When I say storytelling is magical, that’s only half metaphor.
The core of much folk sorcery and basic ceremony is sympathetic magic, the belief that you can use ritual or spells via items and actions associated with a target to affect that target without direct contact. Essentially, sympathetic magic influences people and events at a distance.
The most obvious example is a “voodoo doll” built to represent the target that is stuck with pins to create problems from a distance. Sympathetic magic is the reason many people avoid “unlucky” objects/places and won’t “step on a crack” for fear of injuring mom’s spine. It also explains the use of statues in temples so we can speak to supernatural beings and why many religions prohibit depictions of the divine out of respect. Sympathetic magic is the power of vicarious influence.
Think about that a moment. Don’t we carefully craft characters to make the readers feel things at a distance? Aren’t we influencing people with a few scraps and pins? In this sense, storytelling operates as a kind of empathetic magic.
Authors build a fictional “doll” connected to the reader through actions and qualities and then stick pins in it to make the reader feel things. If assembled correctly, every character offers us a different spectrum of emotional possibilities: new pins and new pains. Amplifying the stakes keeps readers glued to the pages because the story matters to them, personally; you stick pins in those characters and the audience feels them. We build up a series of associations to link their feelings to the character on the page so that we can influence them, so they can experience a series of fascinating lives and worlds vicariously. Abracadabra.
Herein lies the colossal power of story.
Through the device of character, authors have direct and dramatic access to their readers’ thoughts and emotions at a distance. Even after the author is long gone, the “spell” of a book persists and its empathetic magic makes things happen in the real world. Centuries after an author is gone, a story offers an entire cast of dolls waiting to get stuck with the right pin at the right moment to make readers feel actual, immediate emotions.
Remember: our brains do not distinguish between real-world and fictional experiences. We construct “real” people the same way we do fictional people, as a mosaic of meaningful patterns. Empathetic magic is the reason characterization moves audiences and unleashes fandoms. Through the power of suggestion, authors can (and must) create characters that change people’s lives.
You cast the spell with words.
“The bridge between the words glamour and grammar is magic. According to the OED, glamour evolved through an ancient association between learning and enchantment.”
Roy Peter Clark47
Genre fiction can only be as dramatical as it is grammatical.
That might sound nuts, but every story in the world breaks down into subjects doing things one sentence at a time. Someone takes action that causes reactions that require new actions. Rinse-repeat. Whether that subject is the sole focus of the novel or part of a teeming horde, the reader only knows what you tell them one moment, one sentence at a time.
In practical terms, a sentence is built from two components:
• the SUBJECT: the person, object, idea, or entity which the sentence concerns (CHARACTER)
• the PREDICATE: an explanation of the subject’s predicament which creates a context and adds information (CHARACTERIZATION)
No character simply exists; characters take action constantly. A character does meaningful things with consequences so that they can exist. In essence, every sentence is a small story. The subject introduces the main character of that sentence. The predicate goes on to characterize them more fully and dramatically to reward the attention paid.
Take the sentence “The librarian shelved the new books.” The subject “The librarian” focuses our attention where it belongs so that the predicate “shelved the new books” can reveal additional information about this subject at this moment in the fictional world of the sentence.
Grammar fanatics and literary mavens have flagged this linguistic quirk as a key to clear prose. “Most sentences in English open with the subject, and they move from the known to the unknown,” as grammarian Virginia Tufte put it, “Probably one of the most important grammatical observations to be made about English prose style.”48 Readers instinctively follow the known to the unknown, tracing the causal relationship from the familiar to the unfamiliar as their understanding of the characters and their world expands and leads them deeper into the story.
I tend to think of these two halves of the sentence as the lens and the light. The subject focuses attention on something significant within the story’s universe, and the predicate illuminates a meaningful detail, effort, or circumstance that expands the audience’s awareness of the subject, revealing something that might otherwise remain dim, hidden, or missed if someone hasn’t paid attention.
Subject leads to predicate, starting from consciousness and gradually revealing the context. Each sentence operates like a narrative piñata readers whack with their imagination until the story spills out the fascinating gaps created by the author. The subject of a sentence indicates that readers need to notice a specific something; you’ve decided that a particular subject, some person/place/thing/idea deserves special focus at that moment, more than any other potential subject in the universe: pay attention to this. Then the predicate rewards the reader’s attention with meaningful detail and a juicy predicament, spilling the bits of emotional candy and treasure readers actually want.
