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Fiction

Ask experts in literature to tell you what makes a story so compelling, and they will inevitably tell you that all fiction is founded on and driven by a single, all-important central conflict. This conflict can take one of two forms. The first, the external conflict, occurs when the main character struggles against some outside force, whether this is another character, nature, society, etc. In Ice Age, the external conflict is between Manny and Sid on the one hand, and nature on the other. They have to get the baby back to the humans before snow blocks Glacier Pass. The second type, the internal conflict, occurs within a character, who must make some important choice that will determine the outcome of the story. In the first Spiderman, Peter must choose whether to continue to be Spiderman and risk hurting those he loves, or go back to his life as Peter Parker and ignore his responsibility to the city.

I used to ask myself why anyone would read fiction. Since it didn't concern real events, its only use-- in my mind-- was for entertainment. I could see the value in that, I guess, but I was all about improvement, progress, improving my knowledge for use in the real world. Nonfiction was all-important, especially history.

I was naive. It took me actually teaching literature to junior high students to learn that fictional works offer the reader incredible insight into character, not the least your own character; often teaches lessons about life, learned through the main character's eyes; and reflects the culture and history of its author, to the extent that you learn as much about a novel's author as you do its characters.

Last, but not least, you have cool categorical names for the types of character in fiction. You have cardboard characters, who appear unnatural to the reader; dynamic or static characters, who-- respectively-- change or stay the same throughout a story; and flat characters, who exhibit only one or a few personality traits, and thus have no depth to them. There are more, but the point is that you can learn quite a bit about life through fiction, something I wish I had paid attention to when I was in junior high. If I had, I certainly would have begun to see that conflict-- internal or external-- is a very human thing.

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