[ — Karen Myers — ]
They’re your characters — of course you want the best for them. More or less. Maybe you want them to suffer and work for it, like I do.
The characters themselves, well, they’re busy planning (if they have any kind of life in them at all). If you like subplots with lots of independent heroes/villains/fools, etc., then what’s the likelihood that the result of all the careening plans works out for the planners? Any of the planners? (Not to mention the effects on innocent bystanders…)
Will the competing attempts cancel each other out? Rebound and make everything worse for everyone? Result in an unexpected success or catastrophe? Fall like dominoes toward a Rube Goldberg miracle initiated by tripping over a stray cat?
We all know what proverbially happens to the best-laid plans… In this case, you’re in charge (behind the scenes), so what kind of dispenser of Luck do you want to be?
Me, I like to be a benevolent god (eventually — I tend to be hard on my heroes first). Then, when the setup is complete, I rub my hands and sit back while events unfold in a rising cloud of buffalo dust.
What about you?
Mad Genius Club 
14 responses to “Giving your characters what they asked for”
Giving characters what they superficially want is a good way to start character development.
It also helps ensure that the problem was at least partly kicked off by the character.
“I wonder what clouds look like from the inside?”
“Vertigo and air sickness, that’s what they look like…”
“What they ask for” may not be “what they actually want” or “what they actually need”.
[Words of “wisdom” from a computer programmer.]
Oh, man, does that resonate with my old tech career! One spends more time explaining ordinary logic and reality than actually programming.
You should try teaching it:
“Miss Zsuzsa, can you help me find the problem with my program? It won’t compile?”
“The reason it won’t compile is that there should be a semi-colon at the end of line 6. The problem with your program, however…. Let me sit down. This could take a while.”
“I hate this dumb computer.
I wish that I could sell it.
It never does what I want
But only what I tell it.”
LOL 😆
How very true. Requirements extraction is the hardest part of the programming.
I think that it was a country song that had the line ‘some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers’ and that is something I’m doing to a lot of my characters in my series. They want one thing, but aren’t going to get it. What they do get ends up being even better. But they have to go through hell to get there though.
Garth Brooks
To be all noble and heroic, the heroes must first experience great adversity.
I’m in revisions on the WIP. I just got to the part where the innocent bystanders complain. I’m finding I agree with them a bit, but it’s not their story.
The scary thing is how many of my characters are being tortured by the fact that their wishes did come true.
And not ironically!
One of my characters made his wish come true by taking one big chance…after working for 20 years to make that chance possible.
Another one just got everything he could have ever wished for. He’s married to the most amazing woman in the world — brilliant, mysterious, beautiful, passionate…
…with superpowers, of a sort…
…holding secrets that can make them fantastically rich…
…which will get them all sorts of unwanted attention. They are going to live in interesting times indeed.