Harrison Scott Key writes, “This is not from The Onion. I repeat, (re-read previous sentence).”

I love it. Here’s what he’s referring to. The hypothetical questions they should ask at the presidential debates.

In case you’re waiting for an update, I got my material off to the agent without a problem (that I’m aware of) last night. She replied, apologetically, that it might take a couple days for her to get back to me. I have to assume that’s some kind of joke. To hear back from an agent within the same month qualifies as warp speed by industry standards. Stephen King gets that kind of service from his agent. Maybe.

Tonight’s subject will be another lesson in storytelling from The Superannuated Author (I just flashed on a memory of The Old Ranger, who used to introduce “Death Valley Days” on TV when I was a kid. If you only remember Ronald Reagan doing that job, it’s because you’re a young whippersnapper. I liked The Old Ranger. I think I had the idea he was The Lone Ranger’s father).

Here’s a plotting problem that trips up amateurs. You have a character whose personality you’ve established over the course of your story. Suddenly you come to a plot point where you need him to do X. And you realize that your character wouldn’t do X. He doesn’t “want” to do it. It’s not the sort of thing a guy like him would do in real life.

If you’re an amateur, you just make him do what you want. “Who’s in charge, anyway?” You say.

This is bad. Your intelligent reader will say, “Where did that come from?” and not in an admiring way. By forcing your character to do X without proper motivation, you’re reminding the reader that he’s not reading a true account, but a made-up story. You pull him out of the narrative experience. He may finish the book, but he probably won’t buy another.

So how do you deal with this problem?

Well, you can always go back and change your character’s personality to make him someone who’s more likely to do what you need him to do. That’s a possible solution, but not optimal. You probably made this character the way you did for some reason. The surgery you do on his character is likely to leave scars. And doing things that are easy for you isn’t very dramatic.

Another, better way to handle the problem is to make it work for you.

What drives plot? Conflict.

What makes people do things they don’t want to do in real life? Conflict. Stress. Fear. And these things are all useful to the writer.

Take a broad, over-obvious example. Let’s say you’ve created a character called, say, Bruce (following up on my staunch defense of that proud old name yesterday at the American Spectator Online). Bruce, needless to say, is strong, handsome and dauntless. But he has a weakness (if your hero has no weaknesses, give him some. How’s he going to learn anything if he has nothing to learn? And having him learn something is what the story’s all about). He is afraid of… oh, water. Can’t swim. Terrified of drowning. Nearly drowned when he was a kid; ended up with a phobia.

Then your plot calls for him to go to England. And the story’s set in the 19th Century, when the only way to get to England is by ship.

You can’t have Bruce just get on the ship and go. Even if you say something like, “Although he didn’t like to, he bravely boarded the ship.” That’s weak. There’s no drama, and your reader is suspicious of his sudden attack of self-mastery.

No, this is your opportunity to ramp up the tension. Have Bruce think about sailing, try to buy a ticket once or twice, and then lose his nerve. He’s terrified. He can’t handle it. He’s ready to give up.

Now your reader is interested. He knows Bruce needs to go to England; he knows Bruce won’t board a ship. How will this problem be solved?

You solve it by doing what God does in real life. You increase the pressure. Have your lovely, spunky heroine be kidnapped by the villain, who smuggles her on board a ship bound for England.

If you’ve established Bruce’s passion for his lover sufficiently, you can now show him buying his ticket and climbing the gangplank, shivering, sweating, weak at the knees, feeling like he’s going to die. But he overcomes his fear because of his great love.

This is believable, because most of us know the power of love to force people out of their comfort zones. And it’s good for the story, because the reader has experienced Bruce’s fear. The reader pities him, and at the same time admires him for doing what he’s scared to do.

This works with external fears and internal fears. It works for main characters and secondary characters.

But you should listen to your characters too. Sometimes they have suggestions of their own, which turn out to be better than your original plan.

There are two characters called Eystein and Deirdre in The Year of the Warrior. He’s a Viking warrior, she’s a widowed Irish slave. My original plan for them was to have them fall in love, but then to have her father, a rich Irishman, come to find her in Norway and take her home. This is the sort of ending I generally give the romantic elements in my books. Can’t imagine why…

But as I thought the story out, I realized that, given their situations, it just made more sense for Deirdre to send her father home alone and stay with Eystein. So I wrote it that way. I think the story is better for it, if only through avoiding predictability. I don’t want the reader to think he can figure out how I’ll resolve every issue.

There wouldn’t be any drama in that.