Obstacles: The Point of Ignition (Scene Alchemy #3)
In the same way a fire needs oxygen, fuel, and heat, speculative fiction novels have three things they need to catch light:
An interesting character who provides the air a story needs to breathe.
A powerful goal, creating the fuel to sustain things.
And an obstacle that’s getting in their way. The spark that sets everything aflame.
Our protagonist is important, and their goal even more so. But without the life-giving crackle of obstacles, it’s all just a pile of wood sitting out in the open air. Inert.
To bring it roaring into life, things need to go horribly wrong.
What Conflict Is, and What It Isn’t
Conflict suffers from the same misconceptions as action.
Some writers think that it’s all gun battles and car chases. But it’s much simpler (and much more useful) than that:
Conflict = Goal + Obstacle
The problems that get in the way of our protagonist’s goal can be anything: the wrong ingredient for a recipe, something left behind while moving house, navigating bad blood with their best friend. Sometimes, it’s two characters who both want different things. Or who want the same thing but in different ways. Most intoxicating of all: obstacles also happen when the character’s past mistakes come back to haunt them.
The best problems aren’t just a locked door. They’re a guard that must be bribed or convinced.
They happen when the character must sacrifice something they love to get what they want.
And they’re there when the protagonist reaches some goal, only to get more than they bargained for.
In short: if your character takes action, and something gets in the way? You’ve found an obstacle. And one of the things your scenes need to shine.
The Trouble with Internal Obstacles
I see a lot of stories when the thing getting in the character’s way is themselves.
They need to take action, but they’re scared. They doubt themselves. They’re faced with a moral dilemma.
The problem is that speculative fiction, more than almost any other genre, lives and breathes through what actually happens. It exists to make the intangible into something physically real. So, if we want the reader to feel the tension (and keep frantically turning the pages) we often need to do one of two things:
Dramatise the internal obstacle, transforming it into an external one.
Weave the internal struggle around an external one, and let those outer obstacles keep everything moving.
Dramatising: making the intangible tangible
Remember Evelyn? Our would-be knight from the first post who discovers that her dead father was actually a corrupt monster? She can be our victim today.
While she’s investigating her father’s past, perhaps she happens upon the site of a decades-old massacre: old bones and broken weapons, half buried by earth and fallen leaves. She knows her father was responsible for those deaths, but she doesn’t want to admit it.
With a purely internal obstacle, we might have several chapters where she thinks about it, tries to find alternative explanations or excuse his actions...and nothing really happens. She’s stuck in her own way, and the reader is yelling at her to get over it. Desperate for the story to move on.
We can do better than that.
What if, the night after discovering the massacre, she wakes up in the pitch dark to see the howling ghost of one of her father’s victims. Silent and static, like a photograph. Its face twisted in a ghastly mask of betrayal. Now, we have a juicy external obstacle we can use against her.
She goes back to her training, an important scene where she must prove herself capable to her sword master after skipping out the day before. But as she goes to deliver the final strike, she sees that phosphorescent ghost in front of her, and everything goes wrong. She fails and gets kicked back down to basic training.
Now, her reluctance becomes something tangible. And those chapters where she flopped around, complaining about things and not going anywhere? They’ve become something much more visceral and interesting.
Mixing external and internal struggles
The other option is to weave internal struggles through external obstacles to help keep tension in the story.
So, maybe there’s no pointing ghost of a past murder victim. Perhaps we let that struggle stay entirely internal, and Evelyn goes back to her training. But she’s distracted, and we dial up the external challenge enough to make her suffer. Instead of a simple training test, she’s sent out with a few other knights-in-training to catch some petty smugglers.
Only she is still thinking about that massacre. About her father. She makes a mistake and doesn’t see one of the smugglers coming with a knife. One of her friends gets hurt.
Again, we avoid the scenes where she sits around just thinking about it. Instead, we force her to deal with these internal struggles alongside the external plot. Both feed into each other. And in either case, things keep happening.
The reader stays invested.
And we, the writer, smile quietly behind the scenes.
Then we ruin our character’s day even more.
Writing in Practice: The Art of Making Things Worse
One of the most important questions we can ask while we’re writing is:
What’s the worst possible thing that could happen at this point? And what if it actually happened?
As writers, we tend to keep our powder dry—holding things back for later or protecting our characters. Making the reader wait. Instead, ask yourself: What if this happened right now? What would happen next?
Plotters and planners tend to fall particularly foul of this issue. Because we know where the story is going, we subtly smooth the road to help our characters get there. If there’s a locked door, then one of our characters suddenly has a lockpicking skill. If they need a piece of information, then their friend or love interest already knows it. Or maybe it’s sitting right there, waiting in the first book that they open.
But to hold the reader’s attention, things need to feel unexpected.
To achieve that, we must start looking for problems instead of solutions. Let the character try the thing and fail. Increase the number of seemingly impossible problems standing in their way and ask: How would they try to deal with this?
