The answer to both problems is conflict, and its resolution.
Conflict Equals Content
Or, why your characters need to fail more.
Using conflict generating content is not a new concept--it is the driving force behind popular NaNoWriMo tropes, like Chandler's Law and surprise ninjas. Whenever you need content something is bound to go wrong: a new problem, another puzzle, a hurdle to overcome, and while there's nothing wrong with content generation in this fashion the real issue starts with conflict resolution.
If some surprise event occupies a chapter's worth of content before our brave heroes, emerge bloodied, but victorious, you find yourself once again in the same situation. What happens next?
These closed-circuit conflicts don't add anything but fat to your story, and don't contain any of the necessary components of good conflict: stakes and tension. Winning too much makes stakes trivial, and conflict that is overcome does nothing to increase tension.
The solution? I should stop putting spoilers in the title--it's failure.
I like to describe a story as a series of failures culminating in a singular success. I'm sure my characters would murder me if they could.
Every time you open a conflict, think of it as a question. Could be: 'will they survive this' or, 'will they kiss', or anything else. Every time you solve a conflict you are answering that question, and the more questions you have open at any one time, the more tension your story will have. If you're asking the right questions your reader will be dying to find the answer--this is how you produce reader engagement!
So, if you're struggling to make your conflicts go anywhere, the solution is simply find a place where your characters succeed, and then have them fail. Not only do they fail, but do so in a manner that makes everything thing worse and makes the problem much larger than it was before.
This accomplishes three things: it makes the conflict personal--nothing makes an issue personal like failure. It increases the stakes--showing your characters can failure makes the fear of failure more real. Finally, it increases the tension--every unsolved conflict is a direct step upward in tension.
Thank you for reading! I think failure is one of the most important elements of any story, and I wanted to get this bumper post out leading up to my next post--how to avoid saggy middle syndrome--which should be up and ready in the next couple days!
I'd also like to share my personal Conflict Commandments that I use to control the pacing in my own stories. This is more useful for editing than drafting, and I intend to write a full deconstruction of conflict, and how it controls the tension and pacing of a story, after November.
But for now, it's a first draft--don't worry about it.
i) Every major conflict shall be established in the first half of the book.
ii) No major conflict shall be resolved until the Final Confrontation.
iii) No conflict shall be resolved at the end of a chapter--unless its resolution explicitly starts an even greater conflict before that chapter ends.
iv) No conflict shall be resolved within a single chapter, nor shall conflict established at the end of a chapter be resolved at the beginning of the preceding.
Question of the day: what have your characters failed at so far?