Problems

Problem: A matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with and overcome. – Oxford English Dictionary

Problems come in all sorts of sizes and shapes. The constant, for the vast majority of fiction, is that by the end of the story, the main character a) will have had some problem that b) either will have been solved and dispensed with, or will have become unsolvable and unstoppable, at least from the main character’s point of view.

Conflict, in stories, is one kind of problem; it’s not the only kind, which is why I tend to go off on a rant about it when I run across people proclaiming how necessary it is. Technically, “a problem to solve” is also not necessary – there are “marvelous journey” stories and “alternate history” stories that have no real problem at the center of the story. Nevertheless, if one wants to sell fiction today (whether to an editor, and agent, or direct to readers), the main character generally has to have some sort of problem, or people won’t buy it.

It follows that writers need to pay attention to what that central story problem is, how it will be solved (or not), and by whom. Note that “pay attention to” does not mean “know everything about it before they start writing the story.” There are a bunch of variables involved; I’m going to address them in no particular order.

One of the first variables is the size of the problem. Epic adventure stories generally feature epic-sized problems: a rogue asteroid is headed for the solar system, a plague is rapidly turning everyone into zombies, terrorists are about to set off a nuclear bomb in New York. At the other end of the scale are plots that involve getting the mouse’s shoebox home out of the way of the plow, or deciding whether to keep the anniversary dinner with one’s spouse or stay late at work to finish the big project.

Closely related to the size of the problem is whatever is at stake. In many cases, the problem itself suggests obvious stakes – the asteroid is going to destroy the world, the protagonist is going to make either his boss or his wife unhappy – but manipulating circumstances can adjust the stakes up or down. The rogue asteroid isn’t nearly as epic a problem if it’s aimed smack at Pluto, rather than the Earth; the work-life balance problem gets a lot trickier if the spouse is an Evil Overlord/lady and the boss is head of their secret assassination squad. In other words, changing the circumstances changes the possible consequences of the worst-case or best-case scenario.

When it comes to the size and the stakes of a problem, the reader generally needs to believe that there’s a chance things could go either way. There are, of course, nihilistic stories in which it’s clear from the start that the protagonist is doomed and will never succeed, and all his/her struggles are pointless, but they are as much a niche market as stories about happy people happily being happy. Most readers are more interested if it isn’t obvious from the get-go that the main character will succeed (or fail). The sort-of exception is the story in which the central problem is not “Will they succeed?” but “How did they do it?” – things like the thriller where the reader knows from the start who the serial killer is; the central problem isn’t whodunnit, it’s how they’ll catch him (or whether they’ll catch him before he kills the next person).

Which brings up the third variable: is this an “approach” problem, or an “avoid” problem? That is, is the character trying to get something (a college acceptance, a fortune in diamonds), or is the character trying to keep something from happening (another murder, the bank foreclosing on the family farm). Sometimes, fiddling with the problem can change it from one to the other. An asteroid about to hit Earth is clearly an “avoid” problem. An asteroid about to hit Pluto might be an “approach” problem – the character is part of a scramble to put together an observation mission to collect data that will (hopefully) allow people to prevent a future asteroid from hitting Earth – or it might be a different sort of “avoid” problem, say, scrambling to get the Pluto base safely evacuated before impact.

Timing is another variable: At what point does the character realize he/she has this problem? Depending on the story, the writer has lots of choices. Classically, there’s the “just before, just as, just after” problem introduction – that is, the story starts just before the problem is discovered (“I saw something funny in last night’s data; would you review it?”), just as the problem is discovered (“It’s an asteroid, and it’s heading for Earth!”) or just after the problem is discovered (“How do we stop this?”) In reality, the writer can start long after the problem is discovered (“Welcome to the briefing on our last three months of asteroid impact prevention work, Dr. Protagonist”), or well before the real problem is discovered, with some other problem or mystery that develops or leads inexorably into the ultimate story problem.

So the timing question breaks into two parts: First, when does the book start (before, during, or after the discovery of some relevant problem, whether or not it’s the eventual central problem)? Second, how quickly will the main character(s) home in on the central problem (will they know from Chapter One that they’re trying to prevent the asteroid strike, or will it take them half the book to figure out that the streak in the photographs isn’t an equipment malfunction)?

Finally, there’s the question of urgency: Is the character facing an obvious deadline, or is there room for procrastination? The deadline can be external – that asteroid is going to arrive in March, ready or not – or it can be internal (the character just needs to propose to his/her partner, and gets more and more unhappy if they put it off).