> It'd be nice if the author gave examples of significant plots using the structure, like a novel or a film.
Indeed; I found a lot of pages talking about this concept, but almost none mentioning any examples of its implementation. In fact, the only long-form story (not a four panel comic strip or poem) I saw brought up as an example of it was Kiki's Delivery Service, which has plenty of conflict.
It seems more like something that people theoretically like the idea of. It's also interesting the way it's presented as an Eastern vs. Western dichotomy, with Westerners supposedly viewing conflict as central to a story and Easterners not viewing it as essential. I don't see any indication that Eastern stories are less conflict driven than Western ones (most of the major ones I'm familiar with, such as the Four Great Classical Chinese Novels, have plenty of conflict).
1) A game mechanic is introduced
2) The player is subject to slowly increasing difficult that requires the mechanic
3) The player is forced to demonstrate mastery of mechanic in some new situation, often by combining with other mechanics
4) The player has mastered the mechanic and has the option of using it whenever they want in the future
For whatever reasons I vividly remember asking the question in 7th grade, "can't a story not have a conflict? Can't it just be about some nice people getting along without anything like that happening?" and my teacher simply said "No."
That's a semantic argument. Your teacher is arguing that in order for something to be a story, it must have conflict, otherwise it's just a list of events.
Possible counter-example for your teacher: Arthur C. Clarke's 'The Sentinel'?
I also recall Robert Graves' writing, in 'Goodbye to All That', of one of his fellow soldiers saying that after the war, he would read the whole of Trollope's Barchester chronicles, as nothing happens in them, though that is not strictly true.
Graydon Saunders' A Succession of Bad Days: top review on Goodreads:
"There's no plot to speak of--things happen, and then it ends. There's no conflict to speak of until the last chapter. Most of the book consists of detailed descriptions of civil engineering projects and the magical techniques used for them. The characters are ludicrously overpowered special snowflakes. The language is nigh-impenetrable, and the innocent comma is tortured beyond all reason.
But you know what? To hell all that. I loved it.
This is a story about where legendary sorcerers come from. Five young people (ages range from late teens to early thirties) with magical talent take part in a highly experimental training program. Talent is hazardous; absent training, none of them are expected to live to see fifty. Traditional training, which runs along the lines of "spend several years sweeping floors and learning control before moving on to lighting candles", has a roughly fifty percent survival rate. Their program, in contrast, starts with completely reconstructing a square mile or so of geography and scales up rapidly from there."
It is, in fact, an extremely good story.
I also suggest Nathan Lowell's Solar Clipper series, a far-future space story in which nothing much happens and it is fascinating. Excitement is largely provided by superior coffee making and people management skills.
I love the Graydon Saunders books so I'll be sure to checkout the Solar Clipper series! It looks like the author even has free to close to free versions on his website.
There's at least internal conflict in Napoleon Dynamite. Napoleon is struggling with his confidence, both to start a relationship with Deb, and to stand up to Uncle Rico's bullying.
I don't disagree in general that stories can be conflict-free. But, good stories usually have character development, and character development almost always entails overcoming some internal conflict.
I always liked Brian Moriarty's definition of story: "a particular causally related sequence of events".
Which certainly does allow for a conflict free story. The important thing is that a story has events which are causally related. Otherwise it really is just a list of unconnected statements.
> I always liked Brian Moriarty's definition of story: "a particular causally related sequence of events".
By this logic, it seems that a recipe is a story. (Maybe that's intentional!)
I'd almost view the definition of a story as more about the intention than about the content—rather like art, which can (arguably) be created simply by the act of presenting it as such (in the sense of "found art" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object )). So too, surely, can one have a "found story".
Your teacher was an idiot. The right answer to that question for a 7th grader (and, actually, for anyone else too) is: why don't you try writing one and see what happens?
Ha. Might have been the same teacher that showed us the 3 perspectives a story can be told from - 1st person, 3rd person, 3rd person omniscient. I asked "What about second person?" and she said "There's no such thing."
When I learned 2nd person is indeed real I was pretty mad about that. Of course I should have already known it was real, reading Choose Your Own Adventure books, but I just didn't make the connection.
You could read a conflict into almost any story if you want to, the difference being that it'd be more of a stretch in some cases. At a 7th grade level the goal of the class was probably to teach you to find a conflict-being able to say "there isn't one!" would be an easy out that would let you get away with not writing an essay. Similarly, early math classes won't have questions for which "no solution" is a valid answer, but later ones will.
