101 TIWIK #41: Obstacles to Opportunities

Sometimes when you craft a setting, you come up against obstacles that seem insurmountable. With all other aspects of writing, you can rig the game a bit–plot not working? Just adjust it until it does. Characters not cooperating? Kill them off, or change parts of their backstory so they do what you want.

But with setting, you end up having to work within the parameters of the world you’ve chosen (if you’re writing contemporary or historical fiction) or created (if you’re writing world-built speculative fiction). While you have some leeway, especially with a created world, you still have to work with the rules you’ve set. If you’ve crafted or researched your world thoroughly, you’ll see that things are connected, and once you break one rule, others fall apart. You might end up unraveling the entire story world by changing one thing.

For example, say you have a mountain range built into your story world, and a city on the other side that the characters must reach by a certain date. This presents an obstacle. You have to somehow, and feasibly, get the characters over this mountain range. It might not even be feasible at all. Maybe it’s too late in the season and the passes are snowed in. Even with yeti-camels, they’ll never make it in time.

Do you remove the mountains from the setting? If you do, you’ll have to reconsider many, many factors in the story-world. The mountains will affect the climate, economy, ecology, and even culture of the setting. Remove them, and you’ll have to rethink things altogether.

Instead of tearing your hair out over this seeming insurmountable obstacle, consider turning it into an opportunity. Think of how Tolkien got Frodo et al through the mountains in the mines of Moria. Make the solution to the problem difficult and costly to the characters, and the readers will be far more engaged.

Here are a few possible obstacles your setting may present, and some suggested opportunities to turn them into.

Obstacle: An insurmountable distance

Opportunity: A journey of growth for the character(s).

Obstacle: A impassable landscape feature

Opportunity: A dangerous or costly way around, under, or over

Obstacle: A law that makes it illegal for the character to do what needs to be done

Opportunity: A moral dilemma that will reveal the character’s inner struggle

Obstacle: A limitation in the magic system that makes it impossible for the character to win a battle

Opportunity: The character is forced to rely on something other than magic, and inner strengths of the character are revealed

Obstacle: A social restriction that means two characters can’t be lovers

Opportunity: The characters are forced to question their society

And so forth–as you read this list, you may start to think, “why, I can imbed obstacles in setting in order to create opportunities of character growth and plot momentum!”

So you can. Yep, just like the old chicken and the egg question. The beauty of working the problem backwards as it were– finding the obstacles already present in the setting and turning them into opportunities–is that they don’t seem manufactured to the readers. I’m not sure which approach Tolkien took in LOTR, but we don’t question that there happens to be an extremely dangerous way under the mountains. It fits the story-world’s history precisely. Now, you could work it the other way around, but you have to take a lot of care to mesh the manufactured obstacle into the story world so that it doesn’t seem like a gimmick. Manufacturing an obstacle into setting runs the same risk as removing an obstacle from setting.

What obstacles are present in your settings? What opportunities might they present?

That concludes the mini-series on Setting! Next week, we’ll spend some time on the last of the Four Elements of Writing: Theme.

But on Monday, I’ll take a short break from 101 TIWIK for another fun travelling blog: this one is a character interview! 

This post is part of a series of 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book. Start reading the series at the beginning. 

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