A writer’s job is to be the arsonist of everything we know and love.
For the sake of our characters and their story, we must learn to set everything aflame.
Asking the Alchemist—Questions & Answers
Can there be multiple obstacles in one scene? If so, how do I manage them?
There absolutely can and often should be many different obstacles and problems! There’s just one condition: make sure they’re resolved one at a time, instead of throwing them all in together.
The protagonist escapes from their cell and runs into a guard. They almost get away, then stumble on some stairs and twist their ankle. The door at the end of the hallway is locked.
If we want our scenes to stay focused (and we absolutely want our scenes to stay focused!) let the character deal with one issue, succeed or fail, then add something else.
Hitting them with everything at once will likely just cause confusion, jumble the narrative, and mean the reader gets lost.
How do I stop the obstacles and problems from becoming repetitive?
Escalate. Don’t be afraid to make things worse, then make them worse again.
Often, it works best when we start with something small and build from there: the door is locked, so the character tries to pick it. The pick snaps off in the lock, and now the mechanism is jammed. Someone is coming.
Start with one small problem, then add more. Add bigger problems. Let things go wrong.
Your readers (and editors!) will thank you for it.
How do I know if an obstacle is strong enough to create tension?
Is it standing between the character and their goal?
Is it enough of an obstacle that they can’t overcome it easily?
Does it force them to try things, improvise, and work to try and figure out a way forward?
If so, it’s enough!
What if there are no obvious obstacles in a scene? Can it still work?
Sometimes, but very rarely.
We do have breathing points during a novel—lulls in the action where the reader gets to absorb what’s just happened and process things. Usually, they come immediately after some Big and Dramatic Plot Point™
But we only get a very small number of these over the course of a novel. Perhaps just two or three, almost certainly less than half a dozen.
The more of these lulls we have (and especially when they follow one after another) the more the story comes to a halt.
In many cases, a minor problem or low-stakes issue will keep things ticking over. Remember, not all obstacles are sword fights and car drifting. A person or object that isn’t where it’s meant to be, an unexpected piece of information, or a friend falling sick can all help inject tension into an otherwise lifeless scene. Just make sure it’s at least partially in the way of your character’s goal.
Something I haven’t covered? Leave your own questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them!
Conduct Your Own Experiments
If you want to explore conflict and obstacles further, here’s something to try:
Identify a problem or roadblock in one of your scenes.
Is it external, or purely internal resistance?
Does it present a significant obstacle—something that forces your character to adapt, take a risk, or try something new?
What is at stake here? What good thing will they get if they succeed? Or what bad thing will happen if they fail?
If you’re missing sufficient external conflict, ask yourself: what’s one concrete thing that could get in the character’s way here? How can I make their life unpleasant in some small (or not so small) way?
🔥 Lighting a Fire Under Your Story
Last week, we held our fourth Writers’ Room workshop. One subscriber brought a story they’d been struggling with. They received the same professional feedback I give to my developmental editing clients—plus input from the rest of our community.
Submissions for our June workshop are now open.
We’d love to have you with us.
Omg "The reader is yelling at the character to get over it." Yes! Loved your observation that speculative fiction, especially, is about things happening in the interesting outer world.
The situations that bother me the most are the ones where the CHARACTER thinks something is an obstacle, but the READER knows it isn't. Like, one MC is convinced that no one will ever love them, but the reader knows that the other MC is head over heels (or will be).
Maybe the best inner obstacles are areas for character growth that aren't obvious within the genre or "blurb plotline." Like, the inner-obstacle resolution can't be a foregone conclusion from whatever you have telegraphed to get readers involved in the story.
If we know the character will be eventually be accepted to the magical academy (why we picked up the book in the first place), all her fears now about not getting in just seem tedious.
What do you think? Am I making sense here? (Sorry this was a longer comment- it took a bit to figure out what I was trying to say!)
This is one of the core problem with me and writing. I often feel that the constant obstacles feel too artificial and doesn't feel like the kind of story I want to tell. I tried some alternatives to do what I have in mind, but not quite sure if they actually works.
In the ensemble I'm close to completing, there's some sort of shared trauma between each characters that a direct obstacle to one would add tension to other characters long before I have to pit one character against another.
It kinda works. Still feels rather weak for me. But the interconnectedness means adding slight tension requires a ton of words and a ton more rechecking on parts across the entire story. Not confident on my ability to take on that mission quite yet.
Tried another way to create conflict in one of my post here by juxtapositioning internal chaotic evil character voice on neutral good appearing character. Don't know if that works, but sure is an interesting experiment.
Finally, I have to say that writing shorts on someone else's lead (be it prompts or actual other person) helps a planner like me ruin the well-crafted plans my characters had. I discover a lot of tools through that experiment. There are many ways to keep the tension and things like escalation, revelation, and resolution can pull a double duty across different aspects of the story.
Anyways, thanks for writing yet another great article!