Steve Molton: Internal Antagonists and the 7 Forms of Conflict

As many of you know, every Thursday Night, we host a free screenwriting class called Thursday Night Writes. A recent installment with Steve Molton was so groundbreaking that we decided to release it as a podcast for our whole community. Enjoy! Jake: Hello, everybody, welcome to Thursday Night Writes! Our guest tonight is Steve Molton.  Steve is a former HBO and Showtime executive, Columbia film school professor, and Pulitzer nominee. He wrote a movie with Frank Pugliese of House of Cards. He wrote limited series for Showtime. He has worked in television, novels, nonfiction, and film. He’s even penned an opera!  He's also just one of the great human beings in the world and a good friend. We're so lucky to have him back on our team, mentoring students in our ProTrack program and offering a new TV Drama Writers Room. Steve and I are going to be exploring the concept of internal antagonists in screenwriting and the role they play in your character’s journey.  Often, when we're thinking about the “antagonist” or the opposing forces in our script, we think about the “bad guy” or the “obstacle.” But today, we're going to focus on internal obstacles, things that get in the way of our characters on the inside, and the things that get in the way of us as writers on the inside.  Steve: Part of the reason I wanted to do this subject tonight is that, having walked the picket line in the last year, we were besieged by the notion that somehow machines will be able to replicate what we do. But as some great person had written on his sign while picketing, "Computers can't have childhood trauma."  We are still human beings. The fact that we live and die, that we are shaping the world and must still shape the world, sometimes in ways to protect ourselves, requires us to go really deep. So that's what we’ll do today, working from the inside out. I've been teaching at the French National Film School, doing a masterclass there for producers. These weren't people who were naturally thinking like writers, although they were storytellers of a kind.  I pulled together notes from a series of talks I did there on the seven forms of conflict.  There are seven forms of conflict that drive just about every great story. Writers have probably heard about the seven forms of conflict. We forget them because they're so common and ubiquitous. They are:  1) The self versus the self 2) Self versus another  3) Self versus society  4) Self versus technology  5) Self versus nature  6) Self versus the supernatural  7) Self versus God, fate, or destiny The first three of these are present in almost all strong movies and stories. The last four are genres unto themselves, but they often include those three forms as well. For example, you might find the self versus the self, the self versus the other, and versus society within a movie about the self versus technology. These conflicts are ubiquitous and they flow into each other. Jake: A question popped up in the chat. What's the difference between supernatural and God? Steve: That is a fantastic question.  Self versus the supernatural involves conflicts with inexplicable, otherworldly phenomena that defy scientific explanation.