Braiding Drama and Conflict: Why Your Story's Context Matters as Much as Its Plot
'One Battle After Another' is a master class in the "Romeo & Juliet Principle"
Literature reminds us that no one lives in a vacuum. No matter how isolated or clueless or privileged or blind the characters may seem, their own challenges are inextricably linked to the world that surrounds them. To ignore that linkage is to miss the half of the story that matters most.
Hi Loreates,
I meant to write this a few weeks back, when One Battle After Another was fresh in my mind, but perhaps now more of you will have seen it. Or maybe some of the literalists’ negative reviews have turned you off?
It’s not an easy movie to watch or describe unless you think of it as a satirical comic strip from the 1980s wrapped in the front-page news of 2025. It is precisely that tension/balance between the inner conflict and outer drama that I want to dig into here, because we all need to be cognizant of these two frames in our own work.
This post will expand on the idea that stories have both micro and macro dimensions, often made explicit by primary and secondary story lines, like Romeo & Juliet’s love story within the frame of the Montague & Capulet feud. And beware, there will be spoilers!
SAVE THE DATES:
Tune in to MFA Lore’s Well Published! Substack Live series with hot new authors and industry professionals about the truths and tricks of getting… well published!
NARRATIVE NONFICTION- Live with Pulitzer Prize-winner Ed Humes, Monday, Oct. 27, 12 noon PT. Calendar/Join here:
AGENTS TODAY- Live with veteran literary agent Kimberley Cameron, Wednesday, Nov. 12, 11am PT.
Dual Narrative: Conflict inside Drama
No story takes place in a vacuum. However private or personal the conflict at the heart of the plot, there’s always a larger context that directly or indirectly shapes and gives meaning to the characters’ individual struggles. Romeo & Juliet would have had no problem getting married if their families hadn’t been feuding. Dorothy would have been able to go home to Kansas right away, but for the war of witches that dominated the Land of Oz. Harry Potter would have just been another kid wizard in boarding school if the governing Ministry of Magic weren’t under assault from nefarious forces in wizard society.
The drama at the macro level is not always depicted explicitly. Often the larger context is implied by background details and scene-setting or characters who embody the larger dramatic factions and stakes, as explained here:
But the movie One Battle After Another offers a master class in the power of overt dual narratives to make ordinary stories extraordinary. This film, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and based on Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel Vineland (1990), interweaves the core father-daughter love story and the much larger drama of the U.S. military’s war against immigrants and leftist American militants. While the plot involves characters with cartoonish names like Perfidia Beverly Hills and Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, the contextual drama is as deadly serious as the ICE raids throttling Chicago today. The resulting combo feels like a mashup of satires like Kubrick’s Cold War masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove” (whose villain Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper may well have been a model for Sean Penn’s over-the-top portrayal of Lockjaw), gritty docudramas like “The Battle of Algiers,” and action thrillers like “Sicario.” This crazy quilt of genres makes the film entertaining, astonishing, and memorably impossible to pigeonhole.
What resonated for me, though, was the dynamic interplay between the dramatic frame of white nationalist militarism in America and the personal frame of conflict between the key characters. The distinction between these frames breaks down like this:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to MFA Lore to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.