Alternate title: When You Realize One Character Can Solve Most of the Plot. Welcome back writers! It’s time for another Being a Better Writer post, and we’ve got a fun one for you!

Now, today’s post isn’t a reader request, though we’ve got plenty more of these coming. Today’s topic was actually inspired by discussion from the editing of the Axtara sequel—which should leave Alpha today, I’ll add. There’s your news tidbit. But yes, this came up while editing on that title. A minor spoiler, but one of the plot points of the second Axtara book is Axtara’s brother coming for a visit. Who happens to be a wizard.

However, his visit is announced in the beginning of the book, but as a letter noting that it will be some time before he arrives. The book happens, and then Axtara’s older sibling appears for the final chapter, making good on his promise and helping to wrap everything up from the story.

Now, this works, but a few readers did express a little disappointment that Axtara’s brother hadn’t been there from the start, since they’d wanted to see more of him. Which is fair. Ryax is quite a fun character, and many have wanted to see more of him since his (at this time) Patreon-Exclusive appearance.

The thing is, they weren’t alone in that. I too wanted to see Ryax get some more time to shine, which was one reason why he’d been included in the Axtara sequel in the first place. But … as I sat down and began to work through the plot, assembling the framework that would be Axtara’s second outing, I saw an immediate problem with Ryax’s inclusion.

He was a wizard, and solved more than 50% of the book’s primary conflict simply by being present, his skill set much better suited to overcoming the challenges faced by Axtara.

Now, I could have changed the conflict. Given the story something that Ryax couldn’t immediately or easily overcome. But when I started to explore that route additional problems were created, giving the plot multiple issues. Adjusting the plot to give Ryax more struggle took away from Axtara having conflict, making the story more about her brother than her, the titular protagonist. Worse, it shifted the genre, away from Cozy Fantasy more towards just regular fantasy starring a dragon.

Ryax, it became clear, was a detriment, not an improvement. I had unfortunately encountered a problem.

Now ultimately I fixed it, or the discussion never would have started in the first place. But when talk of this reached the site Discord, one member immediately noted ‘Oh, you had the Gandalf problem.’

And he was right. I had.

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Okay, what is “The Gandalf Problem?” Now, I’ll be up front here, I Googled the term, but the only usage of it I saw in the first ten search results (though I did use quotes) that pertained to novels was a 2016 book review of a Jim Butcher book that admitted it was their own term for “magic solves all problems in a book.”

That’s not the context I wish to give it today. Rather, I want to use it in the context of that Discord poster, which was to refer to a character whose capabilities were problematic to the challenge of the story.

The joke being that in the original Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is clearly the most powerful member of the fellowship, being a nigh-immortal wizard with lots of magic that he only uses sparingly until things get serious. So, the joke goes, to keep Gandalf from simply solving most of the struggles of the other, less magical and capable characters, Tolkien had to keep inventing reasons for him to leave the party. “Yes, I’ll meet you in Rivendale. Oop, Balrog, better solo this, you guys go on ahead.”

Now this is usually said with tongue in cheek intentions, but there is a valid logic there. Part of what makes a story a story is conflict. There has to be something for your characters to push against. To overcome. To grow while struggling against. Without conflict, you don’t really have a story.

Gandalf sort of solves a lot of conflict in The Lord of the Rings. Or, at least, he would if he was there. The story instead pits him against conflicts of his own, pulling him away from those that he would easily solve, thus letting those characters that would be challenged by them face them instead.

Now, this isn’t to say that the story wouldn’t have conflicts if Gandalf overcame everything and just stuck with the cast through the whole story. Rather that the conflicts wouldn’t have the same stakes, and that would change the tone and tension of the story.

Let me offer another example of changing that tone and tension. There’s a comedy TV show from … Korea, I think (?) I watched years ago that spoofs the classic video game Dragon’s Quest (along with a lot of others). Chosen hero sets out to defeat the Demon King and save the world, gathers a party of tropes along the way.

