I ran up against an interesting problem today while I was working on the space opera.  Given the trouble we ran into on Star Trek: The Next Generation I should have seen it coming, but it really hit home today.  Contented characters aren’t very interesting and the problems that afflict them are usually of the emotional variety and that’s hard to dramatize.

I’ve got two view point characters in this book (I touched on the problems that may cause in my last post) but today a new issue raised its ugly head.  My hero is lower class, put down.  He has “the-I-wants” really badly.  She’s The Infanta of the Solar League.  Yes, she has the pressure placed on her by her father and the looming knowledge she’s going to have to rule this messy empire, but that’s a problem for the future.  She’s not poor, she’s not disparaged she doesn’t have anything obvious against which to strive.

On Trek this manifested one day during a story meeting where we were trying to “break” a story that revolved around Troi.  Our boss, Ira, was fulminating, cheerleading, trying to get the rest of us engaged, and he tapped a colored pen against the white board and asked, “So, what does Troi want?”  We stared at him, and he suddenly got this funny expression, threw the pen across the room, and declared.  “Fuck, I don’t know what she wants.  She doesn’t want anything because she doesn’t need anything.”

And that’s my current dilemma.  So I’ve got to find something that can test my heroine and place pressure on her that isn’t just an arbitrary problem that I’ve throw in to address this problem.  What ever I come up with needs to be integral to the plot.  It has to have real meat, and real stakes associated with it, and as I sit at my computer at 10:30 at night I have no fucking clue what that’s going to be.