FALLING INTO THE HOLE

Years ago there was a story about a woman who fell into a hole in the road. Every time she walked down the road she fell in and then cursed herself for falling in until one day she saw the hole and avoided it. There’s a moral here for writers. Let your characters fail.

So what constitutes failure? Failure can either deflate us or spur us on to greater things.

You’ve created an incredible goal for your character; it’s fraught with difficulties big and small. But she manages to meet them with relative ease. Well that’s a bit boring. We want her to be successful but we don’t want everything handed to her on a plate. We want her to fight and struggle to get what she wants, we want her to be more like us and fail, a lot!

So what will spur her on? Her failures must range from disappointing to devastating. The small failures are all the better if they create conflict with her major goal. At some point she must realise that she cannot go on the way she has and make a few changes. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. We’re rooting for her, we want her to get what she wants. If she doesn’t, then that’s a tragedy but maybe there’s something even better around the corner, something that was hinted or flagged at the beginning, a plot twist that puts all her struggles into context.

Let her fall into the hole, get out and dust herself off and try again. Eventually she’ll make it and we’ll love her for it.