Obstacles

A story is basically a description of how the intrepid hero overcomes the obstacles between him and his goal.

I have not been explicitly writing down the obstacles. That shall change. In my OutlineThingy document, I have the cross-chapter arcs and the chapter goals. I have not written down the obstacle. I will now to be sure it both there and overcome.

That’s not the point of this. The point is that I see a taxonomy.

• Simple / Stand-alone. These are rare. The obstacle is the obstacle. Overcome it and you’re done. Goal: Be over there. Obstacle: Creek. Solution: Cross it (cut down a tree, find a ford, build a raft, swim, etc…). If obstacles are hierarchical, this is the lowest level.
• One thing leads to another. This is very common and has two subtypes; both can be “chain quests” in LitRPG.
  • Elucidating the dependency chain. The obstacle is complex and the character is not aware of all the details. As he overcomes sub-obstacles, he finds more that needs to be done to overcome the main obstacle. This is the There’s a Hole in the Bucket problem. To cut down a tree to cross the river there must be an appropriately placed tree and you must have something with which to cut it down, dear Henry, dear Henry.
  • The Law of Holes. What the hero is doing is making things worse – or moving sideways – not overcoming the obstacle. He means well, but he’s not doing the right thing and every solution leads to more issues. This is the Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly problem. To build a raft, one needs wood and lashing. In the best case, the search for wood starts with a search for tools to cut trees, which leads to a subplot of making friends with the Dwarven Empire to get an enchanted axe, making friends with the Elven Empire to get lumbering rights in their forest, and clearing said forest of Venomous Spiders on a quest from the Elven King to get the webbing for lashing. It’s not “wrong”, but it’s excessively complicated and just keeps getting more so as each of those steps has its own sub-obstacles. Six books later, the hero crosses the river – with the backing of Dwarves and Elves and the moral burden of spider genocide.
• Side Quests. The hero keeps getting distracted by un- (or semi-) related issues and the main obstacle is deferred. This is the Look, Squirrel! problem. (I don’t think it has a song.) This is what started me down the path to this post. The intrepid hero in the series I’m currently reading (Starter Zone Survivor) does this. Of course, there is a relationship, the author is just hiding it. It seems Look, Squirrel, but it’s not, actually. The Apocalypse is a Side Quest does the same thing, but explicitly.

Did I miss a category?

Book One has an Elucidating the Dependencies structure. No one knows what’s going on so they just deal with whatever comes up. It’s very reactive. The main obstacle – starving to death over the winter – has all sorts of things come up along the way, but they’re mostly of the “we need to harvest, dear Henry” leads to “with what shall we harvest, dear Liza?” and “where shall we store it, dear Liza”, etc… In the first two-thirds of the book, the focus is on “we need everyone to agree that starving to death is a threat and we must work together to overcome it”, not the nitpicky details of how to do it, but rather building a framework from which the problem can be addressed. This is only vaguely explicit.

Book Two is the same, but with a different focus. The main obstacle – ignorance – has more of a plan to overcome it. It’s more proactive.

Book Three is going to be side-quest hell. The main obstacle – not being overrun or reduced to irrelevancy – is clear, but the things that might overrun or ignore our intrepid hero pop up unexpectedly and need to be dealt with as they appear. The characters are proactive – they prepare – but the actual problems just crop up and are handled reactively.

I’m not sure what the goal of Book Four is, so I don’t know what sort of obstacles will be faced. I now have a framework for figuring it out.

Featured Image: This one has a chance simply due to the space around it for text. Not much glows and I don’t like the ripped jeans (perfect clothes is a plot point).