Making Life Hard for your Characters

[Wordmaker]

Friends of mine have described Nathan Shepherd's experiences in Locked Within as "the worst week of his life." So you could say I'm totally fine with being hard on my characters.

In fact, a good rule of thumb if you ever find yourself stuck for how to progress a scene is to ask yourself how things could get worse for your protagonist in the scene, and then make that thing happen.

[arianne]

In fact, a good rule of thumb if you ever find yourself stuck for how to progress a scene is to ask yourself how things could get worse for your protagonist in the scene, and then make that thing happen.

Someone once told me that the best thing to do was "think about the worst thing that could happen for your character in this situation. Make it happen. And then...make it worse "

Obviously there are still limits, though. I mean, in any given scene, the really worst thing to do might be "kill off all his friends and family", but if that happened I don't know if there would be anything more to tell...

[Wordmaker]

Remember you're talking about the worst thing that can happen in that situation. If a move comes completely out of left field, the reader will be taken out of the story by the shock. How many situations are there where a character is in immediate risk of his loved ones dying?

[arianne]

Even the worst thing in any given situation might not be the best thng to do.

Take Harry in Fool Moon where he and Murphy and all the little wolves are in the pit thing with Marcone hanging above them. I'd think that the worst thing that could happen in that situation might be something like, big nasty wolf comes along and bites Harry's head off; or maybe, big nasty wolf comes by and kills Murphy. But if either of those two happened there would be little more to tell.

So...and maybe this is me being softhearted....I would say pick teh worst thing that can happen in a given situation, but make sure your character can actually make something of it because otherwise you're going to be left with a very dead character and a very sad reader.

[Wordmaker]

Nope, not soft-headed at all. Whatever choices you make, you have to be sure the story can continue. If you write your character into a dead-end with no way to progress, you're going to have to re-write that.

Likewise, killing off characters for no reason (especially your hero) is just a terrible idea. You get into that habit, and eventually readers will be numb to it. They won't care what trials your characters have to endure because they'll assume you're just putting them through hell for the sake of it.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I tend to think of it as "do the worst thing to your character that leaves enough of them to still be up for an interesting story'; breaking people completely tends to reduce the options for what they can do thereafter, as well as being a bit of a downer.