Another way to think about a sentence: the subject presents a package and the predicate opens the package to reveal its contents. In practical terms that means the subject is often a literal subject, a person or item that is the intended focus, followed by a predicate that contains the verb and any complements (aka any information regarding the subject) that illuminate the world around the subject.
Just saying the word “Gollum” doesn’t summon a creature named Gollum to life. But consider: “Gollum lived on a slimy island of rock in the middle of the lake.” The subject “Gollum” tells us who needs our attention. The predicate “lived on a slimy island of rock in the middle of the lake.” situates this creature in the emotional and physical landscape of the story. His predicament snaps into focus around his name. Suddenly we know many things about this Gollum and his circumstances and can infer even more.
A sentence guides our attention with intention.
While the subject focuses attention on who to follow (lens), the predicate reveals everything we want to know (light), so that the subject can act upon and interact with the world of the story. At its core, a sentence tells us who to care about and why we should bother.
• “Ma Joong bit his lips till the blood trickled from his chin.” (The Chinese Nail Murders)
• “Jessica closed her eyes, feeling tears press out beneath the lids.” (Dune)
• “DeWitt Albright made me a little nervous.” (Devil in a Blue Dress)
• “Caligula swore to be revenged on Neptune.” (I, Claudius)
• “Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.” (The Golden Compass)
• “Vivian’s lips parted slowly until her teeth caught the light and glittered like knives.” (The Big Sleep)
Simple declarative sentences built as Subject > Verb > Object reproduce the way we perceive any experience: Someone…Does…Something. In story terms it creates snapshot of one moment in the narrative flow: Character > Context > Consequence. Note that this basic diction also echoes the three stages of human cognition: If/Then/Therefore. If we see a character, then their action, therefore we extrapolate and understand the result: narrative cause and effect at its most primal. Moving from the known to the unknown, the sentence unpacks as a dynamic moment we experience.
In essence, each sentence tells a brief story of its own: Verb + Target + Progress. Each has its own little narrative with a subject and a predicate, a person and a predicament, a character and characteristics that draw us forward, action by action. Gradually all those subjects (and objects) create the impression of a larger, living world we experience in our imaginations…an emotional ride worth taking.
By revealing fascinating subjects, actions, and objects, each mini-narrative bridges to the next and the next, sentences build into paragraphs which become chapters, and over the course of a novel those mini-stories accrete into a narrative inevitably more than the sum of its parts. Writers create patterns and shape attention to extract emotion: Stories work dramatically because they work grammatically.
Happily for authors in search of dramatic conflict, the predicament of the predicate requires moment-to-moment solutions.
Characters act because they’re unhappy and want to change that. In other words, they only act to achieve or acquire happiness. If your cast begins the story completely happy, they have nothing to do. They have nothing to want or find or change, and their inertia will kill the story.
What do they want? At what do they aim? All your characters need to want something passionately or else they’re furniture. And to be honest, anytime a book begins with your character talking about how bored they are, you’re probably about to bore your audience. Make their lives matter.
Aristotle pointed out that every plot asks “Will this character’s action lead to happiness?” The character’s high-stakes pursuit of an objective transforms them and the world around them for good or ill. Characters want to be exactly who they are and pursue things they believe will provide happiness. Ideally, they hope their actions will cover the shortest distance between their current location and their ultimate destination. The emotions and outcome are shaped by the genre.
When discussing a story, the average person defaults to the question, “What do the characters do?” because that tells them what kind of a ride to expect. The scale of the obstacles and opponents, the depth of the predicament—establish clear stakes and the emotional extremes the story will cover. When readers pick up a picture book about toddlers searching for a stuffed animal, they don’t expect raunch and mutilation or a witty discussion of late-stage capitalism.
Every character will have to face obstacles and opponents during their journey, whether it’s internal, external, or a wacky combo platter. What’s important is that those problems must be significant to the character’s transformation. External troubles need to induce internal grappling with issues. Internal difficulties should impact the way the character navigates the world around them.
Problems aren’t enough.
A predicament only creates stakes when it is significant to the character.
