This week: Dramatic, or Just Dumb? Edited by: Jayne  
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| Hello, I'm Jayne! Welcome to my dramatic explorations. Sometimes, a series of newsletters will interconnect, while other issues will stand alone. I strive to ensure they are informative but fun and do my best to spark your curiosity. Don’t forget to check out this issue's curated story collection! |
I just watched a horror movie that (supposedly) started off with promising drama/thriller elements.
I checked out within ten minutes.
Here’s the setup:
Our MC (female) pulls up to an AirBnB in the dark, in a clearly “bad” and mostly abandoned neighborhood. She discovers someone else (male) is already in the house claiming to have booked it. She can’t get customer service on the phone.
The obvious solution?
Leave.
Instead, our plucky MC decides to:
1. Go into the house with said stranger,
2. Drink wine with said stranger,
3. Remake the bed with said stranger,
4. Spend the night there,
5. Find her bedroom door mysteriously open in the middle of the night—and decides to stay anyway.
Spoiler: the stranger wasn’t the bad guy (and he made equally ridiculous decisions).
The real villain was whoever wrote the script.
Bad Decisions ≠ Good Drama
Characters making bad choices can be the lifeblood of great drama. But when those decisions are implausible, inconsistent, or clearly exist only to serve the plot? That’s an entirely different kind of tragedy.
When readers stop thinking “No, don’t do it!” and start thinking “No one would do this,” the tension dies.
What you’re left with is disbelief, but not the good kind.
The good kind is where a character makes a devastating choice and you’re left thinking, “I can’t believe they did that,” while staring at the page with your hand half-covering your mouth.
That’s dramatic disbelief. It’s emotional. It’s earned. Your brain doesn’t want to believe it, but your heart knows it’s true.
What we’re talking about here is broken suspension of disbelief. It's the moment you stop trusting the story - but not because of some deliberate unreliable narrator or other writing finesse.
Instead, it's when your brain says, “No one would actually do that,” and you’re no longer immersed in the world. Once suspension of disbelief is gone, it’s nearly impossible to get the reader back.
Believable vs. Engineered Mistakes
Readers will forgive an awful lot if the character’s choice feels real. That means the decision is:
• Emotionally grounded (fear, pride, desperation, hope)
• Consistent with their flaws and worldview
• Driven by character, not plot machinery
If your character lies, screws up, lashes out, runs away—that’s fine. It can be devastating. But it needs to make sense for them, even if it wouldn’t for us.
Now, the woman in that movie? Her situation was technically complicated by a convention in town causing a lack of hotel rooms. That could hint at desperation, I suppose. But I’m not buying it.
She was a woman of means: new car, full tank of gas, working credit card. She wasn’t stranded.
She had options. She just chose every wrong one.
And those choices didn’t come from fear, trauma, or deep-seated trust issues. They came from the writer’s need to push her into a creepy house. They weren’t character choices. They were terrible plot fuel.
The Danger of the Drama Puppet
When a character repeatedly makes the worst possible choices just to keep the plot moving, they stop being a person. They become a drama puppet. And once the strings show, the audience checks out.
I sat through another 80 minutes of the movie.
Don’t be like Jayne.
Do what the character should have done: leave. Close the book. Turn off the TV. Unplug the internet.
To prevent the drama puppet from blundering through your stories, ask yourself:
• Would this decision make sense if I couldn’t justify it with “they had to do it for the plot to work”?
• Does the character grow, shift, regret, or resist over time?
• Is the bad choice tied to something deeper like shame, fear, loss?
Bad Decisions Are Great (When They Cost Something Real)
Some of the best dramatic arcs come from characters making the same mistake over and over—but each time with new stakes, new consequences, or new self-awareness. That’s drama.
But if your character keeps making poor decisions, not out of trauma or denial or desperation, but because it helps move you to another scene?
It's not dramatic, and it risks your readers saying what I said about the movie: "That's just dumb."
If your character's reasoning is so solid that we can feel in our bones, they’ve earned it, and we'll be hooked on your story.
As always,
Happy writing! |
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Drama: June 11, 2025 Issue [#13177]
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