Feedback Wanted
A character can be very good at the wrong things. Tidying up evidence. Keeping everyone calm. Making themselves indispensable. All useful habits, until the story asks them to risk looking foolish or letting the mess stay messy for once.
That feels more interesting to me than simple incompetence. The trouble is that competence hardens into a pattern. If a person has spent years surviving by being careful, useful, or efficient, change is not just difficult. It is almost rude.
How do you handle that without making the character seem stubborn for the sake of it?
That feels more interesting to me than simple incompetence. The trouble is that competence hardens into a pattern. If a person has spent years surviving by being careful, useful, or efficient, change is not just difficult. It is almost rude.
How do you handle that without making the character seem stubborn for the sake of it?
Sometimes the “problem” isn’t stubbornness at all, it’s loyalty to a method that used to work. People cling to competence because it has paid the rent, kept the peace, kept them alive. That can make a character look difficult on the page, unless the story lets us see the cost of changing. In practice, a small failure helps. One cracked routine, and suddenly the old skill set looks less like virtue and more like a trap.