• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

• She's inherited a business but can't run it herself; he has the expertise to run it but not the money to buy it.

• He needs a fiance to help him close a business deal, and she needs money to finish school.

The more solid and down-to-earth the short-term problem is, the easier it will be to construct a plot. Though the character can have more than one problem going on at a time, it's most useful for story development if the short-term problem is confined to one clearly stated problem per character—either a single problem (hat involves them both or two related problems.

New writers often come up with very amorphous initial conflicts, such as:

• Neither of the characters wants to take the chance of trusting again.

• He has to make her accept a truth she doesn't want to face.

• They've each been deceived in the past and won't tolerate being lied to again.

While those concepts can be developed into interesting problems, they're hard to grasp, hard to illustrate, and hard to write about.

And they're actually long-term problems—character flaws or painful past experiences—rather than short-term ones. Lack of trust, unwillingness to corn-mit, and bad past relationships often play a big part in the characters' eventual development and growth, but they're hard to get a grip on when they're set up as the initial problem.

If the characters' mutual problem is lack of trust, what do they talk about throughout the story? If they could actually discuss their difficulty in trusting, they'd be two-thirds of the way to solving the problem—but they can't trust each other enough to talk about it. Worse, without a certain amount of trust, there's not much else to talk about—and characters who have nothing to talk about are very hard to write about.

If, on the other hand, your two characters are at odds about who gets custody of the kid, or how to handle the business they've inherited, or what they're going to do about their marriage of convenience after it's not convenient to be married anymore, then they have lots of stuff that they must talk about—and they have many opportunities to test, explore, and discover that the other is a person who can be trusted after all.

Remember that a short-term problem is not a single event, so it can't be solved in a single step. "While rock climbing, Julie falls off a cliff" isn't a true short-term problem; she'll either be rescued or she'll die, and in either case the story is over.

The real short-term problem is what got her onto the cliff in the first place. Is she trying to protect the precious papers she's carrying from the bad guy who's pursuing her? Is she learning to climb because the man she thinks she loves insists he won't marry her unless she shares his hobby of rock climbing? In either of these cases (or a hundred others), when she's rescued she still faces the problem that got her onto the cliff, plus she has the complications of a broken leg and a black eye and the hero—who rescued her—hanging around.

Some additional examples of complex short-term problems include:

• A hero who is offered a job in a different city, but a heroine who doesn't want to leave her challenging career to follow him.

• A heroine who wants to have a baby, but a hero who thinks he'd be a terrible dad.

• A heroine and hero who must work together despite a painful past relationship.

The key to all of these problems is that they create conflict and tension between the two characters, and they all offer potential for increasing complexity and involvement.

If your short-term problem isn't the sort that grows more complicated, you may be tempted to toss in unrelated obstacles in an attempt to create extra trouble for the characters. Your heroine might fall out of a tree, get hit by a car, and encounter a rattlesnake all in the first three chapters. But adding obstacles is not the same as developing a conflict, because one obstacle doesn't lead into or cause the next; they're just random happenings. Unless each event contributes to the advancement