Is It Enough? Creating Realistic Situations That Challenge Your Characters: by Angie Powers

There’s something funny about the way I write. I always start with a situation that, really, with a little patience and common sense, anyone could navigate their way out of it. For example, let’s say I have a character named Rebecca, who is on her way to a very important meeting, the one that will make or break her career. And guess what. There’s traffic. And what’s worse, she gets a flat tire.

Yawn.

It can feel tense that she won’t get to this meeting if we as readers are invested in her as a character already and want her to succeed. But you know what, it’s just not that interesting to watch people navigate the everyday. What would be more fun?

Let’s say I have a character named Rebecca, who is always sort of deferring to her boyfriend because, let’s face it, she’s got low self-esteem. And let’s say this job is the one where she will get to use her voice for the first time, with a group of people who are interested in what she has to say. So, she gets up that morning and is going to take public transit, because she’s green like that, but her boyfriend worries she’ll look terrible at her interview and maybe smell like that homeless person that always rides the bus. So he insists she take his car, a jazzy BMW (he’s great at what he does). Now, she doesn’t really like to drive but she doesn’t like upsetting her boyfriend more — so she aquiesces.

Backing out of the driveway, she almost runs over a kid who is on her way to school. She’s shaken, BF is reassuring — she hits the highway.  Now, she thinks maybe she’ll get on the surface streets. She calls BF because she doesn’t know. He says highway, she counters, and he actually backs off, but because she trusts him more than herself, she takes the highway.  Now, traffic matters more because she made the choice in a different way. She had an instinct and she didn’t follow it.  And now it’s going to cost her. 

She tries to remember the exit she took last time and thinks it’s Los Felizes, but isn’t sure, so while she fiddles with the gps and the hands-free, she slams into the back of a produce truck.

This isn’t an awesome example, but it does give you the gist — characters’ situations are more interesting when their flaws, their choices, their beliefs are the thing that put them in the situation in the first place. If Rebecca had trusted herself, she would have taken public transit and been fine. Or the surface roads. Or even had her eyes on the road when the truck in front of her stopped because she trusted her own memory.

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, take some time to brainstorm great crazy outlandish obstacles for your characters and then figure out what the character did to put themselves in that situation.  It’ll mean so much more.