A story is told of Wild Bill Hickok in his later, declining years. Wild Bill had given up on law enforcement after accidentally killing a friend while stopping a riot (it’s believed his eyesight was failing). He’d tried stage acting with Buffalo Bill Cody, but couldn’t bear it. He was subsisting as a professional gambler, spending his days in saloons and (occasionally) his nights in jail for vagrancy.

Admirers surrounded him in the saloons, and he’d regale them with stories. Tall tales about his days as an Indian scout. He’d describe a situation where he was alone on a hill, wounded, his horse dead, nearly out of ammunition, surrounded by thousands of Indians charging on horseback.

“What did you do, Wild Bill?” a wide-eyed audience member would ask.

“I got killed,” he would answer. And everyone would laugh and somebody would buy him a drink.

This illustrates Problem Number Two in story plotting, in my personal sequence.

I think it was last week that I wrote here about plotting problems. I referred to a difficulty I’ve mentioned often – that of the author’s (and by the author’s I mean mainly my) difficulty in testing our characters to the extremes. This is Problem Number One.

Since then, Plotting Problem Number Two has occurred to me. It’s the problem Wild Bill solved with his joke:

You have succeeded in inventing a horrible problem for your hero to solve.

Now, how do you resolve it?

Let me make a revelation – writers are not necessarily more resourceful in real life than the average member of the population. Indeed, I’m not sure most of us are in the upper percentile. If I wanted a non-literary problem solved in real life, I think an author would be one of my last choices for a resource person. I suspect a successful businessman might be optimal.

In general, however, as storytellers, what we do is cheat.

Fortunately, we have the advantage of being in control of time, in our small created worlds.

“I could get my hero out of this corner if he had a Swiss Army Knife,” I decide after pondering the problem for a while.

As the almighty author of the story, I can then go back a few pages and insert a scene to provide him with that Swiss Army Knife. I might show him putting on his coat and feeling its weight in his pocket. Perhaps he thinks then that he never uses the thing and it’s wearing on the fabric. He ponders unburdening himself of it, but he’s in a hurry.

Voila! He now has the knife when he needs it.

(The brilliant William Goldman has a laugh at such a situation in the clip from “The Princess Bride” above.)

But my Swiss Army Knife is a very simple example. Not very creative.

The sneakier you can be, the better.

Suppose he doesn’t need a pocket knife. Suppose he finds out he’s been poisoned. He tries to induce vomiting with a finger down his throat, but he can’t make it work.

Ah, but you, the sneaky author, can go back and add a scene in the first part of the story where the hero’s landlady forces a Tupperware bowl of her onion soup on him. He throws it into the back seat of his car, meaning to discard it. Because she always does this, and he hates onion soup.

But now he crawls to his car, finds the container of soup, and slurps it down. And it tastes so disgusting to him that he’s enabled to empty his stomach, thus saving his life.

I remember a story I read years ago. I think it was one of Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective stories. A couple characters in this particular story comment about how badly the detective hero dresses – they particularly criticize the cheap polyester ties he wears.

Later in the story, the detective discovers his girlfriend, who struggles with depression, has hanged herself with one of his ties.

The author inserts a break in the story at this point, to let us despair along with his character.

Then we have a scene (spoiler alert) where he’s talking to the doctor who treated the woman. The doctor says what saved her life was the cheap polyester tie, which stretched so much that it slowed her asphyxiation.

Nice trick, neatly executed.