Do you see this face? It is one of the first GoogleImage search results for the word suspicious.

This dog? Suspicious.

This dog is so suspicious, it wouldn’t even appear. 

And why are we suspicious today? I’ll tell you.

We should actually have been suspicious a few weeks ago. We were writing a series of scenes (okay, I was writing a series of scenes) in which my protagonist was experiencing the fallout of a seriously bad decision. As I was chronicling this, I was grappling with the results of my own questionable decision to have the character merely ‘experience’ the fallout. Stuck with the chore of writing scene after scene like this, I asked my fellow MFA alums, “What can you do to break the monotony of things going godawfully bad for your character?”

The main suggestion was to add humor, to make us like the character amid her whininess. But hello, the real problem was that the character should have been wanting things and going after them! Lois Lowry was big on this when I heard her speak at the National Festival of the Book (I really should have blogged about that experience-of-a-lifetime, but instead, I’ll just show you the photo):

She was showing a character reaching for something she wanted! True story!

If I needed to ask how to make some  more interesting, it was probably a giveaway that they weren’t the right scenes. Next time, include wanting.

Have any of you had revelations like this?