Obstacles and Problems in Your Stories

When we think about our stories, we often ask ourselves, "What is the problem?" However, as the Storm Writing School points out, there is something of a differentiation we can use to get more nuance out of this question. I was recently reading Problems Vs. Obstacles, and it really caught my attention.

So, let's talk about the differences between problem and obstacles in your stories, shall we?

It's a rather interesting question, it turns out.

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Obstacles and Problems... What's The Difference?

Before we get into the difference between these two things, we need to focus on an objective. Because the important difference between these two things is that both of them are connected to your story's objective, but they interact with it in different ways.

As an example, let's take the well-known story of Lord of The Rings.

The objective in the story is that our protagonists want to destroy the One Ring, and as a result destroy Sauron. The reason for this is that Sauron and his finger jewelry are the problem in our story, because a problem (by the definition we're using) is something that comes before the character's objective. And, just as importantly, the problem is what leads to the objective. Your lord of all evil exists, and he's being a problem that has to be taken care of.

Obstacles, by contrast, are things that get in the way of your protagonists actually achieving their objective. The distance to Mordor, that is an obstacle. So are the crows that spy on them, the storm that stops them from taking the mountain pass, the pursuit of the ring wraiths... these are things that arise to make it harder for the protagonists to get from where they started, to the point where the problem is solved.

While the difference between these two things is not always germaine to your story, it can help to have specific language to discuss the various moving parts of your tale... particularly when you're in the blueprinting phase of things. So if this isn't something you've put words to before, consider thinking things through using these terms to see where it gets you!

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Whenever Possible, Let Your Characters Solve Their Own Problems

Stories are full of conflicts. Whether it's soldiers on the battlefield, star-crossed lovers trying to make their relationship work, someone who is trying to win a big competition in order to win enough money to stop the local rec center from closing, we're here to see how our characters handle these conflicts. However, too often we end up letting the machine of the gods come down and save the day on the behalf of our characters.

It's why I wanted to say that, whenever possible, you should make sure that your characters are responsible for solving their own problems.

Eh, I'm sure lightning will strike the dark lord at the proper moment.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

Pull Yourself Up By Your Plot Hooks!

There are often a slew of factors involved in a story, and there are often circumstances outside of your protagonist(s) and their actions. However, the main thrust of today's post is about how the problems and conflicts in a story should be solved by the character, and the actions they take.

For example, let's say you're writing a coming-of-age story where your protagonist is in middle school, or maybe a freshman in high school. One of the problems they're facing is that they've become the target of a school bully, or maybe even a pack of them. Now, they might be the main antagonists, or they might merely be secondary threats that represent something your protagonist has to deal with. And maybe it comes down to a good, old-fashioned schoolyard brawl where the bully gets their nose bloodied (or broken). Maybe your protagonist lays a trap for them, scaring the pants off their bullies without actually hurting them. If there's an additional threat in the story, ranging from a haunted school to a serial killer targeting kids, your protagonist might actually save their bullies from danger, taking them from foes to friends in a rather big hurry.

Now imagine if your protagonist just told a teacher, and that teacher swooped in and reprimanded the bullies for their behavior. Or, worse, the bullies' parents just showed up right when things got tense and dragged them off with no provocation from our protagonist. These other characters just swooped in from out of nowhere to handle the problem for your lead who didn't do anything to fix it themselves, and as a result they've done nothing, but their problems have been fixed for them. Is that a satisfying resolution to the problem your protagonist was facing?

I have learned nothing, and accomplished nothing... away!

If you find that too many of the problems in your books are being solved by forces outside your protagonist's control, and without any input or effort from them, it may be time to reconsider the way your story is being told. Your protagonists don't have to single-handedly defeat armies, or solve everything with a fist fight, or always know the most obscure of facts that just so happen to be the bane of the enemy's existence, but their efforts should have some impact on the overall outcome of your story.

And if they're not... well, ask yourself why, and if the audience is going to be less-than-pleased that the character they've been following didn't actually fix anything themselves.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

3 Common Horror Mistakes That Can Really Ruin Your Story

It's October, and that means there are a lot of people penning horror stories right now. Maybe you're taking up a seasonal challenge, or perhaps you're trying to land some work in the anthologies that always seem to rise from the grave around this time of year. Whatever the reason, though, if you're not an old genre ghoul there are a lot of traps just waiting for you to step in them out there. That's why this Halloween season I'd like to offer you all a seat by the fire so I can give you a warning or two about the dos and do-nots of horror stories.

Don't mind that noise. It's just the wind.

