Does Conflictual Dialogue Improve a Story?

Abstract

According to creative writing experts, adding conflict to dialogue improves story quality and audience reaction to that story. This idea draws from the widely held theory that conflict is vital for dramatic stories. Yet despite conflict’s seeming centrality, experimental research into its effects is limited. We take a small step in addressing this shortfall, by examining whether one type of conflict — adversarial dialogue — improves story quality, and audience response. In a pilot, and two similar studies, we manipulated stories to create different levels of conflictual dialogue, in repeated measures experiments. Forty-seven participants in the first study and 194 in the second, read stories with different levels of conflict, and then rated them on a series of measures (the Perceived Quality Index in the first experiment, the Audience Response Scale, with supplementary questions on boredom and story quality in the second). While the conflict manipulation was successful, it produced no significant difference in these outcome measures in the two experiments. These results do not support the study hypothesis that manipulating isolated adversarial dialogue has a positive effect on stories but would be compatible with alternative theories of conflict in stories.