No Problem
NO PROBLEM
One of the easiest and most common stumbling blocks in writing a Story seems so obvious it’s hard to believe any writer could miss it. But when you’re so busy trying to write good, true sentences, and make a setting clear, and create a well-rounded, believable character, and fashion dialogue that doesn’t sound like a computer-automated voice explaining exactly how it became a computer-automated voice and how it feels about this, it’s easy to forget: a story needs a problem.
Otherwise it becomes a series of scenes - however brilliantly written – where people talk about what happened that day or yesterday and their feelings about what happened that day or yesterday, or when they were six, and eventually we, and the readers, lose interest. You might be saying I’ve read some prize-winning literary novels that feel just like this, and you may be right, but even in the most experimental playing-with-form stories out there, I would urge you to look again at the ones that are loved and have survived. There will be a story in there, I wager, within and around the ground-breaking prose, a motor driving the reader onward no matter how slowly or waywardly, and that will involve something the character needs that she can’t get without a fight.
There are two ways to think about the Problem in your Story. And both are of equal importance.
INTERNAL: This is the one, perhaps surprisingly, that comes more easily to most writers. Maybe because we usually start to write out of some emotional urge, a life truth or experience we feel so strongly about that we want to create a story around it.
The internal problem of a story is the element of your protagonist’s psychology that needs to change, if they are going to have a happy ending. It’s the part of them – usually something they come into the story believing about the world or themselves, see my Tips Post, What Happened? - which leads them to react in a certain way, and trips them up throughout the entire story. And until they are able to let go of that belief, and finally take the action that will really help them. This internal barrier could also be a trait - they’re timid, they’re dishonest, they’re arrogant, they’re naive - which means they miss things, or they’re not able to do something that’s required of them, or they brashly do exactly the wrong thing and sabotage their chances of long-term success.
In my work with writers, I find they usually know quite a lot about who their character is, internally. Although sometimes it’s useful to explore the origins of these traits - again, see my Tips post, What Happened? And sometimes, in the busyness of the tasks list I mentioned in the opening paragraph, it’s easy to lose track of how your character would actually react to something that happens, and in that case a writer needs to take some quiet time to sit within that character again and remind themselves - what would she do if this happened? what would I do, or any person do, to be honest, if this happened?
But in general, writers are usually very happy to talk about their character’s feelings.
EXTERNAL: This is the slippier one. Even sometimes for people who are writing in a very external, problem-based genre, like crime – in this case not because the writer doesn’t know the problem their protagonist is trying to solve, but because they get distracted for too long by other things.
But even in character-based stories, where the emphasis is on emotional change and growth, there needs to be an external problem. In fact, especially in character-based stories! (Proviso: all good stories are character-based, in my opinion, but I’m just trying to make a distinction between action-packed stories, like thrillers and police procedurals and war sagas, and quieter plot lines.)
So ask yourself: what is the EXTERNAL problem my protagonist(s) needs to solve before this story ends?
If your answer is something like: she needs to figure out how to love herself, or, he needs to understand why his mother abandoned him when he was a baby - LOUD BUZZER TONE, nope, that’s not it. The external problem needs to be a PRACTICAL, ACTUAL problem that has landed on the main character’s lap at the start of the story, or at the inciting incident when it comes (hopefully not too far into the book). If I can’t see the problem, if it’s not visible in the world, it’s not external.
Hamlet needs to revenge his father’s death.
Scout needs to find out who Boo Radley is, and how to navigate her school years.
Catniss Everdene needs to survive the Hunger Games (and overthrow the system.)
Anna Karenina needs to escape her marriage, live as Vronsky’s lover, and keep his love.
The Joad family need to find work in California so they have enough to eat.
Oliver Twist needs to find a home where he will be safe.
Harry Potter needs to break free of Voldemort.
In all these stories, there are other, deeper internal problems the characters face, and it is usually these problems which contain the author’s themes. But without an external problem, imagine how different the above stories would feel. What would keep us reading?
It also helps very much to have some kind of deadline by which the external problem needs to be solved. This ticking clock can appear towards the latter part of the book. But we should feel that this is not something the protagonist could just let go on and on as a problem - if they could, then you haven’t come up with the right external problem. Likewise, if the problem is something your protagonist could just decide to give up on and walk away from, without extremely dire consequences (even if these consequences are more in the head of the protagonist than actually true), than it’s not an external problem with enough weight in it to drive the story from start to conclusion. And identifying a stronger, worse one - ideally suited to trigger your protagonist - will definitely re-start the engine of your story and get you writing again.