Simply piling on a bunch of accidents and attacks doesn’t make a book “exciting” unless they cause significant internal growth and reflection. Miring a book in deep-seated trauma and painful memories won’t make a book “deep” unless those issues shift the external progress in significant ways. The internal and external predicaments must intersect and interact meaningfully.
Genre operates like a sentence: subject and predicate need each other to create character and context. A subject needs to attract attention. A predicate needs to explain why the attention is warranted. Once your audience knows the predicament is significant, they can consider the person facing that predicament.
So…when it comes to your characters, what’s the big deal?
“Things do not happen in this world. They are brought about.”
Will Hays49
EXERCISE: Trouble Maker
One of the challenges of genre fiction is pushing the margins while still hitting your marks. Fans show up wanting a certain kind of story, but they still want you to surprise them, within limits. You have to show them something they don’t know they want…yet.
What kinds of unique predicaments do you enjoy writing for your characters and how do they appeal to your audience? How do those predicaments resemble the work of other genre authors and how do they distinguish you? Get specific:
1. Name your 5 go-to tropes or troubles when you’re planning a story.
2. Name 5 go-to tropes or troubles used by the stars of your genre and subgenre.
3. Identify at least 5 ways your list and the genre standards overlap and diverge. In what way do you meet reader expectations and then how do you exceed them? How is your work familiar and how is it unique?
• BONUS ROUND: Identify the one kind of trouble you write differently than anyone else in the genre. What makes it stand part? What special access or insight do you bring to that predicament?
All authors have comfort zones when it comes to character predicaments. Learn your habits and crutches, so that you’re always offering a fresh emotional landscape to your readers and they’ll return to take the next ride.
Nobody’s perfect.
No, seriously…even the most gracious and blessed human who ever drew breath had doubt, pain, damage, and disappointment. We live in compromise and cope with flaws, all of us. Part of mortal existence is the awareness that things and people go wrong sometimes and the subsequent burden of that awareness.
The same is true of the imaginary friends who populate your pages. No matter how clever, gorgeous, or gifted, your characters all experience damage, need, and lack. At least, they do if you want other humans to empathize and sympathize and pay attention to them.
Why do we rubberneck at accidents? Why do we gossip and complain? What’s so satisfying about tabloid scandal and secret flirtations and the fall of the mighty? Where’s the rub between what we want and what we get, between order and chaos, change and stasis, itch and scratch, yours and mine, rich and poor, us and them?
That’s the key to all storytelling: Problems fascinate us.
Our brains are wired to extrapolate from given details. Primate gray matter evolved to identify patterns and solve problems. We’re monkeys who enjoy figuring stuff out. Trouble drags our attention toward it as our minds scramble for a solution, a fix, a balm, a bridge over the alligators. Friction between expectations and events produces energy and attention because we want to know what happens next.
When you introduce a story without a problem (“Once upon a time, they lived happily ever after.”) you deny your curious audience the pleasure of figuring out what the big deal is. Without stakes, without risk, stories are boring. Your audience won’t care because without friction they cannot care. Something needs to be going on underneath the surface.
My term for this fundamental character problem is the Void. Other writers may refer to it as the fatal flaw, inner obstacle, wound, scar, gap, injury, shadow, issue, or skeleton in the closet. I call it the void because each of these other monikers potentially skews characterization in distracting or narrow directions.
• A fatal flaw doesn’t always kill you and isn’t always an obvious detriment.
• A problem can be minor, ridiculous, or baffling.
• An inner obstacle may stay locked in psychology without manifesting externally or dramatically.
• A wound sounds physical and/or limited to a single incident.
• A scar that has healed may cease to trouble anyone.
• An injury might be superficial, imaginary, or temporary.
• A proverbial “skeleton in the closet” may be shared by many members of a group or family.
On the other hand, Voids are powerful, central, and unavoidable. Defined by absence or need, they create their own lines of force with a relentless, driving appetite that resists solution or completion. The void bends time, space, and energy like a black hole within the character. Escaping a void is impossible, but characters never stop trying.
The void is Carl Jung’s Shadow. Sigmund Freud called it the Id. Pop psych refers to it as “issues” and “baggage.” All of them orbit the same idea. Every believable character has a personal void that affects all of their actions and choices, which drives their steps and haunts their happiness. What does your character a-void?
