The Seven Basic Conflicts
The fundamental types of opposition that drive every story — what your character is actually fighting against.
Every story is built on conflict — not necessarily violence or argument, but opposition: a force pushing back against what the protagonist wants or needs. Without conflict, there is no story. There is only description.
The seven basic conflict types are a map of what that opposing force can be. They determine the fundamental nature of your story — its stakes, its texture, its thematic territory. A story about a person fighting another person feels different from a story about a person fighting themselves, even if the external events are identical, because the source of the opposition shapes everything about what the story can mean.
Most stories contain more than one conflict type — but almost always one is primary. Identifying it helps you understand what your story is actually about at its deepest level, and what it needs to resolve.
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01
Person vs. Person
The protagonist is opposed by another individual — a villain, a rival, an adversary, or simply someone whose wants directly conflict with theirs. The most immediately legible conflict type: we understand the shape of two people wanting incompatible things. The quality of this conflict depends entirely on the quality of the antagonist — a weak opponent makes for a weak story.
Hamlet vs. Claudius, Scout vs. Bob Ewell, Harry vs. Voldemort
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02
Person vs. Self
The protagonist is their own antagonist — torn between competing desires, paralyzed by doubt, trapped by a false belief they can't yet relinquish. This is the dominant conflict type in literary fiction, because it is the most psychologically rich. The external plot is often just the arena in which the internal conflict plays out.
Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment), Stevens (The Remains of the Day), Hamlet
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03
Person vs. Society
The protagonist is opposed by the norms, structures, or expectations of the world they inhabit — a class system, an oppressive regime, a community that demands conformity. This conflict is inherently about belonging and its costs: what a person must sacrifice to fit, and what they must sacrifice to refuse.
Offred (The Handmaid's Tale), Anna Karenina, Hester Prynne (The Scarlet Letter)
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04
Person vs. Nature
The protagonist struggles against the physical world — a storm, the wilderness, disease, survival itself. Nature is indifferent, which is what makes this conflict philosophically interesting: it forces the character to confront a force that has no malice, no negotiating position, and no mercy. The real question is always what the struggle reveals about the person.
Moby-Dick, The Old Man and the Sea, Into the Wild
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05
Person vs. Technology
The protagonist is threatened or constrained by the systems, machines, or technologies that were meant to serve humanity but have come to dominate or dehumanize it. This conflict is most at home in science fiction, but its territory is increasingly relevant: algorithms, surveillance, automated systems, the loss of privacy and agency to infrastructure.
1984, Brave New World, Modern Times (Chaplin)
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06
Person vs. Fate
The protagonist struggles against destiny, prophecy, or forces beyond human control — the sense that the ending is already written and the story is about whether resistance is possible, meaningful, or even desirable. This is the foundational conflict of Greek tragedy, where knowing the outcome in advance is part of the horror.
Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, the entire genre of Greek tragedy
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07
Person vs. Supernatural
The protagonist faces forces that exceed the natural world — ghosts, gods, demons, the uncanny. The supernatural antagonist is often a projection of psychological truth: the ghost in Hamlet is partly a real ghost and partly the manifestation of a moral obligation Hamlet cannot escape. The best supernatural conflict works on both levels simultaneously.
Hamlet, Beloved, The Turn of the Screw
The seven conflict types have been part of literary education for over a century — their origin is diffuse rather than attributable to a single source. The descriptions and examples here are my own. Most stories layer conflict types: Hamlet is simultaneously Person vs. Person (Claudius), Person vs. Self (Hamlet's paralysis), Person vs. Fate (the ghost's demand), and Person vs. Supernatural. Identifying the primary conflict helps clarify what the story is ultimately about — what question it's asking, and what kind of answer it can give.