Some days are best spent hiding from the world and making as few decisions as possible. You know the ones – the days when you wait for the stop sign to turn green, or you forget to look at the electronic pad at the grocery checkout so don’t see that it’s been asking you to sign for the transaction, or you leave the house with your husband’s keys and wonder why your car won’t unlock. These are the days when the only thing you can say is, “And who thought that was a good idea?”
These are also the days you can use to make your characters a lot more interesting.
Readers want to see your protagonists get in trouble because of their own character flaws, then figure out how to change enough to triumph over the adversity they made. To add realism to your novel, take your own moments of faulty judgment and adapt them to the story’s needs. Not only will you turn that embarrassing moment into a useful scene, it will help you see your character in a different way. You may have laughed off the absurdity of the stop sign incident, but what if it rankles on your protagonist that he was inefficient, and that causes him to explode at the office, which causes him to lose his job? What if the pad needing the signature wasn’t at the grocery but at the top-secret facility your heroine is trying to break into and her information on how to bypass the security system is inaccurate – something she would have known if she had paid attention to her misgivings over the reliability of her informant. What if by taking the wrong keys, your hero unlocks a door to a secret the family has kept hidden for over a century, and now has to face the truth about his past that he has been suppressing all his life?
Using your own experiences won’t guarantee your novel will be a blockbuster, but at least it gives you something to do with those annoying life moments that we all have. Turning a bug into a feature isn’t just for coders anymore.