Character Struggles: Keep them Exciting

Transcription: Welcome back to Write Better Right Now. In my last video, I talked about checking whether your characters are struggling enough and suggested an exercise where you can add conflicts or try to make the current conflicts your main character is facing even more challenging.

This is a great thing to do most of the time, but there is a caveat. It is possible to add complications, make things more difficult, but also to make things more boring. We don't want to do that.

I'm going to share with you a personal experience. In my book Haunted: the Ghost on the Stairs, Jon and Tania are traveling with their parents' ghost hunter TV show and trying to help the ghosts while hiding the fact that Tania can see ghosts. When I wrote this manuscript, it was a tight, fast paced, 100 page manuscript. I sent it to an editor that I knew through conferences.

A few weeks later, he called and we started talking about it. Of course, I'm very excited to get a call from an editor. He was asking about the page count and the word count. I thought, that's odd, you have it right there in front of you. Finally, he said, "I love it. I want to buy it." Ss I'm doing my little happy dance mentally, he adds, "It needs to be twice as long." This publisher had standardized series for ages nine to 12, and those were 176 print pages. My manuscript didn't actually need to be twice as long, but I needed to add about 50% more in order to match that word count.

I started figuring out how I'm going to do that. I came up with the idea that they would have more of a mystery to solve. In the original manuscript, the ghost hunter TV show goes to this Colorado hotel that is haunted by a ghost bride on the stairs. They knew the ghost's name. They knew her story. Well, making it more complicated, let's say that they didn't know her name and why she was there haunting the hotel. Then Jon and Tania have to figure that out.

I added scenes where they're trying to investigate and find out who she might have been. I turned in the revised manuscript, and then got the feedback, "It needs to be spookier with the ghost more active." I realized that I had added scenes that gave the kids challenges, but they weren't that dramatic. I had them go into the library in town to try to research the ghost and also to the Historical Society. This came out in 2008, so it was before kids this age would typically have a cell phone with internet service. So having them go in town to the library when the ghost only haunts the hotel means that they are not going to have a ghost encounter in those chapters.

To make it spookier with the ghost more active, I moved the library research scene back to the hotel in the hotel Business Center, which had computers. That let them still investigate the ghost and try to come up with conclusions about who she might have been and why she might be there. Then I could end the chapter like this, with Jon as narrator:

Tania went out. I have to admit, I was glad to be alone for a while. It felt good to forget about ghosts and sisters and responsibilities and just do stupid, regular stuff.

Then I heard the scream.

So I set it up that Tania left the business center first. She tried to talk to the ghost and had a bad experience. That gives me a great cliffhanger chapter ending here. It gives me some drama as Jon rushes out to help Tania, and the awkwardness of people seeing that she has just suddenly screamed and collapsed on the stairs, so that's a little bit embarrassing for both of them. Simply moving that scene to a different location was enough to make it much more dramatic or allow me to rewrite it in a more dramatic way.

It's important to keep in mind as you're making things more difficult for your characters, as you're making sure that they struggle, be sure that those complications are dramatic. They should be scary or exciting or emotional, depending on the kind of book. Romance might not have physical fear, but it might have something that's emotionally scary.

You also want to make sure that your complications feel like fresh twists each time.