The void motivates all character decisions and actions. Even if the audience never learns or observes that void directly, you need to plumb its depths to write any character credibly. Consider some of the examples above, and you’ll notice that voids share certain simple features:
• a problematic emptiness, need, or absence that sucks
• deep resonance and personal significance
• an origin situated in the past
• persistent influence on character emotions and actions
• no serious relief until story’s end
Remember Voids always suck, in every sense of the word: they’re painful, hollow, and insatiable, perpetual vacuums with a bottomless capacity to darken and destroy. Like the mainspring of a clock, a void is a tight coil that never stops unwinding, which makes it the source of greatest personal danger to the character. Strong characters avoid the void and never stop battling its inexorable drag on all their efforts.
For our purposes, your character’s void becomes an unsolvable problem that drives all their actions. This topic really needs more space than I can afford it in this book, but for now, ask yourself what creates problems for your character and how will they try to grapple with that essential void in pursuit of the happiness they want.
• The murder of Harry Potter’s parents leaves him orphaned and exiled, disposing him to trust (and mistrust) the wrong people at the worst moments. (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone)
• The abuse from Lizbeth Salander’s father drives her into arson, an asylum, and painful isolation as a hacker while empowering enemies who threaten her life, her allies, and her country. (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)
• The enslavement of Kunta Kinte tears him from his home and thrusts him into a hostile, brutal country that crushes his youthful idealism and severs his descendants’ links to their complex heritage. (Roots)
• Jon Snow’s mysterious illegitimacy instills a crippling chivalry in him, living alongside a loving family he cannot save, then exiles him to defend the literal edge of his world where he faces betrayal and destruction. (A Game of Thrones)
• The fatal illness of Anne Elliot’s mother crushes her confidence, blocks her marriage, and leaves her wrangling self-absorbed loafers determined to ruin themselves and her chance of finding her own overdue happy ending. (Persuasion)
• William of Baskerville’s false recantation allows the Inquisition to burn an innocent man, profanes his faith, empowers his enemies, leaves him rootless, and promotes superstition that empowers a serial murderer and a gross miscarriage of justice. (The Name of the Rose)
• After the untimely death of Ellie Arroway’s supportive father, she abandons her family and faith to embrace the freaky extremes of astrophysics, then risks a respected research career on a mission that violates all her scientific principles. (Contact)
For each of these characters, their void directs all their actions while simultaneously draining, dampening, and derailing their energy, making the goal they pursue both impossible and essential. Think of Gollum’s stolen golden “birthday present” (The Lord of the Rings), Officer Bud White’s abusive upbringing (L.A. Confidential), or Clarice Starling’s screaming lambs (The Silence of the Lambs); those horrible memories define those characters and direct their actions irrevocably. The void produces excruciating tension forcing the character into dramatic action.
Knowing the persistent problem that motivates your character will help aim that at a challenging, significant, relatable goal. It helps specify their intention by anchoring their action in past pain. Through the magic of empathy, we stick pins in our action figures and cause reader feelings at a distance. Knowing the void can activate every scene and spare your audience reams of backstory.
As it happens, your readers instinctively look for a character’s void, because we do the same thing every time we meet people: gauge their issues, suss their psychology, look for their tells, try to figure out what makes them tick…the unstable core in their nuclear reactor. They may not even be able to put a finger on the instinct, but the void is the reason Mary Sues and deus ex machinas ruin stories. In the absence of a void, their fakeness becomes insufferable: plastic dolls pins cannot pierce. Their bland blankness offers no point of access with which to identify and empathize.
Voids are inherently personal, and so they establish basic boundaries and expectations for the reader by indicating the outer limits of emotional experience for this set of characters in this world. Even better, the void is scalable for any story, expanding and contracting to accommodate infinite narratives and any type of emotional ride. During the writing process, a void becomes a limitless power source, a kind of emotional icing gun that directs the character as she or he emerges on the page, shaping everything your character feels, thinks, says, makes, and does.
Pro tip: Accentuate positive intentions. Definite actions and objectives will always outperform reactions based on fear. Rather than focusing on the negatives that motivate your character, see what kinds of positive goals you can place before them to keep them moving in clear, specific directions. Especially with your protagonist, antagonist, and other central characters, favor actions that move characters toward an object of desire rather than away from an opponent or obstacle.