And for those who are wondering about what my bona fides are (or if you'd just like to check out some fun horror stories this spooky season), this genre has sort of been my comfy place for much of my career. From having short stories in collections like SNAFU: A Collection of Military Horror and American Nightmare, to the cosmic horror elements of my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, to the stinking alleys and backwoods copses laden with monsters in my collections The Rejects and New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam, I like to think I know at least a little bit about this particular subject.

 

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Now then, without further ado...

#1: Rushing To Get To The Good Part

Don't rush to the climax... you've got word count to fill.

Pacing and presentation are two of the most important parts of a horror story. If you've ever seen someone tell a ghost story around a campfire, then you already know this. You need to draw the audience in, and ratchet up the tension gradually so that when you deliver the scare it sticks the landing instead of making the listeners sigh and roll their eyes.

In its way, horror is sort of like that third date. You know what you're in for, but you don't just show up on the doorstep ready to go. You take your time along the evening, testing boundaries, and getting little glimpses of what's to come. That excitement builds, and you may have a couple of close calls, but you don't get to the proper reveal until you're finally back in the house, with the candlelight dancing on the walls. Then you hear that zipper come down, and you see her run her fingers through her hair, peeling off that skin suit and dropping it to the ground, those intense blue eyes staring at you from her lipless, lidless face as the blood pounds and the muscles twitch.

As for presentation, think of the xenomorph in the Alien franchise. The movie gives you little glimpses here and there. It lets your mind do the work, and it gets more and more tense, until you're practically jumping at shadows. There is a deleted scene where we got to see the creature just standing there under the light, though. And you know what? It's not scary. When it just stands there with no shadows, no creepy echoes, no blur of movement, it creates no tension. It still looks weird, and clearly inhuman, but it's the difference between seeing a lion in an enclosure at the zoo, and knowing there's one stalking through the shadows just beyond the reach of your flashlight.

#2: Your Entire Cast is Made of Assholes

Jesus... these kids just get worse and worse every film...

This is a trick a lot of people use to try to have their cake and eat it, too. We want to have people get beaten, tortured, or killed in brutal ways, but to make sure the audience doesn't feel too bad about it we make sure it's abundantly clear these are bad people. Maybe it's the homophobic guy at the truck stop who beat up the gay server, or the woman berating the barista because her coffee wasn't just how she liked it. It might even be the schoolyard bullies that we see making other kids' lives miserable. Whoever it is, we give the audience an out. We let them know it's okay not to feel too bad for these characters... after all, they probably had this coming.

You can get away with that once, or maybe even twice in a horror story. Perhaps for the establishing kill to tease there's something wrong, and then a last, satisfying death before the conclusion (like the businessman who keeps trying to sell out the other, non-wealthy passengers in any survival horror movie where cooperation is literally the only way to get past the danger). All the other injuries, wounds, and deaths in the story, though? Don't shy away from those! Let them happen to people who seem to be nice, or good, or honest. Let the audience's guts clench, and their mouths drop open. It isn't horrifying to see someone you're invested in hating get torn apart by a werewolf... it's satisfying!

Don't be afraid to have bad things happen to good people. And don't stuff your story to the gills with people so actively terrible you can practically read the order they're going to die in like some kind of bizarre Hollywood tarot.

#3: Mistaking Cruelty For Horror

Go on... just put your foot in it!

Horror can be cruel, but cruelty is not inherently horrific. This is like that thing they taught you in math class about squares and rectangles. The problem is that a lot of people write stories that are nihilistic and empty in an attempt to be scary, but if the cruelty isn't reinforcing a message of some kind then it just results in an audience that went through an unpleasant experience without any kind of catharsis or purpose. Like eating spoiled devil's eggs just because you could, rather than to make a statement on gluttony, or the human condition, or about how we will go to lengths of astonishing self-harm under capitalism if that's what it takes to survive.

To take that last example and run with it, there's a beautifully grotesque short story in Clive Barker's The Books of Blood Volume 2 titled "Dread." If you haven't read the story or seen the film based on it, the short version is that a psychology graduate student is kidnapping people and subjecting them to the things they fear most to torture them. The reason is to try to understand the origin of fear, how it can be overcome, and where people's minds will break. Ironically these very acts end up creating the antagonist's worst fear, which was that he would be hacked to death by an insane clown with an ax. There is a scene early on in the story where the antagonist forces a vegetarian woman into a room, and locks her in with a perfectly-cooked steak. It is the only thing she will get to eat, but she fears the meat. The longer she waits, though, the more disgusting and spoiled the meal becomes, and the more she will need to eat it to survive.

Hunger eventually wins, and though the meat has gone rancid, she eats it out of desperation, too far gone for the fear to affect her any longer.

