I used to watch this Youtuber who got white-collar criminals ready for their prison sentence. He’s honest about why he went to jail — the Feds could prove he didn’t not know about a person who was criming. And they knew he didn’t not know because in one email sent X years ago, he’d used the criming guy’s promised rate of return sarcastically.

The Feds had criming guy’s emails.

As long as Youtuber didn’t officially know what criming guy was doing, he had no legal jeopardy. But if he’d written down that he knew and the Feds could prove it, the Feds had him locked in as one of their 98% success rate. But Youtuber had sworn up and down to Feds he had no idea what was going on with criming guy. He had assumed he hadn’t made a single mistake. In doing so, he committed the crime of lying to the Feds.

Breaking the rule is easy. Justifying breaking the rule is even easier if they person doing the breaking gains something out of it. It’s the “attempt to get away with it without paying the consequences” that is the story.

I would never sit down to write a story without conflict. Even a character changing their mind requires the internal conflict of a character discarding what they had known — true or not — and replacing it with what was learned. It isn’t an easy process to get past the discomfort of realizing something once held as truth might not be the whole truth or even part of it.

“Conflict is important enough to learn how to manipulate deliberately” is not a rule I think I could break. Conflict does multiple things in a story. It creates the events necessary for a character to be tested when humans must be as eusocial as bees are for our species’ survival.

You could argue Tolkien’s Silmarillion or the Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find Them are successful books without conflict or tension. But they are supplementary work for novels in existence and their audience is anyone who loved the books enough to seek out supplementary work.

I used to keep a copy of the Silmarillion beside my bedside table in high school. Nothing put me to sleep faster than opening the book and reading a random passage. The lack of conflict made my brain so bored that falling asleep was the more exciting option. But I know Tolkien fans IRL who can Colbert it.

Prisons are full of people who are survivors of intergenerational trauma. But it also has a population of people who thought they could get away with it and didn’t realize that multiple systems are designed to catch unethical behaviour. There are catches and traps most people would never think to look for even if they can’t see how they could get caught from their office view. Unethical conduct can be caught in a lack of ethical conduct in a controlled environment.

It’s how the Feds have a 98% success rate. There’s always evidence in the system of a crime being committed, those who crime must crime flawlessly, and lying about not committing crime is still crime.

Understanding how to use conflict to manipulate the tension of a piece is difficult enough. The writer has to understand — implicitly or explicitly — how the elements of the story work to create the meaning in the meaningful challenges on the character’s path. To do the same thing — to create meaning on the character’s path without the character being challenged is as tricky as criming flawlessly.

But this is the problem with the loss of assumed knowledge. Once upon a time, writers knew conflict was significant enough to learn how to manipulate meaningfully. That got shortened to conflict is important because the rest was assumed. Then along came “there are no rules” when “conflict is important” is assumed as a given.

And suddenly what is assumed in “conflict is important” becomes “but not enough to have to learn how to use deliberately.” And to assume otherwise becomes intolerable to imply. Because the first rule is that there are none.

The second rule is “given A, conflict is important is a rule.”

Writing a story with tension but no conflict requires a flawless first draft or endless rounds of editing until perfection is created. A character’s lack of change and their lack of need for change must both be meaningful. That is a character a writer either knows how to write or is willing to learn how to write on the fly.

And once that author figures out how to do that by themselves, all it would require is its prose polished.