YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts

Conflict Is the Essence of Drama

The first thing they teach you in "real" film school is that "Conflict is the essence of drama." It's true. Without conflict, movies and TV would fall out of the screen and drip lifelessly onto the floor, as this photo of my cat, Charlie (Figure 2-2), looks about to do. (The white blur is actually a second cat leaping by, but Charlie didn't catch it. She's too catatonic.)

Figure 2-2. Stories without conflict are boring. (Model: Charlie Squitten Jr.)

All movies and all TV shows incorporate story, with characters clashing with one another (see Figure 2-3), having various types of crises of conscience, and then resolving the conflict, tying it all up in a nice neat package near the end of the show. These types of crises of conscience might be called confrontation—in act one, the characters are introduced, the problem is defined, the story set up; in act two, it evolves, it gets worse, the conflict grows; and finally in act three, it gets resolved somehow. The same is true of most books, plays, and even songs, especially hip-hop and country music, the two most story-driven music genres in existence. The fans of the two genres may not get along, but they have more in common than any other genres (except country music probably has more guns and drugs and booze and sex).

Figure 2-3. Conflict is the essence of drama. (Models: Fuzzbucket "Fuzzy" McFluffernutter ...