Your Characters May Be Solving Problems Too Easily

The common writing wisdom often warns new authors against making life too easy for their characters. So, they place obstacles in their characters’ path.

But all too often, they don’t take enough time to think through how the characters will solve those problems.

Take a fantasy novel in which the hero needs to enter a fortified city unnoticed. The guards know his face, his enemies control the gates, and getting caught means death. That’s a compelling predicament with hefty consequences for failure.

How’s he gonna pull this one off? readers wonder as they eagerly flip pages.

Then it turns out the hero has an old smuggler buddy. That smuggler happens to have a secret tunnel into the city, and he agrees to lead our hero through it to repay an old favor.

Problem solved, right?

Superficially, yes. Each part of that sequence is plausible. The smuggler and his debt to the hero might even have been established earlier.

Yet that scene can still leave the reader cold.

Why?

Read the full post on Substack.

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