TECHNIQUE - Dramatic Anchoring: A Step-by-Step Guide to Dramatising Your Hero's Dilemmas
Give your hero a moral tug-of-war—and make sure someone’s yanking back!
We talked about dramatic anchoring in Tuesday’s post, and I think it would be a great idea to step through an exercise to see how such a technique works in practice.
The Situation
Meet Susan, a young woman about whom I know literally nothing but her name.
Suppose we want to write a story about her. Let’s see what we can whip up in terms of an internal conflict, and how we can go about applying dramatic anchoring to externalise that conflict.
Follow along with your own hero concept, if you like!
Step 1: Define Your Hero’s Internal Conflict
First we’ll write a brief description of our protagonist’s internal struggle. Focus on the key moral or emotional choice they face.
❓What values, beliefs, or desires are at odds within your protagonist?
Let’s see. I feel like Susan might be in the medical field.
I recently watched a movie where the nurse character observed a doctor doing something unsavoury, and quite enjoyed the power dynamics at play there, but for Susan, I’m thinking she’s a doctor, not a nurse. She’s still young, enough so to be more easily susceptible to an internal conflict. I’m thinking she made some rookie medical mistake during a specialty surgery that cost the life of a patient, and she’s having a hard time forgiving herself. She wants to be a good doctor and help save lives, but she’s crippled by self-doubt.
That sounds intriguing to me so far.
You might be able to come up with this conflict right at the start, before you begin writing your story (as I’m doing here), but it’s equally valid to allow the writing of the story to reveal this conflict to you over time. Some characters don’t share so easily, and you will need to follow them around a bit to start seeing behind the brave façade.
Step 2: Identify the Core Options
Next we break the internal conflict into two or more clear, opposing choices.
❓What are the primary paths or decisions your protagonist could take? Frame each as a distinct choice tied to a value or outcome.
As I see it, Susan has two options in front of her, and one of them will need to prevail by the end of this story:
She can obtain redemption
She might be forced to step away from practicing medicine entirely, overcome by her fear of making another mistake
Whether you choose the up ending or the down ending is going to depend on your sensibilities as a writer. Either could make for a compelling story. I personally love reading tragic stories, but when I write I have a stubborn optimistic streak.
How would she be able to get redemption?
The usual method would be using the ghost and the revenant technique, which David Corbett discusses in The Art of Character (hey, bonus technique!).
If Susan’s ghost (i.e. the thing that haunts her) is this medical oopsie she made that killed someone, then the revenant (from the French for that which comes back) is a way that that old ghost returns to her in the present. That is often going to take the form of some new opportunity for a protagonist to right the wrongs of the past.
In this case, let’s suppose Susan is going to be thrust into a situation where she will be able to take on a high-risk surgery of the same kind that killed her previous patient. This is her chance at redemption.
A large part of the story is going to be about Susan having to decide: Does she do the surgery and risk it all? Or does she play it safe and avoid all the drama? (JK, she can’t avoid the drama! Why? Because I said so.)
Okay, so Susan has a redemptive path and a tragic path. Either one could win out, but this is still mainly an internal conflict. Showing her struggling against her own self-doubt by just ruminating endlessly doesn’t sound very appealing, so let’s fix that.
Step 3: Anchor Each Option in an External Character
Now we assign each choice to an external character who embodies or advocates for that path. Ensure these characters have distinct goals, perspectives, and stakes.
❓Who in the story could represent or challenge each of these options? How do their own goals create tension with the protagonist?
For each of Susan’s potential paths, we create a character who can represent that path somehow.
Redemption: What if there’s a senior surgeon who believes in Susan’s talent and pushes her to take the high-risk case, emphasizing duty and courage? Or what if the patient in question is the son of Susan’s best friend, and overcome with empathy for her friend’s distress, Susan has promised to heal him? This friend could then be the redemptive focus who has unshakeable faith in Susan’s skill, or it could even be the patient himself.
