Comfort. Our characters seldom get to enjoy the world on their terms - at lest mine do not. They are pushed from their place of comfort and compelled onward. Sometimes they're compelled towards something - others away.
I've even used the barrel of a gun to move them along.
Tonight I realized I was trying to have a character deal with tumult while in his place of comfort. I was trying to manage the story while leaving the protagonist on his own terms.
That. will. not. do.
No one gets the world the way they want it in my stories. Things happen - bad things mostly - that keep comfort and control from the hands of anyone for anymore than a breath.
Keep them moving. Put 'em in the skillet and turn it on high.
I've got a priest. I was trying to have him maintain stability while dealing with an unstable situation. Nay nay.
I now have him arriving at the house of a potential lover to find her husband dead in the bathtub. I started the story this way some time ago and abandoned it as too much the "murder mystery." Nothing wrong with that but my story isn't one.
So, back to the dead man in the tub and this time, the priest is not an innocent bystander in the eyes of the local constabulary or in those of the diocese's vicar general.
I hope your chair is hard and uncomfortable and words are many and hard themselves.
Kill one for me.
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