When a character flees or denies something, the destination or truth may remain unspecified, blurring and obscuring their action. That undirected murkiness creates a veil that separates your reader from empathizing with the character or engaging with their action. Instead, the same character could pursue an adversary away from a location or prove their innocence via evidence. Positive actions focus character energy and create a clear arc during a scene.
We want to see a character win a specific challenge, not avoid failure. Negatives derail and deaden character efforts; a character cannot play a negative in a scene. Avoidance and deflection make your characters less specific and less intentional in their actions. In other words, give your character an objective that demands fascinating action, rather than a turgid backstory that permits endless reactions. For powerful scenes and characters, keep intentions positive so they stay significant, challenging, and relatable.
To go back to grammar for a moment, the void creates every predicament you’ll need for all those predicates that your subjects face during the story. The void acts as a kind of hardwired power grid for a character, sparking their energy and giving it a framework to flow through.
With a void defined, a character cannot freeze and a story cannot stall because they always have something to fight. If you ever get stuck, ask how the character’s void forces them, specifically, to handle the opportunities and threats in this situation.
By getting specific about the emptiness that drives each of your characters, you create meaningful history, context, subtext, and impetus for their actions. It’s the key in the ignition, the gas in the tank, the foot on the pedal that starts the story rolling.
“Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust
Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.”
John Webster50
EXERCISE: Inner Space
The pain, scars, lacks, and needs of a character impact every element in their creation. Take a moment to craft a meaningful void at the center of each of your main characters. What do they a-void? What really sucks for them?
If you don’t know anything specifically about the root of their troubles, start with what you do know. Consider contrasts and events that seemed evident from the start. Look at their actions and overarching goals and trace backward along their personal trajectory to look for the point of origin. What might motivate each of them to pursue these objectives through darkness and doubt? What gnaws at them and goads them on even when they’re exhausted, dismayed, or depleted?
Frame it grammatically:
• “Because of [past event], I can never satisfy [bottomless need], which constantly messes with my actions/efforts by [chronic, concrete problem].”
Or alternatively…
• “My [persistent problem] keeps me trapped in a cycle of [negative tendency] that [harmful verb]s all my attempts to accomplish my goals.”
When working out a passionate relationship, whether amorous or clamorous, look for opportunities to make those voids exacerbate each other. Their voids power the actions, so you can set up fundamental friction that sparks gonzo chemistry.
Remember: Voids always suck. Don’t be afraid to dig deep or go dark. Better to learn the outer limits of the character. You can always dial it back.
Characters do things (actions) because they want things (objectives). So what exactly do your characters need to do and why? Before we get down to brass tacks, I want to take a moment to discuss one of the most popular rubrics in genre fiction: Goal-Motivation-Conflict.
Writing instructor Dwight Swain collated many (if not most) of the core lessons about writing mass-market fiction in the twentieth century: hooks, scene and sequel, motivation-reaction, goals and conflict. Since the 1965 publication of Techniques of the Selling Writer, his methods have been adopted, adapted, and outright burgled by plenty of books and classes. Through a series of happy accidents, Swain and his wife became good friends with the founders of the Romance Writers of America, cementing his influence as a teacher and theoretician of genre fiction. Because of RWA’s outsize influence on genre writing, several of his ideas became established norms in modern storytelling.
Full disclosure: I’m a fierce Swain fan. Several techniques I tackle in this book expand upon Swain’s no-nonsense approach to visceral entertainment.
Of course, his writing guides come to us from another era, drier and less accessible than the average modern craft manual. In 1991 a romance author named Debra Dixon boiled down several of Swain’s central ideas in a much-beloved book entitled GMC: Goal, Motivation, and Conflict for a contemporary audience using a central characterization mnemonic:
• GOAL: the crucial outcome
• MOTIVATION: the unstoppable force
• CONFLICT: the immovable obstacle
Identifying these three essentials aligns story structure around character action with coherent, believable behavior capable of carrying a narrative. GMC’s strength derives from simplicity and scalability: anyone can explain what a character wants (G), why (M), and what interferes (C).
In practice, GMC maps a character’s energy by explaining their behavior in context. A character takes action to pursue a goal because of motivation despite conflict. Even the most instinctive author can extrapolate from GMC and get a sense of the force driving a character’s action and tactics. GMC exploits tension to reveal attention and intention, helping authors focus on character agency.
