They're a divorced couple whose grown child is getting married and who insists they sit together at the wedding.
He's just bought her family's ancestral estate.
There's only one apartment available and they both need a place to live.
If the short-term problem isn't actually shared, then the two individual troubles will be closely related. Perhaps they can help each other to solve their difficulties:
He needs a house and she's a real estate agent desperate for a commission.
She's trying to establish a new business; he needs special services from that business.
She's inherited a business but can't run it herself; he has the expertise to run it but not the money to buy it.
He needs a fiancé to help him close a business deal, and she needs money to finish school.
The more solid and down-to-earth the short-term problem is, the easier it will be to construct a plot. Though the character can have more than one problem going on at a time, it's most useful for story development if the short-term problem is confined to one clearly stated problem per character — either a single problem that involves them both or two related problems.
New writers often come up with very amorphous initial conflicts, such as:
Neither of the characters wants to take the chance of trusting again.
He has to make her accept a truth she doesn't want to face.
They've each been deceived in the past and won't tolerate being lied to again.
While those concepts can be developed into interesting problems, they're hard to grasp, hard to illustrate, and hard to write about.
And they're actually long-term problems — character flaws or painful past experiences — rather than short-term ones. Lack of trust, unwillingness to commit, and bad past relationships often play a big part in the characters' eventual development and growth, but they're hard to get a grip on when they're set up as the initial problem.
If the characters' mutual problem is lack of trust, what do they talk about throughout the story? If they could actually discuss their difficulty in trusting, they'd be two-thirds of the way to solving the problem — but they can't trust each other enough to talk about it. Worse, without a certain amount of trust, there's not much else to talk about — and characters who have nothing to talk about are very hard to write about.
If, on the other hand, your two characters are at odds about who gets custody of the kid, or how to handle the business they've inherited, or what they're going to do about their marriage of convenience after it's not convenient to be married anymore, then they have lots of stuff that they must talk about — and they have many opportunities to test, explore, and discover that the other is a person who can be trusted after all.
Remember that a short-term problem is not a single event, so it can't be solved in a single step. “While rock climbing, Julie falls off a cliff” isn't a true short-term problem; she'll either be rescued or she'll die, and in either case the story is over.
The real short-term problem is what got her onto the cliff in the first place. Is she trying to protect the precious papers she's carrying from the bad guy who's pursuing her? Is she learning to climb because the man she thinks she loves insists he won't marry her unless she shares his hobby of rock climbing? In either of these cases (or a hundred others), when she's rescued she still faces the problem that got her onto the cliff, plus she has the complications of a broken leg and a black eye and the hero — who rescued her — hanging around.
Some additional examples of complex short-term problems include:
A hero who is offered a job in a different city, but a heroine who doesn't want to leave her challenging career to follow him.
A heroine who wants to have a baby, but a hero who thinks he'd be a terrible dad.
A heroine and hero who must work together despite a painful past relationship.
The key to all of these problems is that they create conflict and tension between the two characters, and they all offer potential for increasing complexity and involvement.
If your short-term problem isn't the sort that grows more complicated, you may be tempted to toss in unrelated obstacles in an attempt to create extra trouble for the characters. Your heroine might fall out of a tree, get hit by a car, and encounter a rattlesnake all in the first three chapters. But adding obstacles is not the same as developing a conflict, because one obstacle doesn't lead into or cause the next; they're just random happenings. Unless each event contributes to the advancement of the story and relates to all the other events in a meaningful sequence, the story is contrived.
Another type of weak short-term problem is one in which there simply aren't enough honest differences of opinion or conflicting goals to keep the readers interested. Misunderstandings that can be solved with a few minutes of honest conversation fall into this category.
In Beth Cornelison's long contemporary In Protective Custody, her hero, Max, is faced with his short-term problem when his injured sister asks him to hide her infant son from the grandparents who are trying to kidnap him.
Gasping her beliefs one key word at a time, she argued breathlessly that if the Rialtos got the baby when he was released from the hospital, they'd take him out of the country and fight her custody rights. Her impassioned pleas for her child, even as she fought for her own life, wrenched Max's emotions in knots.
“You're only … one I … trust. Don't. … let baby … outta … your sight. …” Max placed his free hand over her lips. “Easy. Hush now. … I won't let Joe's family get near your son. I promise.”
… Relief softened the tension in her face. “You'll take m'baby? Hide?”
… What else could he do? The Rialtos didn't negotiate.