Failure: If we choose the senior surgeon colleague above, then I’m thinking, what if Susan’s husband fears for her mental health and encourages her to prioritize self-care over professional ambition? If we choose the best friend’s son above, then we could also use a colleague here to represent the pessimistic side.
I’m finding it hard to decide between these two sets of options, so if I were to write this story, I would probably try out both sets of characters in the same story. Nothing says these dramatic anchors (in this case, the anchor for redemption on one hand, and the one for failure on the other) need to be single characters; they just need to be external to Susan, giving her a visible conflict to play out against these characters.
Diffusing your anchors into several different players like this can be useful, because it provides you with more characters in the story to play off against each other, but there’s also a pitfall to watch out for.
You can’t have these different parts of the same anchor come across as too similar! Variety is the spice of life, and this is doubly true in fiction. You’ll need to take care to render the different components of the anchor somewhat differently.
In practice, it’ll look something like this: I’ve decided that Susan’s redemptive pathway is going to be represented by the following:
A senior surgeon at the same hospital, who encourages Susan because he truly believes in her talent and skill. Probably he’s her mentor as well.
Her best friend, who is the mother of the patient Susan will have to try to save. She is rooting for Susan’s success for pretty obvious reasons. She might be desperate enough to believe, even if she has no idea whether Susan can actually pull off this surgery. (The patient himself might also form part of this anchor, I haven’t decided yet, but that’s okay—we’re keeping things loose and easy in these early stages.)
Notice how the two characters linked to the redemption side have different motivations and reasons for encouraging her? That’s the kind of variety we want.
Same thing goes for the negative side, if I’m to choose two focuses:
Susan’s husband will be pushing Susan to the “failure” option, not because he’s a bad guy, but because he’s genuinely concerned over the toll the situation is taking on her. He’s going to keep worrying about her, and suggesting she back out of the surgery for her own good.
Then there will be a pessimistic colleague who will be doing the same thing (encouraging Susan to quit) but for different reasons—perhaps he realises just how desperate the patient’s situation is, how difficult the surgery, how slim the odds of success.
Step 4: Define Conflicts and Interactions
Now we get to the fun part, where we get to play around with lots of different options.
In this step we’re brainstorming specific scenes where our main character’s interactions with the anchoring characters will force a confrontation with aspects of the moral dilemma.
❓How will each character’s actions or words challenge the protagonist? How will these interactions escalate the tension?
The mentor surgeon would find ways to encourage Susan in her moments of doubt. He might corner her at an inopportune time to share stories of his own mistakes and triumphs, all in an attempt to assuage her fear. But maybe his talk of his own past mistakes will backfire, increasing Susan’s own fears. Whoops…
The best friend (the patient’s mother) might share her faith with Susan, where she sits in the hospital chapel clenching her prayer beads in restless hands. This might either help or hinder Susan’s decision, because she might have a very complicated history with faith (as many people do). The patient himself might tell Susan of his dreams to become a star football player one day (and this moment could also go both ways, either encouraging Susan in the positive direction, or stressing her out because of the heavy responsibility that’s being placed on her).
Susan’s pessimistic colleague will likely try to get in her head, try to convince her she’s not good enough for taking on this surgery. He might reason with her using empathy, or he might show her the failure rates and the obituaries of patients who didn’t make it (wow, he’s kind of an ass).
Susan’s husband might notice her sleeplessness, or her nightmares, and might initiate a heart-to-heart with her—or he might drag her to see a therapist. Some approaches will be tough love, and others might be softer. It’ll all depend on how sympathetic a voice I want him to be in Susan’s life, but the point is that there are many, many options.
Step 5: Add Stakes and Complexity
With our basic conflicts brainstormed, we can look for opportunities to deepen these conflicts by layering on stakes and showing the personal cost of each decision. I’m reaching ahead and stealing a technique from the book we’re exploring in the next cycle, but here it can be very useful to make sure each anchoring character’s goals clash not only with the protagonist, but also with each other.
Imagine these characters sitting on your protagonist’s shoulders like the prototypical angel and devil, fighting over the soul of your character.
