Regular WHQers know my first true fictional love was Star Trek: The Next Generation (okay maybe not first-first, but I don’t want to go into what the unholy trinity of racist Enid Blyton, woke Judy Blume and unexpurgated Grimm did to my psyche. Not even my therapist does tbh).
My love of Trek has waxed and waned over the years, but has remained constant enough that rewatching old episodes is always my go-to insomnia cure. That I don’t force more Writing Lessons From Star Trek on you all is testament to my astounding self control. You are getting this one though. Shields up. Brace for impact.
Gene Roddenbery, the series creator, had a curious vision when he started making TNG – one in which there was no interpersonal conflict between the primary cast members. In his post-scarcity utopia, humans would be evolved enough to live and work together without any kind of friction. Any tension would have to come from external sources.
This, in part, is what makes this weird-ass series so different from many other stories you come across – as well as the key to its powerful soporific effect. It is the original competence porn. Watching competent people doing their job competently really can be a sublime experience. Oi, don’t kink shame me.
But when it comes to storytelling, how does that even work? We all know that conflict is the cornerstone of any story. It’s the first thing we learn at How To Be A Writer School. Things have to be at odds with other things to drive change. Voilà! A story!
In reality, conflict is not such a simple idea. Across the WHQ ecosystem (the WHQ-sphere?!), we go to great pains to disclaim this idea that all stories are built on conflict, because it’s so easy to misinterpret what that means.
Conflict means fighting and guns and explosions and arguments, right? Well, no. Conflict means a mismatch of needs, between where you are and where you want to be, between my understanding of a situation and yours, between what you need and what another person wants. Conflict is one person wanting Macdonalds and the other wanting Burger King. It’s also someone aiming a nuclear bomb at your house. This is the problem. When you look at conflict like this, it’s so broad a concept as to become meaningless.
So when you get into it, what did Roddenberry actually mean that he didn’t want interpersonal conflict between his main characters? It’s… confusing.
Roddenberry flew nearly 100 combat missions in World War II and lived, as we still do today, in a world beset by violence and war. It makes sense that he would want to challenge the way we see people interacting with other people, to challenge the narrative around conflict and brutality.
His vision had always been optimistic, but dare I say his ideas on conflict were not fully thought out (or who knows? Maybe he was just a control freak and what he actually meant was no one should conflict with him and his idea for a whizzy spaceship show?)
Conflict isn’t bad per se. When your partner and you have a difficult conversation because you have different ideas about parenting your twin cats, Geordi and Data, that’s conflict. If you’re both acting in good faith and are willing to listen properly and make accommodations for the other person, the outcome is always a net positive to both your relationship and the cats. It’s when one or both of you is acting in bad faith, or when you don’t have the skills or psychology necessary to listen, process and act accordingly that all hell breaks loose.
The philosopher Hegel (Remember him? No one’s read him. If they tell you they have, they’re lying) taught that the way to get to the truth is via thesis and antithesis battling it out to reach synthesis. If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s the structure of every essay you’ve ever written: an idea, a challenge, a conclusion. It’s also, as all the Plotstormers out there know, the three act structure: a hero has a problem to solve, she tries all kinds of ways to solve it, she figures it out and has to integrate everything she has learnt from the adventure.
It’s the negotiation of the mismatch of needs that is interesting to us.
It is the journey to synthesis that matters.
This journey is Story with a capital S. It’s the thing us humans go nuts for.
It is, then, the manner in which conflict is handled that makes for a utopia, not a complete absence of conflict at all.
In Star Trek, we see this bear fruit. By Season 3, the no conflict rule was sidelined. It morphed into something a bit more like this: by the 23rd Century we’ll all be much better at resolving our interpersonal conflicts and that will be a driving force in our betterment-of-humanity shenanigans. The viewership shot up to 11 million at its peak and by the time the series wrapped up in 1994, 11% of the population of the US tuned in to watch the finale.
And sure, popularity doesn’t necessarily equal good, but here I would argue the toss. There is something deeply human, so profoundly affecting, about imagining a world where we’ve made it through this precarious time and we’ve done it by focusing on each other, on how we connect, on how we communicate.
I promised you a writing lesson (and not just a love letter to Star Trek) and it’s this: finding the right kind of conflict for your story is as much world building as the scenery, the time period, the politics. Asking why your characters interact the way they do will give you as much, if not more, clarity on your story as outlining your plot from beginning to end. Understanding how your characters approach conflict reveals more about them than any description of their clothes and eye colour ever could.
Your story is the journey from thesis to antithesis to synthesis and the manner in which your characters get there is everything.
In stories, like life, we are all obsessed with communication, with connection, with the things we can or cannot say, the metaphysical bonds that bind us, the way we move through the world, individually, collectively.
Plot is character. Characters are people. You are people.
Be human. Write words.
(Also spaceships are fucken cool).
Go write.
Sarah & Team WHQ
PS For my nerds out there – this is one of the reasons many people have a problem with the newer Star Trek series. Sure, they’ve kept the central tenets of morality and equality and being super queer and absolute horndogs (seriously why are they all so horny in space what is going on out there?), but now everyone is screaming and crying at each other all the time, and in terms of how we manage conflict and progress to synthesis, it’s just not very smart or interesting.