This short-term conflict is important, it's emotional, and it has very high stakes. Add to it that Max knows nothing about babies, and you have a built-in role for the heroine — who happens to work in a day care center and can't stand to see a child in danger of being mistreated or neglected.
The Long-Term Problem
The long-term problem is something about the characters' personalities or pasts that makes it seem impossible for them to reach a happy ending together. It's often called the internal conflict because it's usually something inside the character — a character flaw or a reaction to a past experience — that makes it difficult for her to make a lifelong commitment to the other.
Here's where lack of trust and reluctance to face unpleasant truths belong. With long-term conflicts as well as short-term ones, however, the more concrete the problem, the easier it will be to write the book. Rather than just saying that your character's problem is an inability to trust, look for the reason she can't trust.
A guy who's been jilted will have trust issues. So will one who was abandoned as a child. But the effects of those two situations will be different, so the actions and attitudes of those two men will be different even though they share a basic problem.
The long-term problem may be something that makes the character reluctant to fall in love at all:
She caught her previous fiancé in bed with another woman.
His parents experienced a bitter divorce and he doesn't want to risk having it happen to him.
Everyone she's ever loved has died and she's afraid to try again.
Or it may be something that makes the character reluctant to fall in love with this particular individual:
She's terrified of heights, and he's a mountain-climbing instructor.
She grew up in poverty because her father was a compulsive gambler, and the hero makes his living running a casino.
He rejected her once before, so she's afraid he'll do it again.
Often the long-term problems aren't shared with the readers until fairly late in the story. Frequently that's because the character herself doesn't recognize her character flaw until the pain of the current situation forces her to reassess the choices she's made in the past and the impact those choices continue to have on her life.
Even if the details aren't shared with the readers up front, however, the long-term problem will affect all of that character's actions. The hero may not talk about his parents' tragic marriage, but his experience will affect how he acts toward the heroine.
Sometimes, in developing long-term problems for your characters, it's useful to ask, “Why are these people wrong for each other? Why is he the worst possible guy for her to fall in love with? Why is she the absolutely wrong woman for him?”
If the heroine's ex-husband was a crooked cop, then the worst possible person for her to fall in love with is probably another cop. If the hero's parents tried to control his life, then the worst possible person for him to fall in love with may be a woman whose family members are always minding each other's business.
Of course, in the long run these people aren't actually bad for each other, because the second cop isn't dishonest and the heroine's family isn't controlling. But it's only logical that, at first, the pairing appears to be a very bad combination; and it's also logical that it takes a while for the characters to figure out that things are different this time around.
In Beth Cornelison's In Protective Custody, Max and the heroine, Laura, are on the run to protect Max's newborn nephew. But each of them has an internal reason why playing house, pretending to be a family, and falling in love are all very bad ideas. Max is still recuperating from a marriage that failed because he couldn't father children:
It had been three years since he'd slept with a woman. More like six years since he'd made love for the sake of pleasure and sexual gratification.
In the final years of his marriage, sex had been about ovulation and conception and maximizing windows of opportunity. … Knowing he couldn't get a woman pregnant had struck a massive blow to his sense of masculinity.
Meanwhile, Laura — the product of a long series of foster homes — wants nothing more than a family of her own.
The desperate yearning for her own baby, a desire she'd suppressed for years, blossomed inside her and left a hollow ache in her soul. How could she ever have children of her own when she was scared to death of forming a relationship with a man? … She could never risk that sort of betrayal and abandonment. Hadn't the difficult years, bouncing between foster homes, left enough scars?
Is there anyone who could be worse for a woman who's longing for a family than a guy who can't give her a baby? Is there anyone who could be worse for a man with a shaky sense of masculinity than a woman who's skittish about trusting men at all?
How the Short- and Long-Term Problems Fit Together
A character's short-term and long-term problems need to be closely related, because the short-term problem focuses a spotlight on the long-term one. The immediate, life-altering threat or challenge (the short-term problem) is what forces the character to own up to and deal with the character flaw or the troublesome past experience (the long-term problem).
The long-term problem is the reason a character finds a particular short-term problem so hard to face. When Beth Cornelison saddles her hero-who-can't-be-a-father and her heroine-who-wants-to-be-a-mom with an infant, it's like holding a magnifying glass on their long-term problems. A different sort of short-term problem would have had much less emotional appeal.
When the immediate difficulty (the short-term problem or external conflict) the hero and heroine face is complicated by the kind of people they are (the character flaw or past experience that is the long-term problem or internal conflict), then you have the potential for a deeply emotional story that the readers can never forget.
