What frustrates you in your day-to-day life? What can turn you from your easy-go-lucky, happy self into a venom-spitting viper in 3 nanoseconds or less?
Is it bad drivers? When the barista screws up your coffee order? Having to spend an hour on the phone jumping through impenetrable phone-tree options to straighten out a mistake your insurance company made? Taxes? Solar power salespeople interrupting your writing streak?
Believe it or not, frustration can be a good thing—for your characters, that is, not for you (obviously!).
Frustration is a powerful emotion, and often what finally breaks through your character’s inertia to propel them into action.
Maybe they’re frustrated because they didn’t get that promotion they earned. Or because the girl they’re in love with just shot them down in front of the whole school. Or because no matter how hard they try, they just can’t get their magic to work as advertised. Or because they can’t get their father to accept them for who they are.
Whatever the source of their obstacles, when their frustration reaches the tipping point, that is often the catalyst that finally drives them to make a drastic change.
But hitting that tipping point too fast can weaken your story. It depends on the situation, of course, but how realistic is it that your heroine can go from carefree kitten to rage-monster over a single event or issue? Sure, a murder, fatal accident, or natural disaster might seem like a perfectly reasonable trigger to switch your hero into Hulk mode, but more often than not, the character builds up to that snapping point over a series of smaller inconveniences, delays, mistakes, or micro-aggressions that pile up straw-by-straw until that proverbial camel finally collapses. Showing that rise in frustration can be an effective tool for building tension, anticipation, and suspense in your story.
So how can you show the character’s frustration levels rising? Let’s look at a classic thriller trope: when his wife is murdered, the husband will do anything to get revenge. However, very few husbands, no matter how upset they are, launch immediately into full-on Liam Neeson attack mode. Instead, most average citizens start by calling the police. After all, the cops or feds are usually better versed in tracking murderers, hacking phones, or breaking into the FBI database than your average accountant or gastroenterologist.
The frustrations start small: the cops don’t seem to take the husband seriously. Evidence gets contaminated by a rookie crime-scene photographer. The neighbors start to whisper behind the husband’s back. His children get kicked off the soccer team. Someone paints “murderer” across his garage door. TV reporters drop the story. Bills pile up as he misses more work. He starts receiving harassing phone calls. Etc.
With each new setback, our protagonist’s frustration level rises, and we readers feel his pot begin to boil. That way, we’re right there with him when he suddenly blows his top and goes all vigilante on his quest for revenge.
Those little mini-frustrations are important, and they will begin to color every part of your character’s life, so you can show his heightened emotional state through small changes in his behavior. He suddenly yells at the grocery cashier for no reason, or he trashes his office when his boss denies his funeral leave, or he throws his phone at the wall and then is embarrassed to go to the store to buy a new one, so he takes it out on the salesperson.
A good way to add these frustrations into your character’s arc is to identify the things that frustrate them even when they haven’t suffered a tragedy—those bad drivers, go-nowhere phone trees, and incomprehensible insurance forms that you hate, for example—then turn up the pressure.
As you nudge your character towards their tipping point, remember to sprinkle frustration-builders into their world. That will make their ultimate step over their point-of-no-return pack a bigger and well-earned punch.
[Photo by Julien L on Unsplash]