User blog:Zathronas/Author's Advice: Complication

PLEASE DO NOT POST YOUR FAN FICTION ON THIS SITE. YOU CAN POST YOUR STORIES HERE
Hello and welcome once again to author's advice. This is the second post of four on basic story structure. Today we talk about the complication.

So you have a story idea. You've established your characters, the world they live in and place them in the proper settings. Now what? You have to give them hurdles, a problem to solve. This is the complication. Be careful we're talking about problems here not solutions. The solution does not come here.

This is far more difficult than it appears at first. It has to be big enough to make it interesting, It doesn't have to be an impossible task, it depend at the type of story your doing. It can be personal or world shattering. It can start as insignificant and swell to enormous. What i'm saying is that to make a good story it has to affect your protagonist profoundly.

In fan fiction this is much easier since the setup has been done for you. You're reaping the benefit of someone else's work. That's not bad by the way since that person has his own story to tell. But it makes the creation of a complication much more easier.

The complication usually is trickled information. Our heroes get the information a small morcel at a time. Like Roman, Cinder and the dust. The complication also has to be a setup to the climax. What that means is that once the complication is revealed you have to give your protagonist a window to action. Either it's a weak point they can exploit or a course of action necessary. You can have more then one complication but usually there's a common goal. So let's take RWBY as an example again.

We're not truly into the complication stage yet of the story but we've had enough hints to make an informed guess. The grimm. Once all the players are in position, We'll get the complication which as of now it seems to be an army of grimm. When you see the complication you'll probably see some action against it that will fail to make the complication formidable. This will bring a desperate solution that will lead us directly into the climax. If the complication is done properly, you'll worry about the protagonist and their chance of survival. If done wrong, the climax is ruined and so is the story.

Once I'm finished with the basic structure we will go into the story creation itself and I'll explain how to do a good complication. Tomorrow, the payoff of all the hard work put into a story. The climax