For instance, if an infant were dumped on the hero's doorstep with a note implying that the hero is the father, any heroine would be upset. But for a heroine who was raised in an orphanage and who has struggled with her own issues of abandonment, this situation would be particularly horrible. How could the hero not know about his baby? How could he have turned his back on his child?
If the short-term problem is that your hero has suddenly lost all his money, perhaps the long-term one is that he's always bought whatever he wanted — and that, in his experience, others liked him mostly for what he could give them. Because he's always been able to buy everything, the loss of money is more difficult for him to bear than it would be for someone who was less materialistic to begin with.
If the long-term problem is that the young widow refuses to deal with her loss and go on with her life, perhaps the short-term problem is that she is suddenly forced to move out of the home she shared with her husband. Nobody likes to lose a home, but because she has turned the house into a shrine for her late husband, having to move would be a bigger blow for her than it would be for other people.
Developing Complementary Short- and Long-Term Problems
In a romance novel, the long-term problem for each character is always, in essence, what tendency or flaw makes it difficult for the couple to end up together. In each story, however, the precise problem is different.
Can Mary overcome the trauma of her family's poverty and accept that John is not really a free-spending gambler like her father?
That's a long-term problem — the effect of her father's gambling on the family is a past experience that colors everything in Mary's life today. If you then establish that John owns the casino where Mary's father gambled, and begin the story with Mary trying to find a way to close it down or to convince John to return enough of her father's losses to allow her mother to get necessary medical treatment, then you have tension-producing short- and long-term problems that are closely related and intolerable for the character.
Meanwhile, John will have a long-term problem of his own. It may be every bit as huge as Mary's (childhood experiences have left him addicted to risk), or it may be smaller (he's inherited the casino and he'd like to simply close it down, but that would throw hundreds of people out of work; he can't in good conscience sell it to another operator, because he's actually opposed to gambling).
Often, if one character's long-term problem is huge, the other's problem is more manageable — but each of them will have a long-term problem, a past experience or character flaw that causes trouble in the present. In the most effective stories, the long-term problems of the two characters put them in opposition to each other, in addition to the complications of their short-term problems.
THE FORCE
As you develop your short- and long-term problems, keep in mind that because your two characters have so many reasons to disagree and so many things keeping them apart, they need a really good reason to stick around at all. Under ordinary circumstances, when you're frustrated by someone, you just avoid him — you don't hang around long enough to fall in love. In fact, unless they're family members or co-workers, you might even avoid such annoying people entirely.
Realistic characters will do the same thing — walk away unless they're forced to stay. What requires the hero and heroine to stay in the same space long enough to realize that, despite their differences, they're perfect for each other?
In a romance novel, the situation that makes it impossible for the characters to avoid each other is called the force.
Sometimes the force is built in to the short-term problem — maybe your heroine's life is in danger, and the hero is assigned to protect her. But in other cases, you have to look a little deeper. Does your couple need to cooperate in order to succeed? If they're both assigned to a project, perhaps their jobs depend on making it work. Do they desperately need each other's help? Maybe your heroine is in danger, and the hero is the only one who can protect her. Do circumstances force them into close contact? Perhaps they're stranded together by an accident.
For a romance to be successful, it has to have a force in the form of one of these three scenarios:
The hero and heroine must need each
other so badly they can't just walk away. She needs his help as a doctor in order to have the baby she wants, and he needs a wife or he'll lose his job in the medical practice.
Either the hero or the heroine has a logical and valid reason for forcing the other into the situation. He thinks she's cheated a charity and challenges her to prove him wrong or he'll ruin her business.
Outside influences conspire to keep them in close proximity. He's inherited a piece of property and has to do something with it; she's under pressure to acquire the property by any means. Or, they're trapped together by an ice storm in an isolated cabin.
The strength of the force required to keep the characters together will depend on the intensity of the conflict. The more painful the circumstances are, the more eager a person will be to escape. So, if the conflict is very intense and very personal, the force will need to be correspondingly strong to make the character stay in that situation. If the conflict is less threatening, then less force is required.
How can you raise the stakes for your hero and heroine so they can't possibly walk away?
In this example from her short contemporary The Italian's Price, Diana Hamilton's hero makes it clear that her heroine has no option but to cooperate — or go to jail:
It was all too real.
He turned and headed for the door, his stride lithe and totally assured, his shoulders straight and elegant. He opened the door, admitting damp air. “I will collect you at six in the morning. Be ready. If you attempt to disappear again, be sure that I will find you. Be very sure of that.”
On Writing Romance Page 10