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.

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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.

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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!

 

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