This morning I got to work and went to reach for my trusty ‘ol water bottle. It’s not really that old, but It took me a week to pull the labels off of it in various meetings, so we’ve bonded now. And…*gasp* it wasn’t there. My water bottle was missing.

I mentally fumed. Who would have taken my water bottle? What cruel soul would be callous enough to abscond with my connection to the life-giving juice? Had the cleaning staff thrown it away? Why would they throw away ‘ol trusty when they never touch the unfinished Starbucks cups I have a habit of forgetting to throw away at the end of the day? Would my ‘meh’ flask be next? Or the mug from my recruiter? Maybe they liked paper disposable drink cups better than they did plastic, reusable containers.

And then it was time to stop mourning the loss of ‘ol trusty and head to my first meeting of the morning. On the way down the hallway, I passed the conference room we lovingly refer to as the fishbowl. Called this because the wall facing the hallway and front entrance is all glass. And there was my precious water bottle sitting on the conference room table, probably left their from one of the dozens of times I was called into that war room yesterday.

And I have a place to keep my water again.

The entire situation was dramatic, and heartbreaking (well, if you employ a little hyperbole it was), and was resolved in a matter of moments without me having to do anything except go about every day life. Oh, and take a detour into the conference room to grab ‘ol trusty. (Which I now need to tatoo or otherwise emblazon on my water bottle, thanks to this blog entry).

I have a story that works much the same way, and I didn’t realize it until a couple of weeks ago. I’ve known the story was boring, and I couldn’t figure out why. It’s the novel I wrote last November.

It’s because even though the main character faces conflict, it’s always too easy for him to overcome it. He doesn’t ever really flinch, he curses a little, then makes a plan and executes it. Even when his fiancee’ dumped him and sold controlling shares of his company to the competition, ensuring his misery as CEO, he thought about having a drink, and then confronted and solved the problem instead.

Oh, that and if I don’t like sitting in meetings at work, I don’t know what made me think my readers would like reading about them, regardless of how sexy my main character is, but that couldn’t possibly be related, right?

So now, with November approaching again, and a new shiny in my head for this year’s NaNoWriMo try, I know exactly how to fix last year’s novel. And no idea where this year’s novel is going. But with any luck, I’ve learned the ‘sterile, competent characters are boring’ lesson, and can implement some of that in the first draft this time around.

Though, you have to admit that if there had been some explosions and cg robots added to my ol’ trusty story, that it would have been a lot better. Thank you Michael Bay.

Ever have one of those ‘aha’ moments about what was wrong with a story you were working on?