Complication
Quick answer: Complication in fiction, defined and demonstrated: how each new obstacle raises the cost of the goal, why stories need them, and how to write ones that escalate.
A complication is any development that makes a character's goal harder to reach, more expensive to pursue, or riskier to abandon. In other words, it is the story saying not so fast: a new obstacle, a raised price, an unwelcome piece of information arriving at the worst time.
Complications are the working material of the middle of a story, the stretch that structure diagrams label rising action. Whatever you write, from flash fiction to a trilogy, the middle is built out of them, and most sagging middles are simply middles where the complications stopped arriving or stopped mattering.
Three wishes, each worse than the last
W. W. Jacobs' 1902 story 'The Monkey's Paw' is practically a complication machine. The White family receives a talisman that grants three wishes. The first wish, for two hundred pounds, is granted through the death of their son, whose employer pays exactly that sum in compensation. The goal has been reached and the situation is catastrophically worse: that is a complication in its purest form. The second wish, to have the son back, produces the knocking at the door that has terrified readers for over a century.
Watch what each development does. It does not merely block the Whites; it transforms what they want. First they want money, then they want their son, then they want the thing outside the door to go away. A good complication does not just delay the goal, it forces the goal to evolve.
Why stories are built from trouble
Complications exist because readers do not actually want characters to succeed; they want to watch characters earn success, or fail instructively. Each new difficulty applies pressure, and pressure is the only reliable instrument for revealing what a person is made of. Story theorists such as Robert McKee talk about progressive complications for this reason: each one should demand more of the character than the last.
The risk is escalation without variety. If every complication is another locked door, the reader learns the pattern and stops feeling the pressure. And there is a cost to sheer volume: pile on too many and the story turns picaresque, a string of troubles rather than a single tightening knot. Complications should multiply consequences, not just incidents.
Writing complications that count
Give your protagonist a concrete goal, then interrupt the shortest path to it three times, making each interruption different in kind. A practical pattern: first an external obstacle, then a betrayal or reversal involving another character, then a complication that comes from the protagonist's own flaw. That last one matters most, because trouble a character causes is always more interesting than trouble that merely finds them.
The trap is the complication that changes nothing. If a scene's obstacle can be removed without rewriting anything downstream, it was decoration, not structure. Test each one by asking what it costs: time, money, an ally, a secret, a piece of self-respect. Writory's short story judges mark Storytelling and Structure as its own criterion, and stories that stack consequence on consequence tend to score there far better than stories that stack event on event.
Complication, conflict and crisis
Conflict is the underlying opposition in a story, the standing argument between what the protagonist wants and what resists them. Complications are the individual moves in that argument, the specific events that make things worse. A story has one central conflict and many complications.
The crisis, by contrast, is where accumulated complications corner the protagonist into a decisive choice. If you imagine the story as a trap, conflict is the reason the trap exists, complications are the walls closing in one by one, and the crisis is the moment the character must gnaw something off to get out. The inciting incident is a special case: the first complication, the one that disturbs the opening balance and sets the goal in motion.
What poets can take from this
- Make each complication different in kind from the last: obstacle, reversal, self-inflicted wound.
- Let at least one major complication grow directly out of the protagonist's own flaw.
- Test every obstacle by naming what it permanently costs; if it costs nothing, cut it.
- Allow complications to change what the character wants, not just how long it takes.
- Space them so the reader never gets ten calm pages in a row in a short story.
- Save the harshest complication for last, so pressure peaks just before the crisis rather than midway through.
Try it yourself
A courier has until midnight to deliver a small box across town on foot. Write the journey with exactly three complications: one physical, one caused by another person, and one caused entirely by the courier's own worst habit. Each must leave a mark still visible in the final paragraph.
Questions
What is the difference between conflict and complication?
Conflict is the overall opposition between a character's desire and whatever resists it. A complication is a single event that deepens the conflict, such as a lost key, a lie exposed, or an ally changing sides. One conflict generates many complications.
How many complications does a short story need?
Most short stories work well with two or three substantial complications between the opening disturbance and the climax. Fewer than two and the middle feels thin; many more and the piece starts reading like a summary of a novel.
What makes a complication feel contrived?
Usually one of two things: it arrives from nowhere with no roots in the situation, or it exists only to fill pages and could vanish without changing the ending. Complications feel organic when they grow from choices already made, and necessary when their costs are still visible at the close.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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