Twenty-five years later, thanks to Dixon’s canny simplification of Swain’s core ideas, GMC has become an accepted truism across genre publishing. GMC is so ubiquitous in our industry that there are teachers who pretend its universality is something ineffable rather than the result of Swain’s experience, craft, and tenacity or Dixon’s skill at condensing his ideas.
I suspect GMC works so well for authors at every level because it creates a context for characterization usable across genres, modes, and experience levels. At its root, GMC is so flexible because it expresses time.
• GOAL: A clear target maps a trajectory for a story and gives readers expectations about the character’s future.
• MOTIVATION: Wounds and scars map the history which help readers understand the character’s past.
• CONFLICT: Obstacles and opponents define capacities and strengths which make readers identify with the character’s present.
To be clear, I think GMC provides a rock-solid starting point for structure and scene development because it unpacks plot as an intersection in time, situating characters in a given moment to set up the transformations to come. All stories are expressions of time: characters operate within time and reading a book forces readers to spend their time paying attention to imaginary incidents, alchemically transmuting fake-world time to elicit real-world emotions. Magic.
Since all characters (and all stories) operate over a period of time, GMC presents a user-friendly rubric to break down abstract concepts about behavior and background in easily dramatized chunks, pantsing for the plot-addicted and plotting for the plot averse.
Useful? Without question. Scalable? Absolutely. Straightforward? Well…
GMC remains a flexible, popular tool with tangible benefits. For pantsers, it establishes enough meaningful detail without hemming them in or stifling their impulses. For plotters, it situates a character in their world and anchors their emotions with resonant purpose. For folks who’ve never bothered with Aristotle, it reminds them to keep action front and center. GMC is simple enough to support newbies but resonant enough to shore up the efforts of old pros.
Having said that, GMC leaves so much unspoken and undefined that it doesn’t actually create characters effectively. It works, but it doesn’t actually work as advertised. Great for scene structure, shaky for characterization. Cue pitchforks! Please bear with me.
I have serious respect for Dixon’s encapsulation of Swain’s ideas, but please note that GMC only addresses character indirectly. It establishes a context by which an author can deduce character via the process of elimination: the character who pursues this goal because of this motivation despite this conflict should appear in my story. Notice that GMC never answers the basic questions: Who is my character? How do I verbalize the person on the page? GMC only creates a negative space into which the character fits, like folded and taped wrapping paper with no present inside.
In fact, GMC characterizes by establishing everything other than the character.
It nails down the critical objects external to a given subject, without ever addressing characterization directly and specifically. GMC’s method is algebraic (e.g. 2+X= 5 therefore X=3) because it never actually reveals X. By knowing the character’s GMC, you can presumably eventually extrapolate the unknown X of character indirectly by process of elimination and then write it…somehow. Grammatically, it’s all predicate with no subject.
Forensic investigators call this a “void pattern,” the bare outline created when blood spatter or other markings reveal an object that’s been removed from a crime scene, a kind of definition by negation. GMC creates a void pattern where characterization should occur and then expects you to fill the space created by the context. If nothing else, that seems specious and inefficient.
Who tries to cook a meal using a list of all the ingredients you don’t need and all the preparation you won’t use? Decide some stuff and once you find the gaps then [insert characterization]? Underpants gnomes on ice! Magic happens here…good luck!
GMC is helpful, but it skirts characterization and (frustratingly) doesn’t address the actual writing process at all. Like impersonal ads, GMC leaves an author to extrapolate characters and capture them on paper as best they can…somehow…at some point down the line. When GMC assists characterization, it’s not by design. It’s more like cutting a steak with scissors.
There is a better way.
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
Joseph Chilton Pearce51
EXERCISE: Hard Time
Stories have to unfold and GMC allows you to situate the characters in time. Every character occupies a series of moments on-page and off, but without context their presence is pointless. What do you think each character in your cast would do for the entire story to move themselves from the past, through the present, and toward their desired future?
• Identify the goal, motivation, and conflict for your main characters.
o GOAL: the crucial outcome in the character’s future
o MOTIVATION: the unstoppable force in the character’s past
o CONFLICT: the immovable obstacle in the character’s present
• Make a list of things this character might do throughout the book to achieve happiness inspired by and in spite of their circumstances.