At the heart of every story lies a dilemma. It is not a question of whether or not your protagonist has a dilemma, but rather, how effectively you’ve explored it.
By exploring your protagonist’s dilemma, you are led to the most dynamic version of your story. Your protagonist’s dilemma is the source of your story, the source from which all tension and conflict arise.
Exploring the dilemma helps distill your story to its clearest meaning. It sheds light on what does not belong. The dilemma reveals those random digressions that are not germane to the central conflict. It offers clues to what still needs to be written.
But here’s the thing: by definition, a dilemma cannot be figured out. In order to connect to it, you must become invested in your characters.
This is the particular challenge of memoir. We all have blind spots. We all have our idea of our story, and ironically, this idea often stands between us and the deeper truth, the truth that can set us free.
Sometimes there can be a tendency to hold so tightly to our idea of what happened that we find ourselves going around in circles in search of liberation.
When you understand why your characters are doing what they are doing, your story suddenly explodes with new possibilities.
Learn more about marrying the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of structure in The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, or The 90-Day Screenplay workshops.
