Why are so many people who give writing advice so into telling you to make your characters deal with the worst of all possible worlds? Do we just love suffering? Maybe! Let’s unpack it.

For one, hardship is the price of admission in storytelling. Beginning on the day that things change (or close to when things change for your protagonist) means that your main character is facing things that are outside their normal experience. They’re not on autopilot. For another, how anyone gets better at anything meaningful is through dedicated work, both putting the time in to learn things as well as the struggle of figuring out what isn’t working.

If you’re self-taught as a writer, as most of us are, you know the pains and joys of trying to get better at something on your own. You don’t have a lesson plan pre-written. There is no helpful mentor figure. Or, if there is one, they’re either intermittent if they’re living or unable to answer any follow-up questions if they’re dead (one thing I love about writing is that you can be directly learn from artists who predeceased you years to centuries ago!). Most of the time, you are on your own, which means that you not only have to acquire skills, but also learn how to do that, which can be a struggle on its own. This happens with everything you write; you are always going to have to learn something new to pull it off.

Your protagonist, luckily, is likely going through the same thing. They have been pulled out of their comfortable life and into a new and strange version of it (or even a new and strange world). Sometimes they know what to do (defeat evil overlord and free the people), but most of the time they do not (where is the next village? will I even find help there or will they sell me out?). A lot of it is guessing and hoping for the best.

But why do we always need to make it worse? As a teen writing fanfiction, I was obsessed with making it better. I was the monarch of fix-it fics: I wanted my favorite characters to wake up late in comfortable places, watching the sun play on the floorboards in unfamiliar but not unwelcoming rooms, the smell of breakfast creeping up from downstairs. I felt like they’d suffered enough.

However, peace isn’t what drives a narrative. You don’t stake your life on a sunny day. No one sells their soul when they’re mostly pretty happy. Something is wrong and I need to fix it. That’s the underlying current that drives a character to do things that are uncomfortable, to get past that initial inertia of breaking out of their comfort zone.

Without conflict, we don’t have a story.

That said, I don’t love writing about the basics in these posts. We all know that a story needs a problem; we have seen the plot triangle of rising and falling action. We are here because we want the advanced stuff. What does that look like?

Sometimes it’s more helpful to interrogate from the opposite condition. What happens if things go well? What if the thing we’ve left to chance turns out okay?

Maybe a better question is: whom does helpful coincidence benefit? If a medium to large problem gets resolved by coincidence and not the hard work of a character, then the benefit doesn’t always feel earned. Anything that we’ve spent time building up as a significant obstacle shouldn’t be something that easily goes away. Solve small problems or give small victories, but leave your characters to unravel the bigger problems themselves.

On the other side of this, there’s also no end to the little nuisances you can throw in a character’s path. After all, how a character handles difficulty often tells us more about them than how they handle success. It can also be amusing to see a character dealing with a ton of small things irritating them! More usefully, you can push a character to overwhelm like this– it doesn’t have to be a traumatic event that makes them snap at their love interest and reveal shocking information about their past, it can be the additive aggravation of a thousand small cuts.

This isn’t to discourage you from ever doing anything nice for your characters, but a guideline I like to use is to only give them victories by chance when it’s small enough that it doesn’t really affect anything. Like, congrats, their favorite fruit is on sale at the grocery store. The seasonal coffee they ordered on a whim is pretty good. They get their favorite color in the office draw for who gets to be what Power Ranger, I don’t know. Little victories.

The bigger stuff I make them fight for.

You learn more about who a character is when they’re faced with hardship than when they’re successful. That hardship doesn’t always have to be world-ending, soul-shattering stuff. It can also be an accumulation of small things. Or it can be one small thing that really sets them off. We all know people who lose their minds when someone commits a driving faux pas.

Anger is a great tool to show us what someone cares about. Use it well, and in the meantime, don’t be afraid to make things just a little worse for your characters.

As usual, if you liked this and you’d like to support my habit of chatting about craft, you can buy me a coffee below. Or, if you’re looking for a freelance editor for you fiction needs, I also offer editing services over at Constellation Editorial.