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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33132
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

One way to break down a story is _intention_ versus _obstacle_. The intention is what the protagonist **must** accomplish, and the more necessary the intention is, the better.

At the same time, the obstacle is what prevents the protagonist from realizing their intention, and just as necessary as the intention should be, so insurmountable should be the obstacle. It doesn't hurt for the reader to think the obstacle is completely impossible to overcome, at first.

If your protagonist is realizing their intention(s) too quickly, then probably you have not made the obstacle(s) as strong as they should be. As the parentheses in my previous sentence suggests, another approach or outlook is to have smaller intentions as part of the larger overall intention, and likewise smaller obstacles that block the success of the smaller intentions. That is how a serial TV drama stays interesting over (hopefully for the writers) over 100 episodes. You could use the same technique with chapters.

Either way, it's best to make things really impossible for the protagonist.

At the same time, one piece of advice I've heard lately that makes a lot of sense to me is to **write out your whole first draft** before you do any edits or rewrites. Get it all out there and then you have something you can look at as a whole and figure out where the real issues are. This also helps prevent a problem of constantly rewriting the first 100 or 200 pages and never getting to the ending. And you still may have a lot to learn about your story that will help inform your rewrites.

Original score: 4