Any advice for doing a person vs situation story, such as Gravity or The Martian, where there is no actual villain, and the character or characters have to survive their current situation?
Thank you
-Dave L
Hey Dave, Oren here, great to hear from you again!
A story with no antagonist can indeed be tricky. The main advice I have is to make sure your situation is complicated enough to provide plentiful challenges and urgent enough that the hero can’t ignore it. In most stories, the antagonist creates new problems through their actions, but when there isn’t a conscious force to oppose the hero, you need some extra careful planning.
The Martian and Gravity are both very good at this, as is Andy Weir’s new novel, Project Hail Mary. All three stories involve a dangerous situation in a very hostile environment. This allows them to throw increasingly serious problems at the hero, creating the rising action that most stories need.
However, it doesn’t always need to be super high tension like that. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is also a character vs environment story, but the environment is 1980s San Francisco. The stakes are still high, and the story introduces time limits, like the ship’s dilithium breaking down, but the tension overall is much lower to allow for a more comedic Star Trek film.
Hope that answers your question, and good luck with your writing!
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My MC spend a day wandering the woods trying to making back to his village because he lost the sight. I think that shows how resurceful he is despite needing to be found in the end.
It can be simple, but being suddenly blind in the forest as night approach make for a good scene (in my opinion).
Read some “true life” tales of individual survival (e.g. Douglas Mawson).
Or the works of Jack London (e.g. “To Build a Fire”).
A good formula to use is the “sandcastle” method.
Picture your character as a tiny person on a beach. He builds some kind of shelter or survival method (the “sandcastle”), but then something shows up to knock him out of his comfort zone (the tides). As predictably as the tides, this continues over and over until your character either is rescued or learns to swim.
However, readers hate predictability, so try to vary your metaphorical tides. Make them bigger or smaller. Have creatures wash ashore. Have the sandcastle collapse by itself due to human error. You get the idea.
An usual angle in solitary survival stories is focusing not only on concrete action but also on conflict against the protagonist’s weaknesses, ending in survival as a better person. It is, unusually, a genuinely uncertain conflict (nobody is perfect: failure is possible and to some extent expected).
There are mere duty, discipline, attention (plentiful, for example, in “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Martian”); abandoning bad habits, useless material possessions, pointless vanity; discovering and testing various kinds of inner strength; making more or less dramatic sacrifices.
Generally, if a character is alone the story should turn introspective; a martian sandstorm or an air leak are perfectly appropriate hazards, but they can only be meaningful as an opportunity for character change and self-discovery.
Thank you
Definitely some good ideas here