OBSTACLES AND SETBACKS – THE BASICS OF DRAMATIC STRUCTURE

When you start writing fiction, the first thing any decent writing teacher will tell you is to write conflict. Nothing else matters at that stage. The finesse of style and voice can wait. That’s the best advice because without conflict, there’s no tension or suspense, and without those, nothing happens that is of any interest in your story.

When you read this post, you have to keep in mind that conflict stems from your protagonist’s goal. If you don’t have a clear and important goal relevant to the context and your protagonist, your conflict will be melodrama at best.

Let’s think about this. Let’s study a couple of easy examples. Please examine these goals:

My goal is to get a haircut
My goal is to make an omelet
I aim to run a mile daily to make it into the IRON MAN competition.
These seem silly and so typical every day that you wouldn’t dare use them as goals for your characters. Allow me to disagree. A good imagination can come up with all sorts of stories, so any of those goals can be turned into an exciting story with conflict.

But let’s go back to analyzing those goals. When you aim to get a haircut, you’ll face obstacles and setbacks related to that activity. You could run out of money. Find the barber closed. Hate your haircut. Find out that your favorite barber is not working that day and having to get a haircut from the other guy. All these obstacles are within possibility, plausibility, and common sense. They create conflict rooted in your goal of getting a haircut. They are related to the goal in hand.

Yes, some stories are so weird and crazy that anything can happen. Writers like Hunter S. Thompson, William Burroughs, and many others in the New Weird writing movement often confront their characters with crazy obstacles and happenings. But they never come out of nowhere. Those obstacles stem from the root problem that is presented as a situation with the protagonist’s goal in mind.

They are rarely the first thing that comes to mind. Mind the low-hanging fruit problem. The low-hanging fruit problem tells you that your first choice or idea option is usually the easiest to get and, therefore, not the most creative. To solve this, you have to keep brainstorming until you find the most entertaining for your idea or context. Entertaining is key here—it’s the most important thing.

Let’s look at the second example.

You need eggs, cheese, salt, pepper, and butter to make an omelet. On your way to the perfect omelet, you can encounter various problems. You can run out of butter and burn it; you can use cooking oil to ruin it or overcook the eggs. The list goes on, but it’s limited, and it exists within the context of the protagonist’s goal.

The Mechanics of Obstacles and Setbacks
Let’s first define the elements of this equation. Obstacles and setbacks are similar but also different.

Obstacles
Obstacles are challenges, problems, and difficulties between the character and her goal. These can be external (like a locked door, a rival character, or a dangerous storm) or internal (like fear, doubt, or trauma).

PRO TIP: Obstacles slow the character down but don’t necessarily push them backward—they just make progress harder.

KEY IDEA: Obstacles block the path forward.

Example:

In a mystery novel, a detective must find a witness, but the witness has disappeared. The detective can still keep investigating, but this obstacle makes the path to solving the case harder.

Setbacks
Setbacks are moments when the character struggles and loses ground. This means that the character has made some progress toward their goal, but then something happens that pushes them back to an earlier stage or makes things worse than before.

PRO TIP: Setbacks increase tension and raise the stakes because they undo the protagonist’s progress in solving his or her problem, effectively making things worse.

KEY IDEA: Setbacks knock the character backward.

Example: That same detective finds the witness — but right before they can talk, the witness is murdered. Now, the detective is worse off than before because they’ve lost a key source of information and might even be a suspect themselves. This is a major setback.

Okay. This was a short post about the most basic of dramatic structures—the most basic and the most important because if there’s no conflict, there’s no tension. Nothing happens, and your story, script, novel, or speech will go nowhere.

Great suspense often combines both: a string of obstacles that seem manageable at first, some forward movement, and then a devastating setback that changes the game. This rhythm keeps readers constantly off-balance, which is exactly what you want in suspenseful fiction.

Best of luck.