In addition to the many nice examples others have mentioned, I would like to point to one book of which I am currently in the middle: Becky Chambers's "The long way to a small, angry planet". This book is delightfully conflict-free so far, and it's hard to think it's not intentional; indeed, one of the (non-human) characters even lampshades it during a gaming session by referencing the way that human games seem always to be built around conflict and competition.
It seems like both kinds of plots set up a problem and resolve it. In one, a problem happens to the characters in the story. In the other, the problem is for the reader to understand what is happening in the story.
But it's very common for stories to include both kinds of problems.
Yeah, I had the same response. To use the phrasing of the article, I find the third non sequitur act to be a conflict in terms of simply being a mismatch from the pattern established by the first two i.e. a combo-breaker.
Depends on the type of joke. For setup/punchline and wordplay-type jokes, I think “contrast” is more apt. The punchline is a resolution, sure, but not usually in the sense of a conflict—it’s dispelling confusion by connecting the parts that have been presented, or inviting the audience to connect them to have that “Oh, I get it!” moment. That seems basically like kishoutenketsu.
To me, humour based on conflict, even between expectation and reality, falls more into the category of irony, mocking, or slapstick, where someone (or something) is the “butt of the joke”.
Is there such a thing as a joke that doesn't have a "butt", though? It's obvious in mocking and slapstick but even in wordplay the joke is at the expense of the structure and rules of language and implicitly the people who try to police it.
The problem of the reader needing to understand is story is not in the story itself. Anytime anyone reads anything, their goal is to figure out what they are reading... so that problem doesn't add anything.
Kishōtenketsu specifically doesn't set up a problem in the classic western sense. There is no apparent obstacle that the protagonist needs to overcome. There are no "stakes" that we are worried about (what happens if she doesn't get what she wants?). There is no antagonist. There is no rising action where conflict+stakes increase over time. It's just a totally different structure.
There is a twist at the end, but a twist is not a conflict.
I agree that they are quite different. However, I was pointing out a similarity when looked at in a more abstract way.
Some stories are intentionally more difficult to understand until you've read far enough. In this sense, the author is setting up a problem and resolving it.
> The problem of the reader needing to understand is story is not in the story itself. Anytime anyone reads anything, their goal is to figure out what they are reading... so that problem doesn't add anything.
I feel you're been needlessly pedantic here. Sure, the reader always has to parse each sentence and understand it. But that's pretty different from the author deliberately introducing a non sequitur that cannot be understood until the later resolution.
> It's just a totally different structure.
What skybrian is saying is that, yes, at one level the structures are different, but at the next level of abstraction there are commonalities. In both cases a tension is created in the reader which is then later resolved.
In conflict-based stories, most of the tension comes from the reader sympathizing with the protagonist who is directly experiencing the tension. In kishōtenketsu, the reader experiences a tension the characters do not because it's not "in world".
Even in Western literature, this technique is used all the time. Foreshadowing is common. Many stories shift viewpoints between multiple characters so that the reader has access to insight the characters do not, and that's used to deliberately create tension and anticipation in the reader.
As another example, it's common in novels to have multiple independent storylines that eventually connect. Part of the tension is "what do these two people's stories have to do with each other?"
It's worth noting that this is the structure of haikus, which rarely make any sense in translation. Haikus hinge on a twist as well, usually a word of two meanings that is meant to create emotional movement. For example, something like "In the forest the dark pine/of my desire" would play on two meanings of the word "pine".
Spot on. You could locate the 'conflict' of a story at one of two levels:
Within the content (traditional conflict between characters, etc.)
Within the form (conflict between the text itself and the reader, e.g. something like a riddle, or as others have mentioned, a joke--the opponents are the text itself and the reader's preconceptions, e.g. a joke usually works when it refutes our expectations.)
The author's first example is an instance of formal conflict. Once we reach panel three we question where the panel is going because it introduces a radical element (as the author observes) that seems disconnected from the first two elements of the sequence. This is enough to establish a formal conflict for us as it subverts the form established prior--it creates a narrative question, 'why is this here, what is the point, where is this going?' The final panel then resolves this conflict by reintegrating the material from the first two panels with the third.
