How To Find A Stronger Conflict-Resolution For Your Video
A husband finds out he has brain cancer.
All of a sudden their family is thrown into chaos and stress with chemo treatments, medical bills that are suffocating them, and to top it all off their dryer stops working.
This is the hypothetical story we’re going to be using today.
And we’re digging deep!
We’re talking about the main 2 plot points of a story: conflict and resolution.
First of all, if you don’t already have a story structure or framework to apply to your videos, head my advice and find one now! A story structure is the foundation to any story, and to get an impacting story, you need an effective story structure. (Coaching courses available if you need my help! If you’re not yet ready to invest in this, google “story structure” and “three act structure” and you’ll find a lot of info to sort through.)
Okay, so let’s just dive in.
Conflict & resolution are the main elements of a story- you can’t have one without the other.
This can be as simple as: my eyes were itchy (conflict), so I put some eye drops in and it was relieved (resolution.)
Obviously in our stories, the conflict-resolution is going to be more complex.
A practical example
I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I was having a conversation with the Media Pastor at my church.
My church does this campaign called Dollar Club, where every month the church picks a family to bless. They usually choose a family going through a hardship and decide to bless them according to their needs (with a new dryer, remodeling a room, paying off some debt, things like that.)
We were discussing how to best tell the stories of these families that are blessed by Dollar Club. And the question came up about:
How to find the *right* conflict in a story.
LET’S REVISIT THE HYPOTHETICAL SCENARIO: This certain family is going through a hard time because the husband found out he has brain cancer. They’ve been doing lots of treatments, they’re drowning in medical bills, and to top it all off, their dryer just died. The church decides to bless them with a brand new dryer as part of the Dollar Club. Now we want to tell a story about this.
Find the conflict/resolution.
Right off the bat, you might assume that the husband having cancer is the conflict, because that’s a very dark conflict. But if that’s the conflict, what’s the resolution? Is getting a new dryer a solution to his cancer?
Not quite.
Work backwards.
Let’s work backwards instead. If the story is about how the church blessed this family with a dryer, that’s the resolution we want to focus on. So if that’s the solution, the problem would be: they need a new dryer because theirs died (and because they can’t afford one because of the medical bills from the cancer treatments.) So the cancer is still tied into the conflict.
And that’s a perfectly sensible conflict-resolution. It works.
DIG DEEPER
There’s a much more powerful conflict-resolution at play here.
Think about the blessing of the dryer to this family. Step into their shoes… They’re going through terrible hardships of cancer, treatments, lots of medical debt, and then on top of it all, their dryer goes out. They feel so hopeless, like they can’t catch a break… they FEEL ALONE.
But then, they get a call that the church family wants to bless them with a new dryer! Wow! Suddenly they don’t feel so alone! They feel seen, they feel cared for, they feel loved.
And in the midst of all that tragedy, that simple act of kindness means the world.
Did you catch that? Lots of feeling in there.
That’s because beneath the material/environmental conflict, there’s a deeper emotional conflict.
If it was just about meeting their physical need of a dryer, it would be fine, but not all that impacting.
The dryer going out? It’s not a very big deal in and of itself. But they had so many hardships, so much stress, so much medical debt, they felt suffocated by all of it and alone in it, too.
And receiving the dryer as a gift represented a whole community who was behind them, rooting for them, praying for them… showing them they were not alone.
You see how much more impacting the conflict-resolution is when we tie the underlying emotion? We’re emphasizing their feelings because that’s much more important, not to mention engaging.
CONFLICT: Dryer dies + feel alone/overwhelmed
RESOLUTION: Church gifts them a new dryer + feel loved/cared for
So here’s the tip you can apply:
A STRONGER CONFLICT/RESOLUTION
IS USUALLY EMOTIVE
So next time in your story development, think about that! It might start off as a material/environmental conflict, but as you start digging deeper, you can reveal and tie the feeling behind it for a much stronger conflict-resolution.