❓What does the protagonist stand to gain or lose with each choice? How do the anchoring characters’ conflicts with each other heighten the drama?
For Susan’s situation, it’s almost effortless by this point to establish the stakes:
If she agrees to do the surgery, she risks a repeat mistake, potentially devastating her already fragile self-confidence. Incidentally, this would also likely kill the son of her best friend, so there’s some added complication already.
If she refuses to do the surgery, she’ll be leaving a critically ill patient without the best chance of survival. How does that square with her desire to be a good doctor? Is she willing to lose her best friend over this?
But these basic stakes aren’t enough. We can complicate them with a little effort, by imagining how these various characters might respond based on each potential choice that Susan might make.
If she chooses to do the surgery:
The pessimistic colleague might go a step further than he’s ever gone before. What if he reports Susan’s surgery to the ethics committee? After all, she’s personally involved with the patient and his family, so there are probably some ethics considerations there. This means Susan’s entire career can be threatened, regardless of the surgery’s success.
Susan’s husband, seeming to act out of compassion and empathy earlier, might put his foot down and demand a divorce. This may sound ridiculous, but what if their marriage was almost destroyed the previous time this surgery failed? Given the prospect of going through all that pain and struggle again, we might come to understand—if not outright condone—the husband’s response to this.
If she’s on the point of deciding not to go through with the surgery:
The senior surgeon might decide there was undue influence by the pessimistic colleague, and might publicly confront the other doctor about shielding her from responsibility and costing the patient his best chance at survival. Or he might go to the ethics committee himself claiming that Susan’s refusal to act constitutes a failure in her duty of care. (If this surgery is specialised enough, Susan might literally be the only person available to do the job in time.)
The best friend, distraught by Susan’s refusal, might do any number of things in her desperation: threaten to sue Susan for failing to save her son, team up with Susan’s husband somehow (maybe an affair?), or she might try to ruin Susan’s life some other way to force her to act.
Some of these options may sound silly or out there, but it’s all going to depend on what kind of story I am trying to tell. A quick glance over all the options laid out here convinces me that I would quite easily be able to tell at least 4 or 5 entirely distinct stories, each with its own tenor, style, and moral message, based on this single initial premise.
More options are great! It means I can flit between them as I start locking down the story idea and end up with something I will really enjoy writing.
Step 6: Reflect on the Resolution
But as fun as brainstorming can be, at some point we need to stop playing around with all the stories we could tell and home in on the one story that we want to tell. In this step we determine how the protagonist’s final decision will resolve the conflict, and also how the anchoring characters’ roles evolve based on this resolution.
❓How will the protagonist’s eventual choice affect their relationships with the anchoring characters? What does this resolution say about their growth or the story’s theme?
Now, I’m not really going to write this story about Susan. It’s not really my kind of story (although I have to admit that the brainstorming step above has produced some tantalising possibilities that my Muse is toying with even as I’m trying to dump buckets of cold water on the process).
For argument’s sake, let’s say I want the up ending, so I decide Susan is going to do the surgery. That implies an internal success: she’s facing her fears and doing the thing she needs to do.
Great!
But remember how I said I like tragic stories?
Well… I’ve got a bit of bad news for the patient…
Can a story work where the protagonist overcomes her fear of her ghost to act—and then promptly experiences the same setback that caused her ghost in the first place?
I think it can. It’ll be grim for sure, but depending on how you structure it, and on how well you present the mere decision to do the surgery as the thing that Susan really needs, I think I could get away with this up-but-kinda-down ending. It’s Susan’s story, after all, not the patient’s story. As long as Susan isn’t entirely crushed by her second failure, that would directly show her growth (even if it comes at the cost of the patient’s life).
This chosen outcome will naturally suggest a few knock-on effects in these anchoring characters, which I’d do well to explore at this stage of the process.
