Conflict is a major element of narrative or dramatic structure in literature, particularly European and European diaspora literature starting in the 20th century, that adds a goal and opposing forces to add uncertainty as to whether the goal will be achieved. In narrative, conflict delays the characters and events from reaching a goal or set of goals. This may include main characters or it may include characters around the main character.

Conflict, as a concept about literature, and centering it as a driver for character motivation and event motivation mainly started with the introduction of Conflict Theory from the 19th century. It moved to literature with Percy Lubbock in Craft of Fiction in 1921. He spends the majority of his treaties on fiction arguing past stories were all about conflict, particularly Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, though it was previously classed as a "Morality Tale" using what would later be coined in 1967 as The Death of the Author, as his main literary theory. He mainly focused on conflict in events, rather than in characters.

This later gained traction with the introduction of character having conflicts with Lajos Egri's work on character throughout his body of instructive manuals on writing. He attempted to apply the idea of psychology to characters using mainly Sigmund Freud. Freud also drew heavily from ideas of conflict from Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's idea about conflict are often cited by his soft readers as promoting agons, or a measured mode of struggle, as a cornerstone.

Though this work has been attributed to Aristotle's Poetics, Aristotle himself did not promote conflict as a major force in narrative works. He argued for morality through pity and fear being the main point of the tale. This error was mainly because of Syd Field's Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting where he invokes Aristotle's name in his arguments about conflict.

By the time of the 1980's, conflict was considered a cornerstone of all fiction, though this was not true in the 19th century. The 19th century had morality tales, realism, absurdism, etc. All previous literature was often retconned to be about conflict, and argued into being about conflict, even if contemporaries didn't say it was. The main targets of this were often Shakespeare and Aristotle.

In the 1980's conflict was justified, rather than with conflict theory, with saying that it added interest to the story. The idea is that conflict brings tension to the story. The theory is tension adds interest.

Bertolt Brecht didn't think that conflict was the point of the plot, but conflict should be a starting point to a point of transformation, of uplift to transform the whole point of theater into being about fun. He was known for hating Aristotle, commenting: "[B]y Aristotle's definition the difference between the dramatic and epic forms was attributed to their different methods of construction."

Still there were critics of the idea that stories were all about conflict well into the 1980's, which mainly came from women, such as Jean Mandler and Nancy S. Johnson who argued for development as the center of stories. There were equal complaints from people of color that conflict didn't reflect what they thought story was about, such as Utako K. Matsuyama and Toni Morrison who commented to Charlie Rose that she didn't base Beloved around conflict, but that for her, it was about memory. Griots, who tell stories in West Africa, are a core source for memory of the history for their tribes.