Literary agent Kristin Nelson has an interesting post up today about the difference between “dramatic plot elements” and conflict. She writes:

I just want to clarify here that these two things are not the same.

Conflict is what motivates and drives your character (and can be internal and well as external).

Dramatic plot elements are simply events that occur in the story.

Not the same thing. So what I’m seeing is that writers are confusing the two and making the assumption that if they have a lot of big events in their novels, that’s enough “conflict”  to carry the story.

I’m going to ask, in her comments, if she’ll follow this up by elaborating on conflict . . . when she critiqued pitches on TWLAuthorTalks last week, she mentioned lack of conflict as a major strike against a couple of pitches. It would be interesting to get more insight from her into how successful writers build conflict into their novels.