And so even though there's no 'conflict' in the western traditional sense of the characters of the story combating, conflict still drives the story. It's actually pretty difficult to argue that stories don't require any conflict, as conflict is often an imprecise and overloaded category (think of all its different varieties) and really when people advocate for conflict they are advocating more generally for flux and change--e.g. the idea is you couldn't tell a story if every panel were the same image--you'd perhaps be saying something--making a statement or a proposition, but it wouldn't be a story. While a poem or a painting can often take the form of a one-line proposition, a story as I conceive of it is something more like an argument--it operates on the premise that certain bits of information are out of scope as we read and that patterns are interrupted then resolved into different forms as we glean new information--all narrative arts are necessarily time bound arts and thus more often called experiences rather than objects (e.g. a film is an experience b/c it relies necessarily on a time factor, where as the totality of an object might be consumed at a singular moment T, ignoring history--)
I agree. Maybe tension/release are better terms to use then than "conflict". In both the structures presented in the blog you see tension followed by release. It's also pervasive in Western music (don't know enough about Eastern or African music to know how they work).
The problem with that point of view is that you can find a conflict everywhere if you try hard. For a definition, like "conflict", to be useful it must be clearly and distinct. Cinematographic conflict is a problem the characters are confronted with.
That's because 'conflict" - which is a requirement first described by Aristotle - is being poorly defined.
Western conflict is psychological and heroic. A jarring or unexpected element in the text is not enough. The standard pattern is that the protagonist encounters challenges, and either overcomes them through heroic effort, bravery, and self-discovery - or (less often) is destroyed by them.
The prototype is martial and egotistical, in that the plot revolves around the protagonist's goals and actions.
External influences are either enemies, helpers, or ambiguous distractions, as seen from the protagonist's point of view.
Kishōtenketsu seems to have a more meditative and less confrontational approach. The protagonist is one character among many. They encounter other characters of equal interest and value. These other characters are not compressed into the enemy/helper dichotomy. Similarly, situations are unexpected but may be neither harmful nor helpful.
This seems less abstracted and closer to real life, where other people and events are just there without having to be shoehorned into positive or negative roles within our personal dramas.
I suppose Western audiences have set expectations, and it's not obvious that plots that take this approach will satisfy them. But it would still be interesting to see where this plotting style could lead in a Western context.
I'm not a writer in the conventional sense, but can't Kishōtenketsu be reduced as to just world/character-building? I'm not fully seeing just how different it is. The comic panel was too simplistic I guess.
I'll try to restate the point in my own words and see if that helps you.
"just world/character-building" would be if the plot was: a girl gets a soda from a soda machine, then take it to a boy. Kishōtenketsu is: a girl gets a soda from a soda machine. Meanwhile, a boy sits on a bench. The audience is confused at this point and that creates conflict in their mind. In the resolution, we see the girl was getting the soda for the boy.
It's different because there is no apparent obstacle that blocks the protagonist (the girl) from achieving their goal. In traditional western plots, this conflict is the main focus, and is usually between the protagonist and an antagonist who has their own (usually opposite) goals.
This conflict underlies almost all the narrative structure. For example, the reader should be obsessing about the stakes as they read: what happens if the girl doesn't get what she wants? Who else loses? Does anyone die? This is what drives people to read on. Without conflict, this structure falls apart.
World and character building can occur in either of these cases. But in the classic conflict case, the world and characters are usually designed to heighten conflict (ie. the character has a flaw that leads to them to more direct conflict).
I viscerally hated kids shows (e.g.: Little Einsteins) that had conflict-driven plots, and avoided those for my kids (except in small overall % - where for some reason my kid really wanted to watch).
At a point it felt like a conspiracy.
You don't need an antagonist to make an interesting story.
I agree that interesting stories don't have to adhere to this structure (and by all means, stories should break the rules!). But, the western market generally demands it for salable material, especially novels.
Even in this conflict structure, the best antagonists are the ones that believe they are doing good. It's not a trite good vs. evil construct. They have their own desires and a philosophy that can be a logical way to solve a problem (but in conflict with how the hero wants to solve it).
Ghibli films do this best. For example, in Princess Mononoke, the antagonist (Lady Eboshi) is initially presented as the evil forest destroyer, chopping down trees to make villages and industry. But then, you find out she does this to provide shelter and work for social outcasts. It's a moral dilemma with no clear right answer.
I was watching a movie last night, where in the opening scene, a getaway driver escapes the cops. In the meanwhile, the driver, seemingly randomly, kept listening to the score of the local football game. At the end of the chase, the driver pulls into a parking ramp where the game has just ended - obfuscating his vehicle in a sea of fans leaving the game. (It's worth noting that there's still conflict, but this was the first example that came to mind for me.)
_Driver_. That scene struck me mostly because it was the rare example of a director trying to make chase conventions work in a contemporary setting, rather than pretend cellphones, radios, cameras, and police helicopters don't exist.
I would have liked the author to include references to the particular Derrida texts they were referring to. I'm not familiar with him in particular and I'd like to get more context. Especially since Derrida entered philosophy right after World War 2-- pretty compelling evidence (by no means eurocentric, either) that the world is ultimately ruled by violence.
