It is important for writers to understand conflict and how
it can be resolved. This morning’s Smartbrief
for Entrepreneurs
included a link to an article
on Dan McCarthy’s Great Leadership blog on recognizing the different types
of conflict and how best to resolve them.
Pay particular attention to the conflict of emotion. It reminds me of a lesson I learned from my marriage. (Note to all you men out there who have not learned this lesson—THIS IS A BIG ONE). My wife is in a management position and deals with customer service issues all the time. In the evening she will come home and unload on me. I relish these moments. I work by myself and often I will go for several days without leaving my office and meeting a client face-to-face. I get lonely.
When my wife unloads on me, I have the standard male urge to fix it. My wife, on the other hand, does not want me to fix anything. She wants me to listen. She wants to talk the problem out with a neutral party. By doing this she will quite often come up with her own solution—as long as I keep my mouth shut.
This is by no means a definitive list of the different types of conflicts, but it is a start. Good literature is all about conflict, and writers need to know how to solve conflicts in a realistic fashion.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Image courtesy the Medieval Festival in Dortmund 2004
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