The mentor surgeon might feel a lot of guilt for pushing Susan to go ahead with the surgery. Or he might obsessively study the events of the surgery and prove that it wasn’t the same failure as before. Perhaps something unrelated went wrong this time, and it was just rotten luck. (Or sabotage…)
The pessimistic colleague might feel a fair amount of validation, but I doubt he’d bring himself to outright crow in victory—but if he does, I’d like the members of the vaunted ethics committee to see it happen.
The best friend will be devastated, of course. But what will her legacy (and that of her treasured faith…) in this story be? Will she forgive Susan and thank her for at least trying when nobody else would touch the case? Or will she become embittered and vow to destroy Susan?
The husband might go through with the divorce threat, or—and here’s that stubborn optimistic streak of mine again—he might appear on the day of the patient’s funeral (after having filed for divorce earlier in the story), and slip his arm around a mourning Susan, and pull her head against his shoulder in a silent, reassuring renewal of their vows. I could absolutely make this ending work, I think, and pull a couple of tears from the average reader, depending on how I set all this up. (Oh no, I might actually end up writing this story…)
Of course, there is another possibility I can use for the ending, and it came to me as I was writing all these options out: If the point of the story is truly only the decision itself, of whether to do the surgery or not, I could make the intriguing choice of stopping the story just as Susan puts scalpel to flesh (or says that famous mantra of all surgeons everywhere: “Scalpel, please.”).
It wouldn’t matter what the outcome of the surgery is. It was only ever about Susan’s doubts, and her eventual choice to do the surgery.
That’s also a story I could make work.
Whatever you decide, now is also the time to give a bit of thought to what you want this ending to mean to the average reader.
The version of Susan’s story where we cut off just as the surgery begins would showcase Susan’s determination, and would be advocating for similar bravery in the face of opposition. It might even say something about faith.
The one where Susan loses the patient and then her husband comes back to comfort her despite the pending divorce would be making a strong statement on the power of love, or the value of vows, or something similar, depending on how I set it up beforehand.
The resolutions you select at this step will in large part determine the content of your moral messaging, and it’s a good idea at this point to write down in so many words what you want the final message to be.
Step 7 (Bonus!): Add a Twist
Just for fun, look back over your brainstormed events and picture the story they would tell if strung up in sequence.
Now brainstorm some unexpected event or revelation that complicates the protagonist’s decision even further. Audiences love twists, especially ones that deepen the conflict and force the protagonist to reevaluate their values.
❓What new information or action could shift the protagonist’s perspective or raise the stakes?
What if the patient is really Susan’s child that she carried as surrogate for her best friend? Revealing this in the final moments of the story would certainly retroactively change the way we see Susan’s struggle, no?
What if the previous patient who died was related to the current patient, like a brother or a father? For that matter, what if the previous patient was related to Susan’s husband? That might cast a lot of the conflict in a different light.
What if Susan is on the verge of deciding not to do the surgery, and the best friend snaps and takes Susan hostage, forcing her to perform the surgery at gunpoint? That’s an anchor that physically forces its point of view, but hey, the best friend is still acting out her anchoring role of pushing Susan toward the “do the surgery” option. Suddenly we have an entirely different story, but one that may be more interesting and exciting to tell.
Twists can make or break a story, and the right twist can elevate a middling story idea into a high-concept blockbuster.
Phew, okay, that was a lot, and I hope it demonstrated the dramatic anchoring technique well enough that you can go ahead and use it in your own work. It’s a really useful way to sort out the moral poles of your story and can lead to rather rapid development of a story, and as you saw here, can take you pretty much from beginning to end.
Susan’s story might not be the best story I’ve ever plotted (and it would still need a lot of work, if I were to try to write it), but considering that I spent no more than two hours or so working on this idea, I think the results speak for themselves.
By anchoring your protagonist’s internal conflict in external characters and dramatising their interactions, you can create visible, dynamic tension that draws readers into the story, and add emotional depth and thematic resonance with barely any additional effort.
Well? What are you waiting for?
Get writing!
Did you follow along with your own hero concept? If so, why not share what you came up with using this exercise? I’d love to hear whether this exercise helped you dramatise your hero’s dilemmas!
