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Failure in Fiction

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Writers need to have a sadistic streak to inflict pain—emotional or physical—on our beloved characters repeatedly, but failure is important in fiction. Without it, the story drags.

Why to Include Failure

Without failure, we decrease the stakes, consequences, and slow the pace. And, most importantly, without failure there is no character arc. The story may seem messy and uncomfortable when we add failure, but it also adds authenticity. Mistakes and failure are part of life. If we don’t shy away from failure, the characters’ journey feels real.

Think about it this way. Who would you rather champion—a character who worked hard, persevered, failed a gazillion times, and still achieved massive success or someone who inherited a business?

How to Include Failure

It’s not difficult to make a character fail. The possibilities are endless. Failure might result from the character’s flaws, fears, insecurities, inabilities, or simple mistakes and oversights that have major consequences later in the story.

Here a few examples:

  • Trusting the wrong person
  • Refusal to accept help or advice
  • Misheard information
  • Tripping, slipping, falling
  • Unable to follow simple directions
  • Losing something that’s important to the storyline
  • Rushing without forethought
  • Misunderstanding a friend/parent/mentor
  • Misunderstanding directions, plot clues, etc.
  • Misreading a situation
  • Overhearing something incorrectly
  • Misplaced suspicion of an innocent person and/or act of kindness
  • Physically failing
  • Arriving too late
  • Arriving too early
  • Dropping an important object that shatters
  • Losing something important
  • Speaking without thinking things through first
  • Unwilling to stay quiet
  • Sneeze or cough at the wrong time
  • Not speaking up when they should
  • Forgetfulness
  • Not trusting or second-guessing their own capabilities
  • Not being willing to take a needed risk

Where to Include Failure

We don’t need major complex issues to fail. Speedbumps in every scene help with pacing. Our character doesn’t need to be a complete klutz, but they should make mistakes. Otherwise, the character won’t feel real.

We enjoy watching others fail. It’s human nature. How many of you have gotten frustrated with a cyclist who’s holding up traffic? Have you ever wished the car in front of him would open their door? Or the tires would blow, sending the cyclist over the handlebars?

Admit it. We’ve all experienced similar thoughts. Do we want the cyclist harmed? No. We just want him out of our way. And let’s face it, if he crashes it’d be a lot more interesting. Dark thoughts entering our headspace doesn’t mean we’re bad people. It means we’re human.

  • Failure creates conflict.
  • Conflict creates tension and raises the stakes.
  • Tension is far more interesting than continual success, which gets boring fast.

To answer the “Where?” question, include failure when things are going a little too well. Now, it doesn’t need to be a major failure. The character arc shouldn’t change.

Four quartiles or Parts (each represent 25% of the book) of a character arc should look like this:

  • Part I—The Setup: Introduce main character, hook the reader, and setup First Plot Point. In terms of character, they’re like a newborn experiencing the world for the first time. With an uncertain future ahead of them, they should fail. A lot.
  • Part II—The Response: Main character reacts to their new reality, the goals, stakes, and obstacles revealed by the First Plot Point. They’re trying new things and failing a great deal.
  • Part III—The Attack: Midpoint information or awareness causes the MC to change course in how to approach obstacles. The MC is now empowered with intel on how to proceed, rather than staying reactive. We still need failure, but they’re smaller mistakes.
  • Part IV—The Resolution: The MC summons the courage and growth to find a solution, overcome inner obstacles, and conquer the villain(s). Failure is minimal here, if at all.

When to Include Failure

Let’s say your character is cruising along. They’ve met many of their scene-level goals and are making decent progress. Now would be the perfect time for failure. I’ll show you what I mean…

A scene is broken into two parts, Scene and Sequel.

Scene Structure

Goal: What does the character want to achieve? What’s their objective?

Conflict: Obstacles preventing the character from reaching that goal. *Here’s a great place to add failure.

Disaster: Things worsen. *Or here.

Sequel Structure

Reaction: How does the character react to the Disaster? *Another perfect spot for failure.

Dilemma: A no-win situation. If they do A, B might happen. But if they refuse to act, the fallout will be worse.

Decision (which leads to the Goal of the next scene): The act of choosing what to do. *We can even add failure here (i.e. short-sightedness).

On a micro-level, include failure in motivation-reaction units or MRUs.

  • Motivation (external): Something elicits a response in our character.
  • Reaction (internal): How the character responds to the outside stimuli.

Also known as cause and effect, failure can only occur in the reaction. Why? Because the MC has no control over external stimuli. Could their past actions or mistakes be responsible for the motivation/cause they’re facing now? Absolutely. Hence why failure is so effective in fiction. As mentioned above, failure leads to conflict. And conflict drives the story.

What types of failure have you included in a WIP?

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Pete Springer says

    Having failure as one of the central themes of any story makes sense because everyone has experienced and can relate to it. Indeed, how we respond to failures and disappointments is a testament to our resilience and character.

  6. Gwen M. Plano says

    Fabulous post, Sue! I’ve so much to learn. Thank you for sharing these pointers. Very helpful.

  8. Paul Shen-Brown says

    Great stuff! I love how you pointed out that having evil thoughts does not make us evil people. I had a friend who was haunted by such thoughts. She thought it meant she was bad. But our brains have so many things going on at once inside that everyone pretty much has every thought possible at one time or another. The sweet old granny who wouldn’t hurt a fly doesn’t exist. I have a character in a sci-fi story who learns this the hard way because she has telepathy. After a while she loses it because, as she explains, one moment a guy is thinking about how much he loves puppies, while at the same time he’s thinking about how much he wants to eviscerate his manager. The evil thoughts don’t make evil action is in and of itself a great source of internal conflict and potential failure for a character, as when they decide that if I’m really evil inside, I might as well go all the way.

  9. Margot Kinberg says

    This is so true! And the timing couldn’t be better. I’m now editing my forthcoming novel, and in it, my lead character fails at something important. It happens in real life and it should in fiction. Thanks for the reminder

    • Sue Coletta says

      Yay! Love when the timing works out. Good luck, Margot! I’m sure you have plenty of failure in the MS but it never hurts to double check. 😀

  10. D.L. Finn says

    Great post, Sue 🙂 Failure does make for page turning reading and you give some great examples.

  12. Kay DiBianca says

    Great advice, Sue.

    “What types of failure have you included in a WIP?” Interesting that you ask. The protagonist in my middle-grade WIP is a 10-year-old who is hot on the trail of a treasure. When she and her 9-year-old cousin think they have successfully decoded a clue, they spend all afternoon searching through a library to find the next clue to the treasure. But their quest fails, and young Reen takes it as a total disaster. Of course, things change quickly, and she goes from rock bottom to top of the mountain when she discovers the mistake they made.

  13. Robbie Cheadle says

    Hi Sue, a most useful and interesting post. I’ve never thought of these sorts of things in terms of human failures, but it makes sense that they are.

  14. Jan Sikes says

    These are such great tips, Sue. And I love the way you laid out the scene and sequel structure. Thank you for sharing! Pinning for future reference.

  15. ANGELA ACKERMAN says

    Great advice on where to highlight failure so it supports character arc, Sue – thank you so much!

  16. BECCA PUGLISI says

    I’m a big fan of failure (in fiction, lol). The story really can’t move forward satisfactorily without it.