Western works (especially cinema) use this in individual scenes all the time, right? The first example wouldn't be at all out of place in the first act of a film to show us that two people know one another, or (even more effectively) later after they've fought to show us that they're friendly again.
Its use as the central structure for an entire 1.5-2hr movie, or a whole novel, say, is what's rare.
[EDIT] All the examples on Wikipedia are very short, too. Is such a structure common as the central plot of a longer work anywhere? Its super-common in the West in the above use—maintaining interest in scenes that lack conflict—but again, not as the main plot structure of anything. Also, the "argument" version on WP made me realize that the thing this all reminds me of that I couldn't quite place is the syllogism
> Western works (especially cinema) use this in individual scenes all the time, right?
Sometimes, probably, though conventional theories of screenwriting hold that each scene must have and be defined by a conflict whose resolution advances the plot related to the wider conflict of the piece, and that a scene which does not have a conflict or whose conflict doesn't fulfill a role in advancing the wider plot should be excised.
> Also, the "argument" version on WP made me realize that the thing this all reminds me of that I couldn't quite place is the syllogism
It also has some similarity to the Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis style of rhetoric/argument, possibly closer than to the purely-deductive syllogism. But, yes, I can see that similarity, too.
Interestingly, the Western 3-Act structure has been described as a special case of T/A/S structure; so, in a way, this structure may be more relatable to Western structure than the superficial differences suggest.
I'm so sick of movies that end with a giant, epic, battle scene. These are movies with minimal conflict for the first 90 minutes or so, and then all of a sudden turn into a boring epic battle to the death. Ugh.
This is basically the structure of most This American Life stories. A recounting of some events, interrupted by incongruous new information, and then a resolution where the mystery is resolved.
There's a YouTube video where Ira Glass describes storytelling as asking a series of questions that demand answers.
When I think of the focus on multicultural writing I wish it was more stuff like this rather than typical stories told with a slightly different cultural background.
I love the kinds of stories where nothing happens, I don't even know what they're technically called but I mentally refer to them as people walking around and doing stuff movies. I dont know why they're so appealing to me - maybe for the same reason that people find slow tv good. But I would be totally happy to go and watch Slacker for the sixth time right now.
Have you seen Lynch's The Straight Story? It's literally just an old man who goes to see his brother, who suffered a stroke. There are a few problems along the way, but it's small stuff, there's no big race against time or anything like that, it's literally a straight story of his trip and the people he meets and talks to along the way until he reaches his brother's home. It's also very good, in my opinion.
Antonioni's movies are like that. Contemplative pace, not much dialogue or plotline, beautiful pictures and actors/actresses, ennui, some philosophical thematic. Yet it's all highly engrossing.
It was a major eye opening experience the first time I saw My Neighbor Totoro. There was a charming and wonderful film that was completely devoid of conflict! Yet, it worked and worked well. It went against everything I had been taught in every English class in my life.
In my high school literature class we were taught that conflict doesn't have to be between individuals. Indeed, Totoro does have conflict by this definition: between the girls and their insecurity about their mother's illness. The conflict is resolved thanks to Totoro and the friendship they developed with him.
I seem to remember The Magic School Bus [1] (kids' science show) having stories – that is, a series of related events – but only sporadic (and generally incidental) conflict. "Magical bus takes school kids on memorable – if ill-advised – journey, and Arnold makes jokes" sums up pretty much every episode.
Seinfeld I would venture to say also deviates from the western norm, in that the conflicts (of which each episode has several) are rarely, if ever, overcome. Half the time the conflict reaches a climax at the end of the episode. In fact the entire series ended with unresolved conflict. But the stories are nonetheless memorable.
I also thought about The Magic School Bus, but while incidental, I seem to remember there was often some element of danger that they had to surpass, no? Like being inside someone and the time until re-growth being limited, causing a race against time to exit the body.
I love My Neighbor Totoro, and it's a great example of kishōtenketsu structure, but it's not devoid of conflict - it just doesn't have an antagonist. Satsuki and Mei have an argument in the third act where Satsuki stomps off and Mei disappears, setting up the ending (ketsu).
> Is it possible that deconstruction could never have been conceived in a world governed by kishōtenketsu, rather than by the three-act plot? Is the three-act structure one of the elements behind the very worldview that calls for its deconstruction? Can the Western narrative of the will to power remain coherent in the face of a rival narrative from the East? This writer would prefer to ask than to answer these questions.
