Let’s say that, hypothetically, your furnace keeps dying. As long as it keeps dying in the same way- not by blowing up or setting the house on fire- your initial reaction shouldn’t change much: ascertain that the furnace is, in fact, dead; shut it off and attempt to restart it; eliminate possible causes like a busted pilot light, problems with the gas line, etc. Once you’ve gathered as much information about the problem as you can, call the landlord, who then calls the HVAC techs, who then say they’re going to show up at a specific time but actually show up a few hours later. Don’t forget to turn on the space heaters, if they weren’t already running.

Panic is allowed at any stage of this operation as long as it doesn’t get in the way of whatever you’re doing at the time. No, really, you’re allowed to be annoyed that the heating system is on the blink when the outside temperature is five degrees and dropping. Just don’t get so wrapped up in panicking that you forget what you’re doing and miss a step.

But, panic or not, most of the steps are the same as the last six times this has happened. In real life, that’s comforting. Routines are nice. In a story, however, that’s boring. The Tale of the Dead Furnace is interesting once, maybe twice, but after that, the audience is going to see that the furnace died and go, ‘And? I know what comes next,’ and flip a few pages ahead to the next interesting event, which at this rate, might entail the main character calling up the local church and asking the priest to perform an exorcism on the dead- or possibly possessed- furnace.

Say your story requires the main character to encounter a particular obstacle multiple times. How do you make it interesting, over and over?

Throw in an exorcism. That’ll liven things up.

If an exorcism isn’t needed, there are other things you can do. Focus on the characters’ actions in one iteration of the event, and focus on their emotions the next time. If there are multiple points of view in the story, you can view the same event through a different character’s eyes.

Whatever you do, make sure that you show progress in some way; the characters should get better at dealing with the problem. Maybe they all panicked and flailed helplessly the first time; then they can panic but flail purposely the second time; then by the time they’re dealing with the same problem for a third time, they deal with it calmly while making snarky comments about demons inhabiting the furnace.

So, while I deal with this latest iteration of the same problem, entertain yourselves in the comments. Have you ever written a work that throws the same problem at a character multiple times? What about the story required that approach, and how did you handle it?