Character vs. Nature strips a story down to its most primal conflict. There’s no evil villain with a dark motive. No institution with an agenda. Just one person or a group of people against the vast, breathing indifference of the natural world — and nature is not concerned with whether they live or not.
This is one of the oldest types of external conflict, and when it is done effectively, it does something few other types of external conflict can: it reveals who a person truly is.
In this article I will go over what character vs. nature conflict is, give examples from literature and film on how it works, and how you can use it in your own writing. Lastly, I’ll give you a Story Weapon to help you amplify this theme in your work.
Employing character vs. nature conflict in your story requires an accurate characterization of both your protagonist and Nature. Examples illustrate how powerful character vs. nature conflicts focus on characters who have as much to gain as they have to lose to the indifferent elements. Avoid the mistakes that other writers make and craft a timeless story by personalizing the dilemma of your character to externalized conflict.
What is Character vs. Nature?
Character vs. nature is an external conflict where the main impediment your protagonist encounters is the elements. A storm. A mountain. A frozen wilderness. A drought. The ocean. The desert. Whatever it may be, the chief conflict is between a human and an environment that is indifferent to its existence.
The distinguishing factor that makes this conflict different from others is that nature has no motive. It isn’t cruel. It isn’t kind. It simply is. The snowstorm does not despise your main character. The ocean isn’t trying to drown them. This indifference is precisely what makes nature such a potent antagonist since it eliminates the opportunity of negotiation, manipulation, or any appeal. A charismatic character will not be able to talk their way out of a hurricane. They will either survive it, or lose their life to it.
Why It Works
The reason why Character vs. Nature has been a storytelling device since the beginning of time can be summed up in one thing: it reveals deeper truths about people.
When you deprive someone of comfort, safety, civilization, etc., and pit them against the elements, then all that would have been hidden within is brought into the light. Their courage. Their selfishness. Their resourcefulness. Their breaking point.
This is why readers are drawn to stories of survival. They’re not just watching a character fight a bear or a blizzard. They want to see your protagonist’s instincts at work, their fear, their doubt, and their will to push on or submit.
The best Character vs. Nature struggles are never simple.
The surface layer gets into the external struggle — the storm, the mountain, the wilderness. Below it the true tale is always internal. A character who comes to terms with loss. Who learns to trust themselves once more. Who faces something that they’ve been running away from long before they became lost in the woods.
Nature provides the pressure. What the character does under that pressure is where the story actually lives.
Think of a man who survives a shipwreck. On the surface, that’s a story about a man and the ocean. But the more interesting story is what the shipwreck revealed: that he had been sleepwalking through his life long before the water rose, and that it took the ocean nearly killing him to make him feel like he was actually living. The nature wasn’t the story. It was the pressure that made the real story visible.
Examples in literature
Jack London was intimately familiar with this format. In his short story “To Build a Fire” we see a man travelling alone through the frozen Yukon in extreme unsurvivable conditions. The man is nameless in this story. He’s simply a man — and that anonymity is intentional. It is not a story of a particular individual. It is about the arrogance of humankind in the presence of a natural world indifferent to how confident you are. The cold doesn’t negotiate. It just kills. And it does.
In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway relies on the churning depths and the great marlin as powers that challenge Santiago not only physically but also spiritually. The sea is not his friend. In a number of aspects it is the only place where he feels full of himself. It is not a battle of man against a hostile world, but rather man against something bigger than himself. He attempts to determine what he is still capable of. It is quite a different emotional register, and it demonstrates how far this type of conflict can extend.
The non-fiction book, Into the Wild, which was written like a novel, follows Christopher McCandless into the Alaskan wilderness and poses a question: Was this a man who was destroyed by nature, or was it a man who was already at war with something within himself long before he got there? The wilderness does not respond to this question. It just makes it impossible to avoid.
Examples in film
The Revenant presents one of the most visceral examples of Character vs. Nature ever to be brought to the screen. Hugh Glass, who has been left to die in the frozen wilderness, must live long enough to avenge himself on the man who betrayed him. The scenery is not in the background. It’s an antagonist. Each frame is a reminder that the world of nature is vast, callous, and ruthlessly cruel. The reason the film works is that the protagonist’s survival is not based on his physical endurance alone. His grief, rage, and the love for his son are things the wilderness cannot touch no matter what it does to his body.
Cast Away approaches this conflict in a quieter manner. Stranded on an island by himself, there is only time, nature, and the gradual wearing away of all that he believed made him who he was. By the time he is rescued, the question that the movie actually poses is not whether he will survive or not, but if the man who survives is still the same man who crashed.
127 Hours reduces the Character vs. Nature conflict to an even more barebones experience: one man, one canyon, one boulder. The war with the outside world could not be more localised. But all that occurs within Aron Ralston during these days is massive. In this film, nature compels the protagonist to take a serious look at his own life for the first time.
How to Write It Well
Be specific with sensory details. Describe the particular sound the wind makes. Make it smell to your reader; let them feel the ground beneath their feet. The closer it can simulate the actual world, the more real the threat will seem to your reader.
Do not turn nature into an evil. When nature turns wicked, when the storm has the impression of being out to get you personally, you have lost the very thing that makes this struggle effective. The point is the indifference of nature.
Apply the setting to bring out your character’s internal struggles. Any choice your character makes when under pressure informs us of something about who they are. What is important to them? What is it that they keep hidden? Where do they break and what do they do when that happens? The pressure is the natural world. Show what that pressure reveals.
Relate the outside to the inside. Ask yourself: what is it exactly that the character is fighting? The mountain exists. The blizzard is real. But what does surviving it mean to this person? Get to the core of that question, and your narrative will have an added richness that a tale of survival often lacks.
Your story weapon: Focus on character
The mistake most writers make with Character vs. Nature conflict is that they spend a lot of energy focusing on the nature and not enough on the character. The storm is vivid. The mountain is rendered in precise and punishing detail. While it may give impressive visual imagery, your reader is left feeling like it didn’t mean much. The spectacle was there. The revelation wasn’t.
What does your protagonist believe about themselves at the start of the story that the wilderness is going to put to the test? What have they been avoiding, carrying, or refusing to look at directly? What would it take to make that thing impossible to ignore?
Nature, used well, is not only beauty and cruelty. It is a pressure system designed to strip away everything your character uses to avoid being honest with themselves. Remember the cold does not care about their excuses. The ocean does not respond to their charm. The wilderness has no interest in their plans. What remains when all of that is gone is the only thing your story was ever really about.
So let the blizzard rage. Let the mountain be merciless. But know before you write the first scene what your character stands to lose, and what they stand to gain. That is where the truth lives in a Character vs. Nature story.
If you are ready to deepen your exploration of complex conflicts and bring greater clarity and purpose to your work, join one of my workshops: The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, Story Day.