Does the author actually say what the significance of a plot without conflict is? Is this an experiment with meta-thesis where conflict is avoided by not actually concluding the argument?
It was an interesting article, but I think we must be very careful if we are to make the strong claim that the entirety of western literature follows a single plot structure. Maybe all Disney movies, but not the great abundance that constitutes western literature.
Ciméma du look [1] does something other than conflict in a sense. The movies still have conflict (I'm really thinking of Diva [2] as my exemplar) but it is entirely secondary to the style and texture of the movie
Tangentially, journalists almost, as a rule, put a narrative on events, even those that really don't have a narrative (which is most things under Current Events) E.g, when a story focuses on someone's personal story through the time of events, that becomes the narrative lens.
I'm not fond of this approach, because it sets up conflicts and limits the view of events to the specific, when really, as someone far away, the specific isn't useful in understanding how it is actually news.
Popular American storytelling is centered on something even more precise than conflict. It's centered on the question of which side is going to win. Not only fiction, but even reality TV, always has to trick us to make the conflict seem exactly balanced until the very end.
Sometimes I want to see a conflict that's an obvious blowout from setup to resolution. That can still be vastly entertaining with a little creativity.
Narratives are driven by 1) a question that 2) the reader cares about.
- How is Ender going to save earth in space army academy? (Ender's Game)
- Who killed Mr Ratchett? [EDIT: or rather How will Poirot figure out who killed Mr Ratchett?] (Murder on the Orient Express)
- How was Rome formed in the early days? (History of Rome, Livy)
- What's going to happen to Seth Brundle? (The Fly)
- How did Warren Buffett become who he is today? (Snowball)
- Are Mr Knightly and Emma going to hook up? (Emma)
- Who is Ted Mosby going to marry? (How I met your mother)
Conflict can be the basis of the question, 'Who will win the fight'. Kishōtenketsu can be the basis of the question, 'Who are these people and how are they related?'. I don't agree that 'in the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict' because many plots do not have the outcome of a conflict as the main question.
I'm pretty sure everyone that watched "How I Met Your Mother" were doing so for the jokes, not the plot. It wasn't even really a narrative at all, more like a smattering of teasers.
But you're right, not all plots are about conflict. Plots about conflict, and especially inner conflict, tend to be fascinating if done right though.
Yes I agree that watchers/readers are not always focused on the main question. In any moment you feel drawn in to a story you might be drawn along by a secondary or tertiary question. Storytellers weave them together into a tapestry of compelling viewing/reading. Think of a single joke you might hear in a show, 'Why did the chicken cross the road?', we immediately think, 'How is he going to try to make this old joke funny now?'. Once a story loses its questions for you, you lose interest in the story.
It's true that the journey is often more important than the destination. You don't really watch HIMYM to find out how Ted met his wife (at least up until the last season). On the other hand, each episode needs to have some kind of plot to work as a narrative structure.
This is why I stopped watching Orange is the New Black.
Season 3 had no conflict, or it wasn't relevant conflict any longer. Just life in prison.
I did consider that dull, but I don't preclude that a plot can't be "good" without conflict.
I think that is entirely fine and possible. But in a story where a previous chapter or segment did follow that formula, and then the next doesn't, it looks like a dull accident.
I've always think that "My Big Fat Greek Weeding" was close to that concept. Instead of a big conflict that is resolved at the end, we have small conflicts that are resolved almost immediately after being presented.
Toula feels ugly, ignorant and trapped in an uninterested job. She begins to study, changes her clothes and make up, changes job. She still remembers that she was rejected by the other girls when she was a child, but now in college, she tries again and is accepted. She likes a man, he likes her back. Her father doesn't accept a "xenos", but he tolerates him. He's not catholic orthodox, he gets baptized. And the last part of the movie lacks any conflict, and nevertheless, we're thrilled to see the happy ending materialize because we got to like the main characters.
I think that the most important and engaging components of conflict are "mystery" and "anticipation". Playing those out with a deliberate antagonist just happens to be an easy go-to way of encapsulating that, playing with the mystery of what he's got up his sleeve and anticipating when they finally clash.
But these components of conflict do not require an antagonist "character" per se. The conflict can be survival, overcoming disease, making that next promotion, getting the girl/guy, not knowing what happened to bring the world to the condition it's in, etc.
Or they can be applied in simple charm or humor, but those still need a setup and payoff of some sort. The "setup" here still sets up a conflict of some type, just not necessarily of the antagonistic flavor.
So I would disagree that there's no "conflict", but rather there is a lack of a specific antagonist character.
