Back in 2020, I wrote a series on plotting for the Institute for Writers. Here’s an excerpt. There’s a link at the bottom that will take you to the rest of this rumination, which distills down some of the best advice I’ve picked up through years of study. This blogpost started with a key question for every writer:

What’s the worst thing I can do to this character?

The first time I ran across that question was in an essay by award-winning science fiction and fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold. My eyes stopped. This formulation was sheer genius and, at the same time, insanely obvious. I’d been sharing something similar with my Institute for Writers students on the importance of matching the external conflicts in a story to a character’s internal struggles for years, but there’s a deep and painful twist of the knife to coming up with the worst thing to do to a specific character. Naturally, this doesn’t mean that a serial killer should massacre your protagonist’s family and friends. Instead, it’s knowing how to challenge your characters’ weaknesses and twist their perceived strengths in a gut-wrenching way that will help them to grow.

As a fan of Bujold’s work, I could see where she’d done the worst thing to her protagonists again and again. Various members of the supporting cast had also suffered. Fans, critics, and fellow authors have been impressed by how well this plotting technique worked for Bujold. She’s won five Hugos and three Nebulas as well as being nominated many more times for each.

I saw variations of Bujold’s question appear in other places as the years passed. It could have been borrowed and stripped of the attribution, or other writers could have come to the same question independently. . . .

https://www.instituteforwriters.com/plotting-against-your-characters/