Your Character Already Knows How to Destroy What They Love

A husband and wife had a bad argument on Saturday night.

He found out she spent money she said she wouldn’t. It wasn’t a lot of money.

But.

It was enough.

And some distance had spread between them over the weekend.

By Monday night, he was still waiting for her to come back to him. Now, it wasn’t stubbornness. Not at all.

Inside his own internal logic there was nothing on his side that required repair or reconciliation because she was the one who had done the thing, and he simply had reacted to the thing. In his mind, you wait for the person who caused the problem to acknowledge it.

He had always operated in this way and she always came back around and he thought she would come back again.

On Tuesday, she started moving around him and the house rather carefully. Choosing her words before she said them. Asking him things and saying things in a register that was too neutral.

He noticed.

He logged it.

He felt she was managing him.

He had told her once how that made him feel. She had said she didn’t know what he meant. He had added that to the list too.

That growing list of resentments.

On Wednesday she tried to tell him something.

She said she felt like every time she raised something real, a concern or a problem or something the husband had done wrong, it became, instead, about something she had done wrong.

She said she wasn’t trying to attack him. She just wanted him to hear her.

But he only heard attack.

Because hearing her required accepting that he had a hand in causing a problem, a mistake. And that door was the one he could not, and would not, open. So what arrived to him as his wife trying to be heard, that was just more assault.

He added it, too, to the list.

The list of resentments.

By Friday he had, in his mind, been patient with her for six days. In his telling of the week to friends and family he had been generous and HE had been the victim, he told them. He didn’t make the mistake. She did. He had been restrained with her. He had given her room to come to terms with what she had done. Because, he told them, he never did anything wrong in their relationship. It was always HER.

It never even occurred to him that he had not once moved toward her, that distance had been allowed to grow rather than close.

And she had stopped trying by then.

And, also, the reader already knows she has probably been leaving for years.

She most likely ran out of the desire required to keep crossing the distance between them alone, and had run out of patience for being blamed, endlessly.

Eventually you stop crossing rooms and distance that your partner/lover/husband ever crosses back, and you stop accepting the burden of blame in a one-sided relationship.

The husband never once asked what he might have done to make coming back harder, and he never, not one time, accepted responsibility for his part in their problems.

Writers.

A coping mechanism is more than a character flaw.

It is not a villain trait or a dramatic device or something a character needs to overcome by the third act (although they can). It is something much simpler and much more durable than any of those things.

It is a behavior a person built after something painful, and they built, without their knowledge, to make sure that particular brand of pain never happened again. And it works, or at least it worked, once, in the environment that produced it.

The eventual problem is that the environment changes and the coping mechanism doesn’t. It keeps running the same logic in circumstances that no longer require it, and the by-product of that is that it keeps producing consequences its owner never intended and cannot fully see.

In that short little story, the husband’s coping mechanism is externalization. That is to say, the learned and automatic habit of locating the source of all pain and problems outside himself.

It is not dishonesty.

It is not intentional manipulation.

It is the only way he knows how to survive being in the wrong; by never being or admitting to being in the wrong.

Somewhere in his past, accepting responsibility for something meant something worse than the thing itself. And so he built a life around not accepting responsibility and accountability. And now it runs without him or his awareness. In every argument. Inside every moment his wife attempts to tell him something true or something he’s doing wrong about their dynamic and every time he hears threat instead of truth.

He is not doing this to her.

He is doing it because it is the only thing he knows how to do.

That distinction is everything for the writer.

Because here is what a coping mechanism does that no plot device can replicate: It generates conflict before anyone does anything wrong.

Writers, when they need tension in a scene, introduce something from the outside. Including but not limited to: an argument. A betrayal. A secret that comes to light. A rival. A deadline. These things work.

They produce friction and momentum and a reader who wants to know what happens next. But they are all external. They arrive from outside the character.

Which means the character is always responding to something rather than producing something. The conflict is situational. It can be resolved when the situation resolves, and when it resolves the character walks away essentially unchanged because the conflict was never really about them.

A coping mechanism produces conflict from the inside.

It doesn’t arrive, it was already there, hiding so very well, built into the character’s psychology before the story began, running automatically in every scene. The conflict it generates is not situational. It cannot be resolved when the situation resolves because the situation is not the source.

The character is the source.

And the character carries it into every room, every relationship, every attempt to get what they need.

That is, what I talk about all the time on my social media, identity conflict, and it is profoundly compelling in fiction.

This type of conflict is one of the biggest differences between a story that moves and a story that means something to a reader.

Situational conflict moves the plot. Identity conflict moves the character.

What a coping mechanism does for the writer specifically is remove the burden of manufacturing obstacles.

When you know your character’s coping mechanism you know exactly how they will pursue what they want and exactly why that pursuit will keep missing the target. You don’t have to invent reasons for things to go wrong. The coping mechanism invents them automatically, in ways that could only belong to this specific person running this specific internal logic.

The husband in that story wanted to repair things with his wife. The coping mechanism tells him to wait, it’s not your fault. It tells him to let her carry the repair because he holds no blame. And so he waits. And she gets further away. And his waiting, which he experiences as patience and superior, is the thing producing the distance he is hoping will resolve.

The writer didn’t manufacture that obstacle, the coping mechanism built it. Out of the character’s own psychology, the very thing he developed to protect himself.

That is the wonderful gift a coping mechanism gives you, that keeps on giving. The reader watches that conflict accumulate and thinks of course. Of course that is what he would do. Of course that is why it isn’t working. The reader never needs to be told why the story is going the way it is going, they can feel the logic of it because the logic belongs to the character and not to the plot.

Find the coping mechanism in your character. Not the wound, the behavior the wound produced that is designed to prevent another wound of the same kind. This is the automatic behavior they do to make sure that particular brand of pain never happens again.

Then ask what they need in this story that the coping mechanism will not let them have directly: That gap between what they need and what their psychology will allow them to ask for is where your conflict ignites.

Everything else follows from it.

The conflict builds itself.

The obstacles generate themselves.

Nobody in this story is intentionally cruel. Nobody is intentionally trying to cause harm. He loves her. But she is tired.

And the marriage is not falling apart because of the money or the argument or the week of silence that followed. It is being dismantled by the one thing the husband’s entire psychology is constructed to prevent him from doing.

That is not a plot problem.

That is a character with a coping mechanism.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this article. If you enjoyed it and the work I do here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the continued work here, it means so much to me :)

Also, if the core of this article resonated with you and it speaks to the types of stories and characters you wish to create, I have a tool that can help you get started and get over the hardest part about approaching these types of stories and characters, that is to say, the psychological work (lol). I pulled together 100 character-coping-mechanism-based starting points to help you get your writing-legs started, until you’ve practiced enough to start developing your own. If you want to start with one already built: belief, behavior, pressure and all, there are 100 of them at the link HERE.

Thank you for reading!

-AJ