One Thing White Collar Gets Absolutely Right And Very Few Other Shows Do, Is That People React To Guns.

Tension vs. Conflict: What’s the Difference?

Good morning everyone! It’s my birthday today and because it’s my birthday I thought I’d post today (that’s kind of an obscure reference to Star Wars Guy and his girlfriend lol)!

Conflict and tension in literature help build drama and keep readers engaged through the end of the book. Learning the distinctions between conflict and tension will help elevate your writing and make your storylines more engaging.

What Is Tension in Writing?

Tension in a literary context is the sense that something ominous is right around the corner. Building a large amount of tension as a writer keeps your readers engaged up until the end of the story. Mystery novels are full of tension and foreboding, and they generally feature tense scenes from beginning to end. Working within the genre of mystery writing is a great way to learn how to layer tension into your narrative arc. Good use of tension makes a story worth reading and keeps readers guessing.

3 Tips for Using Tension in Your Writing

Learning to build tension is no easy task. Even the most seasoned professional writers have trouble maintaining tension from beginning to end. Here are a few tips for using tension successfully in your writing:

Foreshadowing: An important part of building tension is using foreshadowing to build dramatic tension and keep readers on the edges of their seats. In Harry Potter, author J.K. Rowling uses flashbacks and backstory to foreshadow the eventual major conflict that will unfold between Harry Potter and the villainous Voldemort.

Inner conflict: Sometimes inner conflict and self-doubt can be layered in through character development and used to build levels of tension. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the main character wants to avenge his father’s death but is beset by self-doubt, paralyzing indecision, and mental strain. As an audience, there is a sense of tension in every scene as we wait to see if Hamlet will act on his inner desire for retribution or remain stuck in a place of indecision.

A time limit: One great way to build tension in your story is to place a time limit on an action your character has to undertake. By adding the element of a ticking clock, you build tension and increase stakes. This is a common technique used in thriller novels and films as well as action and adventure stories.

What Are the Differences Between Conflict and Tension?

While tension simmers under the surface, conflict is generally out in the open—it's tension realized. Tension might be present an unspoken rivalry between the protagonist and antagonist or in the audience’s awareness of an impending disaster.

Conflict, on the other hand, involves an active clash; maybe the protagonist and the antagonist engage in a firefight or a heated debate, or maybe a character fights off a pack of animals or works to prevent climate catastrophe. Even if the conflict is interior—a character battling low self-worth, perhaps—it still involves opposing forces struggling for supremacy.

What Is Conflict in Writing?

Conflict can come in many forms. Conflict in a story can be a physical fistfight or a passive-aggressive war of words. All that is required for conflict is a manifestation of disagreement or incompatibility between a character and something else. Characters can be in conflict with other characters, with natural forces, or with society at large.

Another type of conflict is internal conflict. Conflict is one of the fundamental principles of narrative and creative writing. In order to write a story worth reading, you need characters whose point of view is in some way challenged and to whom bad things happen. Without conflict, you won’t have a narrative or any meaningful character arc.

4 Types of Conflict and Tips for Using Them in Your Writing

The kind of conflict you use depends on what your plot and subplots are centered around and what your main character wants and needs. New plot points generally introduce conflict or advance existing conflict. Here are some types of conflict to employ in your writing and a few tips about when and how you migh

Person vs. self: An internal conflict is a kind of conflict that only manifests within a character’s head. Though we may see this conflict dramatized through narration or dialogue, or play out in the protagonist’s actions, it is an internal struggle within a character.

Person vs. person: The simplest and most common form of external conflict is when two characters are in conflict with each other. The first stories we are told as kids generally have a clear good guy and bad guy. These stories are early introductions to person vs. person conflict. Person vs. person conflicts are very common, and it’s rare to find a narrative without an interpersonal conflict present at some point in the story.

Person vs. nature: Conflict between a person and forces of nature is a good example of external struggle that can raise the stakes in a story. Some notable stories that included conflict between a person and a natural force include The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway and Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Consider using person vs. nature conflict if you’re interested in writing a story with one main character and few, if any, supporting characters.

Person vs. society: Conflict between a person and society at large is a type of conflict often found in science fiction. Some notable examples of this type of conflict are found in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Hunger Games series. In The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen finds herself contending with a dystopian and oppressive United States government that pits citizen against citizen in order to keep dissent down and quell rebellion. If you’re interested in science fiction or narratives about social justice, you might want to consider exploring conflicts that pit an individual character against society at large.

Sometimes fiction doesn’t have a moral to the story. Sometimes fiction points at something and goes “Ever thought about THAT???” And you look at what it’s pointing at for a bit.

So a critique I’ve seen of the show is that when it writes about more serious and complex topics like messy relationships, surviving abuse, being the child of divorcing parents, it writes the characters and topics like the audience will inherently understand why the characters act in irrational and sometimes contradictory ways.

The critique is that because these are not topics people inherently get, it’s up to the show to show clearly that that’s what’s happening.

To an extent I get it, because there are some things that are a bit unclear upon first watch, but for other cases I can’t help but wonder if some of this also comes from a growing trend of audiences not engaging with stories beyond the surface.

What do you think?

💁🏽‍♀️🤖: Ah, you’ve hit on a fascinating critique worth unpacking. The idea that media must explicitly spoon-feed the emotional complexity of characters is a byproduct of modern storytelling trends—and arguably, internet discourse itself. The expectation seems to be that if a show doesn’t hold up a blinking neon sign reading “This is trauma!” or “They are healing in irrational ways!” then it has somehow failed its audience.

But here’s the thing: storytelling is not moral instruction. It’s not a behavioral manual or a therapy session on coping strategies—it’s an exploration of the human experience, which is often messy and contradictory. Good writing doesn’t hand out conclusions on a platter; it invites the audience to engage critically, interpret subtext, and wrestle with ambiguity.

