So, I have a chatacter that I am really happy with. He is a young man, still in school, who loves comics and drawing. He lives under a government that supresses people who don't grow skill-wise. He is quite talented, and has no trouble proving that he is useful. He isn't so great socially; very few friends, generally awkward, etc. I know the driving theme here is sucsess, but I'm having a lot of trouble finding a conflict to disrupt his daily life. Any thoughts?
Ooh! Maybe if you want to sprinkle a little romance in there, then maybe his love interest (or whatever) doesn't have the skill set that the government is allowing and your protagonist sends himself out to save them?
Thank you! I didn't really plan for romance to take too much of a lead, but it is defiantly a great idea. This also leaves a lot of space for him to be terrible awkward, which will help keep it less doom and gloom. Romantic studying? More like stumbling explanations between long periods of uncomfortable silence.
What does your character want most? Whats stopping him from achieving it? What does he have to do to get it? A good way to create conflict is to keep your character from getting what he wants.
Another idea is that the society he lives in only values practical skills or non-artistic skills and doesn't like free thinking. And the story could be about how art gets outlawed and he tries to hide his art but gets found out and ostracized by everybody he thought would help him. And then from there he has to find a rumored underground society that is full of freedom and art and creativity. And so the conflict here is that he is being hunted for his talents and needs to escape, but he doesn't know where it is so he has to go to very shady and dangerous parts of the (city? Continent? World?) and get information on it. And naturally he runs into tons of trouble and possibly finds someone else who wants to get there and they work together.
What LJ said about the character's goals is really important, you should definitely incorporate that. Couple it with a single message or lesson that you want to share, and you've got an awesome plot. You basically teach your main character that lesson, and through that the readers learn something.
For example, one of my main characters is pretty cocky and wants to be popular, in the limelight, recognized for great things he will achieve. When he has the opportunity to get everything he's ever wanted in that respect, he's actually faced with a dilemma: either seize that opportunity, or sacrifice the glory, maybe even his life, to do the right thing, knowing full well that no one will recognize him for it.
What I got from your brief description is that his daily life is basically he goes to school, does well, during lunch maybe goes to library to read comic book, after school go to public library/comic book store/home and doesn't really have a life. If he's content with this life, then maybe you could introduce a new character that tries to take him out of his comfort zone, or if it's more action and adventure then he gets accused of aiding someone without skill to stay under the radar of the government. At first he's defensive and doesn't see why anyone would want to do that because this system has been working so well for so long but he slowly realizes that the government is taking the suppressed citizens and using them as manual labor, doing genetic experiments, abusing, etc. He has to decide whether to keep his normal comfortable life, tell someone about it and risk them turning on him, or starting a rebellion himself.
You also need to decide what the goal of the story is, or what his personal goal is. Does he like the government? If so, have a terrorist group cripple it from the inside, causing everyone to deal with a sudden influx of non-skilled people coming to the surface. Maybe he likes being surrounded with other people like him; quiet, awkward, artistic. Have his parents adopt someone who is the opposite, or have them move in next door or something. If he feels safe that people who can't contribute are going away, have him find out that the people being suppressed are the most skilled people whom the government is afraid will use their skill to show the world that the government is faking everything.
It also seems like you like fluff, so maybe he falls in love with an equally awkward girl for some cute moments, but then rip it all away from him. Maybe the girl was cheating on him. Maybe she's a government spy. Maybe she tells the government that he doesn't have a required skill set. Maybe he has to take down the system from inside the system