In a recent email to her mailing list, Janice Hardy suggests that strong temptations can provide good leverage for revealing character and creating conflict. “We all have things we can’t resist…Maybe it’s a food, a song, a TV show,” she says. “It might even be a type of person or an action, but it gets us every time. We even do dumb things because of it.”
Hardy says that you can create conflict and obstacles by imagining what your characters can’t resist and then dropping it in front of them at the worst possible time. “If we need a character to behave badly, or forget something important, or just screw up in a relationship, then force them to choose between what they know they should do, and what they can’t resist,” she says.
Whether it’s something as silly as a donut or new outfit, or something as serious as an untrustworthy person who is just their type, a strong temptation can pull your character in surprising directions. “Use it for small relationship problems or have it cause a major betrayal in the climax of the novel,” Hardy writes. ‘It’s fully adaptable and works in pretty much any situation.”