One of the things I realised I loved about _My Neighbour Totoro_ is exactly this; it cuts against the normal kids' movie fare by providing a fairly simple slice of life (albeit with the supernatural). It really stands out compared to the structure of most kids' movies.
This reminded me of the MacGuffin concept, popularized by Hitchcock, about the need for a goal to drive a the plot of the movie, but it was just a throwaway device used to get into the characters and their conflict (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin#Alfred_Hitchcock). The MacGuffin school assumes that the viewer understands the deeper meaning of the quest or centerpiece, and so can ignore it, but it turns out that many viewers, right or wrong, actually like clever plots and quests... along with great characters and snappy dialog, etc.
My dictionary (Pleco) says: "introduction, elucidation of the theme, transition to another viewpoint, and summing-up-- the four steps in composing an essay".
I would guess that kishōtenketsu is a loanword from this, qĭchéngzhuănhé.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 73.7 ms ] threadIt'd be nice if the author gave examples of significant plots using the structure, like a novel or a film.
Indeed; I found a lot of pages talking about this concept, but almost none mentioning any examples of its implementation. In fact, the only long-form story (not a four panel comic strip or poem) I saw brought up as an example of it was Kiki's Delivery Service, which has plenty of conflict.
It seems more like something that people theoretically like the idea of. It's also interesting the way it's presented as an Eastern vs. Western dichotomy, with Westerners supposedly viewing conflict as central to a story and Easterners not viewing it as essential. I don't see any indication that Eastern stories are less conflict driven than Western ones (most of the major ones I'm familiar with, such as the Four Great Classical Chinese Novels, have plenty of conflict).
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-17-how-nintendos-b...
1) A game mechanic is introduced 2) The player is subject to slowly increasing difficult that requires the mechanic 3) The player is forced to demonstrate mastery of mechanic in some new situation, often by combining with other mechanics 4) The player has mastered the mechanic and has the option of using it whenever they want in the future
I also recall Robert Graves' writing, in 'Goodbye to All That', of one of his fellow soldiers saying that after the war, he would read the whole of Trollope's Barchester chronicles, as nothing happens in them, though that is not strictly true.
"There's no plot to speak of--things happen, and then it ends. There's no conflict to speak of until the last chapter. Most of the book consists of detailed descriptions of civil engineering projects and the magical techniques used for them. The characters are ludicrously overpowered special snowflakes. The language is nigh-impenetrable, and the innocent comma is tortured beyond all reason.
But you know what? To hell all that. I loved it.
This is a story about where legendary sorcerers come from. Five young people (ages range from late teens to early thirties) with magical talent take part in a highly experimental training program. Talent is hazardous; absent training, none of them are expected to live to see fifty. Traditional training, which runs along the lines of "spend several years sweeping floors and learning control before moving on to lighting candles", has a roughly fifty percent survival rate. Their program, in contrast, starts with completely reconstructing a square mile or so of geography and scales up rapidly from there."
It is, in fact, an extremely good story.
I also suggest Nathan Lowell's Solar Clipper series, a far-future space story in which nothing much happens and it is fascinating. Excitement is largely provided by superior coffee making and people management skills.
That's true about the first book, perhaps the second (is clothes shopping conflict?), but the third is completely different.
I don't disagree in general that stories can be conflict-free. But, good stories usually have character development, and character development almost always entails overcoming some internal conflict.
Which certainly does allow for a conflict free story. The important thing is that a story has events which are causally related. Otherwise it really is just a list of unconnected statements.
By this logic, it seems that a recipe is a story. (Maybe that's intentional!)
I'd almost view the definition of a story as more about the intention than about the content—rather like art, which can (arguably) be created simply by the act of presenting it as such (in the sense of "found art" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object )). So too, surely, can one have a "found story".
When I learned 2nd person is indeed real I was pretty mad about that. Of course I should have already known it was real, reading Choose Your Own Adventure books, but I just didn't make the connection.
Had to google. Was delighted that I got to go to TV Tropes. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging
But it's very common for stories to include both kinds of problems.
Many good jokes are conflict-less stories, that create a contradiction for the reader to resolve with a double take.
To me, humour based on conflict, even between expectation and reality, falls more into the category of irony, mocking, or slapstick, where someone (or something) is the “butt of the joke”.
If they dropped forwards, they would land in the boat.
Kishōtenketsu specifically doesn't set up a problem in the classic western sense. There is no apparent obstacle that the protagonist needs to overcome. There are no "stakes" that we are worried about (what happens if she doesn't get what she wants?). There is no antagonist. There is no rising action where conflict+stakes increase over time. It's just a totally different structure.