This scene is witnessed quickly in both text and film, but it isn't just pointless cruelty for the sake of cruelty. The experience shows that the villain of the story is willing to go to horrifying lengths because of his obsession, and that once someone becomes a subject they are no longer a person to him. Then, in a microcosm, the vegetarian's struggle with her own fear, and her de-evolution into a baser animal who does things to survive that her upper brain would never have allowed. It acts as foreshadowing for what's going to happen to our protagonist once he finds himself face-to-face with his own inner demons.

Yes, torture porn, I'm getting to you.

For those clearing their throat about to cite the many examples of stories where pointless cruelty is the thrust of the whole endeavor (the Hostel series comes to mind, for those seeking examples), I'd like to point out that even bleak horror stories that seem to have no rhyme or reason to their violence and brutality are often using that lack of reason to make a point.

Take the film Seven. It's a detective story about tracking down a killer who is obsessed with a deeper meaning, with purity, and with object lessons. In a very real sense the film is about the fragile nature of security, and how those who cannot or will not look at the bigger picture will be shattered when tragedy arrives on their doorstep, blood dripping off the hem of its overcoat. While at a glance it looks like nothing but a grotesque murder spree with allusions to faith, as Ryan Hollinger points out, its subject matter challenges our definitions of "realism," and what we expect from a narrative.

We see this in a lot of films. Hostel is about the drives of those with power to seek forbidden experiences, and how they never expect to be taken to task for the things they do. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has allusions to the lost generation who died in a pointless war in Vietnam, as well as criticisms of the meat industry and the cruelties it's responsible for. Even the outlandish A Serbian Film is making a political statement on how a particular ethnic group is portrayed in fiction, using the brutality and grotesque actions to create a parody of these stereotypes.

There is cruelty in all of these examples. That cruelty is in service of the narrative, however, and it's used to drive home what the stories are about, in addition to their actual plots. But just throwing cruelty into your story doesn't make it any more compelling, or any more inherently frightening. In fact, handled poorly, it can be the final nail that makes your audience walk away.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Try 100 Years, Instead of 1,000

So, we've all had a chance to sit down and watch Netflix's Original Bright by now, right? A modern-fantasy cop drama that deals with the first orc being allowed on the force in L.A., the casual racism that orcs have to deal with, and the bizarre, Tolkien-esque world that everyone now inhabits.

If you didn't see it, relax. They give away pretty much everything in the trailer.

One thing Bright does is try to offer some token justification for all the orc racism we see all over the place. In short, about 2,000 years ago, orcs sided with some mysterious Dark Lord, and had to be defeated by an alliance of all the other races (humans, elves, centaurs, fey, etc., etc.). And, according to the world's lore, orcs have done literally nothing else to earn that awful rep since those dark days.

Do you remember how long it took Germany to stop being thought of as the place that bred jackbooted genocide soldiers? Well, if you looked around recently, it's been less than a century before they left that reputation behind. Now Germany is thought of as respected leaders of a union of nations, and a strong, guiding force.

Roll that around in your head for a moment. There are still people alive today who remember the atrocities of the S.S., and who survived the Holocaust. Yet only a few generations later, the identity of that nation has been remade into a different image.

Are you seeing the disconnect, here?

I Blame Tolkien, Really

As with so many other genre-setting trends, I lay this one at the feet of the famed author and professor. Because, since Middle Earth dealt with time by thousands of years, it seems that every other fantasy setting chose to do the same thing. Not because it was what felt right for their stories, or because it was inherently more interesting, but because it was what worked in The Lord of The Rings, and that was the mold they happened to be using.

Thanks, Tolkien...

The problem that you run into is that a lot of stuff changes over 1,000 years. Empires crumble, cultures shift, language changes, and governments are entirely rebuilt. Hell, depending on your world's doings, the very shape of the landscape might change entirely.

If we're talking about lost civilizations, ancient artifacts, and forgotten treasures, then it's perfectly reasonable to talk in millennia. However, if you're talking about the perceptions of a group of people, the lifespan of a nation, or even how long a certain fighting style or weapon has been in use, it might be worth asking yourself whether you should narrow your timeline. Especially if your protagonists lead relatively human lifespans, indicating that generational turnover happens fairly fast by the standards of elves, dwarves, and other long-lived races.

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing post. Hopefully it got some wheels turning, and gave some folks a little insight. If you like my work, you can find more of it in my Vocal archive. To stay on top of all my latest releases, simply follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and/or Twitter. Lastly, if you'd like to support me, head to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page, or Buy Me A Coffee! Either way, there's a free book in it for you.