Conflicted About Conflict

"That's it!" said Owen. "that's the last straw. I'm tired of trying to explain it to you! We need to get this script done and unless you pull yourself together, you're on your own." Owen was staring into a mirror practicing his speech that he was going to tell Jesse. Their drama teacher gave them a project to do, and they hadn't even started yet. They had to write a script for a scene to perform at the end of the year. The scene had to be original and written by them. Every good drama student knows that all great scripts have conflict in them, without it the play is boring and stale. Owen had worked with Jesse several times before, in fact they worked great together acting in scenes, but writing scenes was a different story. Jesse had no idea how to use conflict   in a scene, he didn't understand the use of it, and that made their thought process slow down like a sloth in the summer. Owen had it with Jesse. They started their project three weeks ago!! And they were completely behind. They didn't have a rough draft of their scene to present because Owen had spent so much time trying to explain to Jesse was conflict was. Now Owen knew he could have just written the scene and gave a copy to Jesse to perform, but how could Owen let his best friend go on through life never knowing how to use conflict? He couldn't, and that was the problem.

Jesse was waiting for Owen in the drama room on spare, same time as he usually did. Owen and Jesse want through the usual routine. They asked what each other did the night before, ate lunch and came up with a philosophical question to debate with each other. Once all the fun was over, it was time to work. Owen asked Jesse for ten millionth time, "Do you have any ideas?". And Jesse replied in the same manner, "What if we were two guys walking to the store, then we bought milk *pause, and walked home." Owen sat there and rolled his eyes, as he usually did to all of Jesse's ideas. "What about the conflict? Do they have anything happen to them on the way there? What if a robber came and mugged them, or they got lost in the store and had to find their way out?"

"Why would that happen to them? There is a less than 20% chance of them getting robbed and a 0% percent chance of them getting lost in the store? Why do you always try to make things harder for us in the scene?"

"Because Jesse, it adds conflict to the scene, which will make the scene better and add more action to it."

"Well I think it's not worth it and not possible."

They bickered with each other for a whole hour before, Owen stood up and just walked out of the room by pure frustration. Jesse had to sit there alone and think for a while. He thought and thought and thought, and nothing came to him. He just couldn't understand why conflict was needed in everything. It was implausible and very little of it happened to him. Then he realized something, conflict happened everywhere. When he went to the store and a little old lady cut him in line. Or when he was home and his mom wanted him to clean and he never did, so his mom got mad at him. His eyes lit up and he picked up the piece of paper, grabbed a pen and started writing his master piece.

The next day, Owen was walking to school, not prepared to present his rough copy and felt hopeless that it would never be done. Right when he walked into the door, he saw Jesse running to him like a puppy runs to his master. "I finished the scene!"

"What? How did you possibly do that?"

"Well I sat there and I thought, I thought and I thought and I thought. Then it came to me. Us arguing about myself not knowing about conflict and we have a script due the next day was conflict. So I grabbed a pen and wrote out our scene."

"This is everything we said yesterday to each other." said Owen

"I know, and I also know how much you like to add robbers to a scene so I threw them in there on page 3."

To make a long story short, Owen and Jesse claimed that their scene was inspired by Monty Python... thank you Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, John Cleese, and Michael Palin... you got us out of that jam.