There is a twist at the end, but a twist is not a conflict.
Some stories are intentionally more difficult to understand until you've read far enough. In this sense, the author is setting up a problem and resolving it.
I feel you're been needlessly pedantic here. Sure, the reader always has to parse each sentence and understand it. But that's pretty different from the author deliberately introducing a non sequitur that cannot be understood until the later resolution.
> It's just a totally different structure.
What skybrian is saying is that, yes, at one level the structures are different, but at the next level of abstraction there are commonalities. In both cases a tension is created in the reader which is then later resolved.
In conflict-based stories, most of the tension comes from the reader sympathizing with the protagonist who is directly experiencing the tension. In kishōtenketsu, the reader experiences a tension the characters do not because it's not "in world".
Even in Western literature, this technique is used all the time. Foreshadowing is common. Many stories shift viewpoints between multiple characters so that the reader has access to insight the characters do not, and that's used to deliberately create tension and anticipation in the reader.
More recently, Arrival, which I like even better has a similar effect.
The author's first example is an instance of formal conflict. Once we reach panel three we question where the panel is going because it introduces a radical element (as the author observes) that seems disconnected from the first two elements of the sequence. This is enough to establish a formal conflict for us as it subverts the form established prior--it creates a narrative question, 'why is this here, what is the point, where is this going?' The final panel then resolves this conflict by reintegrating the material from the first two panels with the third.
And so even though there's no 'conflict' in the western traditional sense of the characters of the story combating, conflict still drives the story. It's actually pretty difficult to argue that stories don't require any conflict, as conflict is often an imprecise and overloaded category (think of all its different varieties) and really when people advocate for conflict they are advocating more generally for flux and change--e.g. the idea is you couldn't tell a story if every panel were the same image--you'd perhaps be saying something--making a statement or a proposition, but it wouldn't be a story. While a poem or a painting can often take the form of a one-line proposition, a story as I conceive of it is something more like an argument--it operates on the premise that certain bits of information are out of scope as we read and that patterns are interrupted then resolved into different forms as we glean new information--all narrative arts are necessarily time bound arts and thus more often called experiences rather than objects (e.g. a film is an experience b/c it relies necessarily on a time factor, where as the totality of an object might be consumed at a singular moment T, ignoring history--)
Western conflict is psychological and heroic. A jarring or unexpected element in the text is not enough. The standard pattern is that the protagonist encounters challenges, and either overcomes them through heroic effort, bravery, and self-discovery - or (less often) is destroyed by them.
The prototype is martial and egotistical, in that the plot revolves around the protagonist's goals and actions.
External influences are either enemies, helpers, or ambiguous distractions, as seen from the protagonist's point of view.
Kishōtenketsu seems to have a more meditative and less confrontational approach. The protagonist is one character among many. They encounter other characters of equal interest and value. These other characters are not compressed into the enemy/helper dichotomy. Similarly, situations are unexpected but may be neither harmful nor helpful.
This seems less abstracted and closer to real life, where other people and events are just there without having to be shoehorned into positive or negative roles within our personal dramas.
I suppose Western audiences have set expectations, and it's not obvious that plots that take this approach will satisfy them. But it would still be interesting to see where this plotting style could lead in a Western context.
"just world/character-building" would be if the plot was: a girl gets a soda from a soda machine, then take it to a boy. Kishōtenketsu is: a girl gets a soda from a soda machine. Meanwhile, a boy sits on a bench. The audience is confused at this point and that creates conflict in their mind. In the resolution, we see the girl was getting the soda for the boy.
This conflict underlies almost all the narrative structure. For example, the reader should be obsessing about the stakes as they read: what happens if the girl doesn't get what she wants? Who else loses? Does anyone die? This is what drives people to read on. Without conflict, this structure falls apart.
World and character building can occur in either of these cases. But in the classic conflict case, the world and characters are usually designed to heighten conflict (ie. the character has a flaw that leads to them to more direct conflict).
At a point it felt like a conspiracy.
You don't need an antagonist to make an interesting story.
Even in this conflict structure, the best antagonists are the ones that believe they are doing good. It's not a trite good vs. evil construct. They have their own desires and a philosophy that can be a logical way to solve a problem (but in conflict with how the hero wants to solve it).
Ghibli films do this best. For example, in Princess Mononoke, the antagonist (Lady Eboshi) is initially presented as the evil forest destroyer, chopping down trees to make villages and industry. But then, you find out she does this to provide shelter and work for social outcasts. It's a moral dilemma with no clear right answer.
