difference.

[00:09:19] I think our characters ought to be broken and not evil. If they're going to be heroes. I think that speaks for itself, right? Heroic characters ought not be evil. Unfortunately, I think we've gotten really bad at being able to gauge this because we almost don't want to say anything is evil anymore. We want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt.

[00:09:41] We want to love people. I hear this all the time. Oh, we need to love. We love. In fact, I was told just the other day, my questioning of the whole trans phenomenon and what is happening in our society is a product of me being afraid. Of what I don't understand and that God is beyond gender God is love and therefore if I was on God's side I would just love everybody and accept them as they are And these are arguments that we're hearing very much in real life.

[00:10:19] The problem is Is that it assumes that everybody? has the same brokenness and that none of these things are being done with an act of the will that is contrary to God's will. The motivation matters. Motive matters. Why a person does something actually matters. And when a person is trying to finagle something and take advantage of something and exploit somebody else, and they know it's wrong, but they can get away with it.

[00:10:51] It ain't pretty. It ain't brokenness that's at work in them. I mean, there's probably brokenness too, but that's not supposed to entice our sympathies. That should entice our horror. That deserves our rebuke. That deserves discipline, correction, rejection. We should call those things out. Because some things are evil.

[00:11:20] And I think we've lost the ability to gauge what is evil in a lot of ways. And our society is living the fruits of that right now. We can't just give everybody the benefit of the doubt. So our characters, they ought to be engaged in behaviors that are more akin to their brokenness and not their moral depravity.

[00:11:44] A character that is truly selfish and self absorbed and only thinks of themselves is evil. It is evil. They're a despicable, horrible, hateful person if all they care about is themselves and getting their way into hell with everybody else. They can't care about anybody else if they're truly selfish.

[00:12:07] Whereas a character who's broken may believe that their presence is harmful to others because there's something so fundamentally flawed about them that they will cause others harm. damage. And so out of concern for their fellows, they may go off on their own. They may go off and be alone and push other people away because they don't want to harm that other person.

[00:12:34] But in that case, they have the other person's best interest at heart and they may be deceived, right? There, they may be very much deceived that they're going to cause harm, but nevertheless, the motive is for the good of the other person. And maybe even the. The outcome or what it looks like on the outside might even manifest quite the same.

[00:12:54] It may look the same to others, but the motive is different. And one is good and one is bad. So when we're talking about the internal. obstacle of the character. I think we need to be looking at what is their weakness? What is the thing inside of them that is preventing them from stepping into the hero that they were meant to be?

[00:13:20] And it might be a flawed sense of self. It might be cowardice. Cowardice is based on a false sense of self. It is based on lies about our own potential or the capacity of human beings to exact change or to make a difference in a lot of ways.

[00:13:41] It also elevates the power of others over and against our own. It's a fearful position. It's a fear based weakness. It also hinges on and depends on a false hierarchy. of importance. People who are cowards have elevated their own standards of safety over and against things that are good, truly good, noble, holy, right, just, the big things that are above that.

[00:14:11] And so they are afraid to stand up to others because they see them interfering on the wrong level. It's, they've placed it on the wrong level of importance. And so what they have to learn to do over the course of the telling is elevate the importance of things like truth. See, people right now that are being silent while all of these horrors are taking place in our society are cowardly because they have probably elevated the This sense of well, you know, I should just keep things to myself, you know, hold my opinion to myself It has nothing to do with me They have put it in the wrong order or hierarchy, but god calls us to speak out against injustices So we have to put it in a correct prioritization So we have to realign our priorities is what i'm saying So that's something that can be addressed over the course of a story in a way that is believable, I think Because it isn't based on It's based on a false sense of priority of importance of what's really truly important in God's economy and of course, there's lots of other examples of Weaknesses within one's character that have to be overcome a lot of times This is where trauma comes in.

[00:15:29] People that have been traumatized have some deficiencies. They have some deficiencies of character probably, that need to be overcome. But they also just have a primary fundamental brokenness based on the false lies they now believe about themselves because of the trauma that occurred. And so, over the course of the story, they have to overcome those lies.

[00:15:51] They have to replace those lies with truth, and then they can step into the person that they were always meant to become. And by the way, I know this because that applies to me. I know this is true because it applies to me. And it applies to a lot of people that I've been in recovery programs with. So, the key is we have to be able to navigate what are those internal obstacles that are based on our weaknesses, our human foibles, our broken natures.

[00:16:26] Versus, what are the obstacles that make us evil? Evil. What are those internal obstacles that make a person truly evil? And how do you redeem a person who has evil, right? And it's a tricky thing and I know there's all sorts of theological issues here. Someone will argue with me and say, well, that's what depravity means.

[00:16:48] We're fundamentally evil. But I'm still trying to separate it in these categories of what is Practical in terms of what we can address and I don't believe that we are Evil in the sense that we are as bad as we possibly can be that's the whole point of also being born with dignity where God has put on our hearts a Capacity for good where we know what is good where we are ashamed when we do bad things 

[00:17:15] So this is just, we're just opening the box here. We're just opening the box. We're starting to look at some of these things and we'll continue to expand on this notion in the weeks to come. For you, the takeaway is 

[00:17:29] before we get there, it's once again time to hear from our sponsor, me. So hello, storytellers. 

[00:17:38] Did you know that there are seven crucial plot points that every story must hit in order to satisfy the audience? And if you miss even one of those crucial plot points you risk losing your audience's attention forever. This is why I've created a free training video for you where I break down exactly What these seven deadly plot points are These are the essential plot moments that you need to hit in order to deliver a powerful compelling page turning story So be sure to check out my free training video on the seven deadly plot points.

[00:18:16] It's going to transform your writing. Just click on the link provided in the notes or head over to thestorytellersmission. com and you can start watching this free training video right away.

[00:18:25] For you, the takeaway is 

[00:18:29] you. In your story, you want to be looking at the different types of obstacles that your character might have to overcome.

[00:18:34] And by the way, they should be taking direct action to overcome them. They can't be passive participants as these things are happening. They can't have something happen, like even a natural disaster, and then they just sit there for the rest of the story and wait to be rescued. That is not an active character.

[00:18:52] That makes them a passive character. When they face these obstacles, they must act. Choose courses of actions that allow them to face those obstacles and overcome them. That's what the story is ultimately about. So we have to choose active things for them to do to overcome those obstacles. Okay, I hope that this is helpful and gives you some ideas for your current work in progress.

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