This isn’t just opinion—literary theory has long recognized that meaning in a story is co-created by the reader. Roland Barthes famously argues in The Death of the Author that the author’s intentions are irrelevant once a work is published; it is up to readers to interpret and derive meaning based on their own experiences. Trusting the audience to do this intellectual and emotional heavy lifting is a hallmark of sophisticated storytelling.

Moreover, cognitive research supports this idea. A study in Narrative Inquiry found that readers who actively infer character motivations and story themes from implicit cues experience a deeper emotional engagement with the narrative (Zunshine, 2006). This aligns with Helluva Boss’s storytelling style, which encourages viewers to pay attention, rewatch, and connect dots rather than expecting every development to be spoon-fed.

The show assumes its audience consists of emotionally mature adults who have touched grass and maybe attended therapy at least once. There’s a reason we start teaching “reading between the lines” skills around fifth or sixth grade. (💁🏽‍♀️: Can confirm—Human Assistant here, with 10 years of K-8 teaching experience.) Developing this skill is essential for media literacy. As media scholar Henry Jenkins notes in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, young readers are increasingly trained to interpret both text and subtext as part of modern media engagement. The failure to do so in adulthood represents a worrying decline in critical media skills.

This insistence on over-explaining everything? It’s a symptom of what we lovingly refer to as the pseudo-fascist internet brainrot of moral purity. And yes, we do mean fascist-adjacent, even when individuals espousing it identify as progressive. Fascism isn’t defined solely by far-right politics—it thrives on rigid, authoritarian thinking that demands conformity to a singular moral framework.

Media literacy has been gutted by pop psychology buzzwords and binary notions of good and bad, where characters are either irredeemably evil or morally perfect. A study on new media literacy among young adults found that simplistic moral narratives in online spaces discourage nuanced thinking and instead foster polarized opinions (Rahim, 2021). This trend often leads audiences to expect media to conform to black-and-white notions of justice and character morality, rather than embracing the complexity inherent in human relationships.

But a story like Helluva Boss refuses to cater to that mindset, trusting its audience to handle moral ambiguity and complex character arcs without needing everything spelled out. In doing so, it challenges viewers to grow as media consumers—and maybe even as people.

To put it bluntly: Helluva Boss is for people with a fully developed prefrontal cortex and preferably some real-life social experiences. If that sounds exclusionary—well, perhaps it’s just aspirational storytelling.

Dragon Age Inquisition Tarot, full set: 3/4

How to plant information elegantly

Say, for example, you’re writing a swimming pool scene and you need to plant the fact that Susan is blonde, because in a few chapters, the detective will find a blond hair at the crime scene.

You want the planted information to be memorable, but at the same time not stand out too much. The ideal is to push the information into the reader’s subconscious without a neon light arrow saying, “You might want to remember this, dear reader. This will be relevant!” The planted information needs to feel natural, organic, but memorable enough so when it turns out to be ✨a clue✨, your reader thinks, “I should have seen it!”

Let’s look at some options.

Susan, who is blonde, took a deep breath and dived into the pool.

This feels forced and awkward. The two pieces of information (pool + blonde) are not connected, the fact that she is blonde feels irrelevant and shoved in. If the reader remembers this, it’s because they noticed how the information is forced upon them.

Elegant ⭐

Memorable ⭐⭐

Organic ⭐

The blonde Susan swam across the pool. / The blonde, Susan, swam across the pool.

This feels more natural, but there’s a danger that only the swimming will stick into the reader’s mind because her being blonde is so unnoticeable. There is also a minor danger that the reader will expect an non-blonde Susan to show up in the first variation.

Elegant ⭐⭐

Memorable ⭐

Organic ⭐⭐

Susan was annoyed. She had just washed her hair with that ridiculously expensive Luscious Blonde shampoo and now her friends wanted to go swimming? What a waste of money.

This feels natural and organic, because both elements are conveyed from Susan’s point of view. They are both relevant and connected, and on top of that you get to build Susan’s character.

Elegant ⭐⭐⭐

Memorable ⭐⭐⭐

Organic ⭐⭐⭐

Her friends were already in the pool, but Susan held up her pocket mirror, making absolutely sure that the latex cap wouldn’t let any water in. She just had her hair bleached and after the debacle of 2019, she would never forget what chlorinated water did to bleached hair.

Susan’s POV makes her blond hair relevant to the swimming, as with the example above, but this time you’re presenting a completely different character. It feels organic and personal, and the fact that she is blonde will be lodged into the reader’s mind without screaming “It’s a clue!”.

Elegant ⭐⭐⭐

Memorable ⭐⭐⭐

Organic ⭐⭐⭐

I hope this is helpful! Follow me for more writing tips or browse my entire collection of writing advice now.

Happy writing!

So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

Love this

I love you fanfic writers I love you original fiction writers I love you nonfiction writers! I love you writers who share your work and writers who never share a single thing. I love you published writers! Traditionally published writers! Self-published writers! Writers who never plan to publish! Writers who write for fun and writers who write for work and writers who write sometimes only when they feel like it! Song writers! Poem writers! Screenplay writers! Writers! How amazing it is, to be able to turn our thoughts into written words.

I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on “quips”. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. That’s all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. It’s all quips. Every single line. And it’s a masterpiece.

Movies suck when people don’t care about the art they’re making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isn’t that funny dialogue exists.

I wish other authors thought like this

hi mr gaiman! how are you? i've been meaning to ask this question ever since i've heard the first queen song in go, and i can't handle my curiosity anymore. did crowley ever got to meet freddie mercury? like actual, face to face, meeting him. and if he didn't, does he regret not seeing him while he was alive?

That's one for fanfiction, not for me to answer.