Its use as the central structure for an entire 1.5-2hr movie, or a whole novel, say, is what's rare.
[EDIT] All the examples on Wikipedia are very short, too. Is such a structure common as the central plot of a longer work anywhere? Its super-common in the West in the above use—maintaining interest in scenes that lack conflict—but again, not as the main plot structure of anything. Also, the "argument" version on WP made me realize that the thing this all reminds me of that I couldn't quite place is the syllogism
Sometimes, probably, though conventional theories of screenwriting hold that each scene must have and be defined by a conflict whose resolution advances the plot related to the wider conflict of the piece, and that a scene which does not have a conflict or whose conflict doesn't fulfill a role in advancing the wider plot should be excised.
> Also, the "argument" version on WP made me realize that the thing this all reminds me of that I couldn't quite place is the syllogism
It also has some similarity to the Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis style of rhetoric/argument, possibly closer than to the purely-deductive syllogism. But, yes, I can see that similarity, too.
Interestingly, the Western 3-Act structure has been described as a special case of T/A/S structure; so, in a way, this structure may be more relatable to Western structure than the superficial differences suggest.
There's a YouTube video where Ira Glass describes storytelling as asking a series of questions that demand answers.
EDIT: And now I see it's written and directed by the same guy as Slacker :)
I seem to remember The Magic School Bus [1] (kids' science show) having stories – that is, a series of related events – but only sporadic (and generally incidental) conflict. "Magical bus takes school kids on memorable – if ill-advised – journey, and Arnold makes jokes" sums up pretty much every episode.
Seinfeld I would venture to say also deviates from the western norm, in that the conflicts (of which each episode has several) are rarely, if ever, overcome. Half the time the conflict reaches a climax at the end of the episode. In fact the entire series ended with unresolved conflict. But the stories are nonetheless memorable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_School_Bus_%28TV_ser...
Does the author actually say what the significance of a plot without conflict is? Is this an experiment with meta-thesis where conflict is avoided by not actually concluding the argument?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinéma_du_look [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diva_(1981_film)
I'm not fond of this approach, because it sets up conflicts and limits the view of events to the specific, when really, as someone far away, the specific isn't useful in understanding how it is actually news.
Sometimes I want to see a conflict that's an obvious blowout from setup to resolution. That can still be vastly entertaining with a little creativity.
- How is Ender going to save earth in space army academy? (Ender's Game)
- Who killed Mr Ratchett? [EDIT: or rather How will Poirot figure out who killed Mr Ratchett?] (Murder on the Orient Express)
- How was Rome formed in the early days? (History of Rome, Livy)
- What's going to happen to Seth Brundle? (The Fly)
- How did Warren Buffett become who he is today? (Snowball)
- Are Mr Knightly and Emma going to hook up? (Emma)
- Who is Ted Mosby going to marry? (How I met your mother)
Conflict can be the basis of the question, 'Who will win the fight'. Kishōtenketsu can be the basis of the question, 'Who are these people and how are they related?'. I don't agree that 'in the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict' because many plots do not have the outcome of a conflict as the main question.
But you're right, not all plots are about conflict. Plots about conflict, and especially inner conflict, tend to be fascinating if done right though.
It may be a plot, but is it a good plot? Does it makes you want to know more about the story?
Season 3 had no conflict, or it wasn't relevant conflict any longer. Just life in prison.
I did consider that dull, but I don't preclude that a plot can't be "good" without conflict.
I think that is entirely fine and possible. But in a story where a previous chapter or segment did follow that formula, and then the next doesn't, it looks like a dull accident.
Toula feels ugly, ignorant and trapped in an uninterested job. She begins to study, changes her clothes and make up, changes job. She still remembers that she was rejected by the other girls when she was a child, but now in college, she tries again and is accepted. She likes a man, he likes her back. Her father doesn't accept a "xenos", but he tolerates him. He's not catholic orthodox, he gets baptized. And the last part of the movie lacks any conflict, and nevertheless, we're thrilled to see the happy ending materialize because we got to like the main characters.
But these components of conflict do not require an antagonist "character" per se. The conflict can be survival, overcoming disease, making that next promotion, getting the girl/guy, not knowing what happened to bring the world to the condition it's in, etc.
Or they can be applied in simple charm or humor, but those still need a setup and payoff of some sort. The "setup" here still sets up a conflict of some type, just not necessarily of the antagonistic flavor.
So I would disagree that there's no "conflict", but rather there is a lack of a specific antagonist character.
I would guess that kishōtenketsu is a loanword from this, qĭchéngzhuănhé.