There’s a scene where they’re ambushed by a mid-boss fight (I did say this was spoofing a video game) a notorious thief who has been hired to stop the party in its tracks. At the start of the battle—laid out, mind you, like the traditional old-school 16 and 8-bit RPG battle setup—he taunts the heroes and informs them of his deadly poisoned blade, able to kill with but a single cut! You know, obvious boss monologuing that tells you what to look out for in the fight. He then strikes a classic “bad guy dramatic pose” which finishes with him licking the knife like a classic psychopath.

You know, the super deadly poison one? He then looks down at the knife after licking it, wide-eyed, and says “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that.” Then he dies, and the victory fanfare plays.

Now, is there conflict here? Well … only sort of. The party is at least mildly inconvenienced, but they didn’t have to overcome anything as the villain took himself out. Which is what makes it funny, clearly. That pull of the rug. Which fits with the tone of the show, that being a low-stakes laugh mixed with a wink as they make humor out of a bunch of tropes.

But that would really land a lot differently if it were to happen in The Lord of the Rings, wouldn’t it? If Gandalf just led Frodo and the rest of the Hobbits into Bree, marched into the inn, and pointed at Aragorn and said “There’s my ranger friend, you can trust him, so come along!”

It would change the tone and challenge completely. Which wouldn’t fit the kind of story that LotR is. If you’re familiar with either the movie or the books, think about how different that would be, but also what would be lost. All the tension as the hobbits struggle to reach Bree. The fear as they confront a town full of “big folk” and then find that the one they were supposed to meet isn’t there, and wonder what to do next.

All that would be lost if Gandalf had not moseyed away from the plot to do (unplanned) battle with Saruman.

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Now don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that Gandalf’s character is a detriment to LotR as a whole. He’s a great character, with many memorable lines and scenes. But there were moments of the story where had he been there, the tension and tone that Tolkien was going for would have evaporated. Gandalf would have been a “problem” in that he would have been an easy solution for everything ahead of the characters.

Thus, The Gandalf Problem: when we have a character whose skills and/or capabilities trivialize a portion of the story, upsetting our tone, pacing, theme, or any aspect of what we wanted the story to be instead.

Now at this point some of you are probably thinking “Yeah, but how hard can it be to fix this? Just change that character, change the story, or don’t have them at all. Boom, problem solved.” An easy fix, right?

Well … no. Yes, it can be that simple sometimes. Especially if we’re just setting out to write something new and fresh, then there’s a lot of flexibility granted to us. If you’re not set on the tone or the type of story that’s about to be written, then yeah! You can just go “Oh, I don’t want to write a horror story, it’s an action story instead!”

That’s easy to change … when there’s so little that’s been built up. But what if you’re halfway through the story and only now realizing “Wait, this character can solve that. And that too.”

Worse, what if you’re writing a sequel, and now all that character growth and accomplishment from the first story is suddenly making it difficult if not impossibly to create tension and meaningful conflict the second time around? Suddenly The Gandalf Problem is a lot more pressing, and has a lot greater of an impact.

Have you ever seen a sequel to a movie, or a later season of a show, or a book sequel where one of the more skilled characters just … leaves? Like, they go on “vacation” for the exact duration of the plot or off to handle “some other problem somewhere else?” Sometimes the characters even hang a lampshade on it later in the story, noting that “If so-and-so were hear this problem would already be solved!”

I certainly have. Numerous times. Because those stories ran into The Gandalf Problem and their solution was just … send the guy somewhere else for a book, issue, episode, etc.

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Okay, with all this said, again I want to reiterate that having a character like Gandalf isn’t the problem. The only “problem” is when a story can’t figure out how to keep said character while maintaining the tone, conflict, etc, that the character would naturally uproot.

So say you’ve seen this problem rearing its head in one of your stories. How do you fix it? Or rather, how do you keep it from becoming a real problem? One that has negative consequences?

Well, if you’re in the early stages, as I was with Axtara 2, you’ll have to decide which elements of your groundwork you’ve laid down you want to shift. This will likely mean extrapolating several possible paths forward to see what each change would do. For example with Axtara 2 I mentally charted out several possible stories, including a few with my “Gandalf” just to see what would result. And in each of those cases where I chose to keep him in the story, either having him there at the start or show up partway through, the story was changed in a direction that either left me asking “Why isn’t Ryax the main character?” (pretty rough when Axtara’s name is the one on the book) or noting “This is not a Cozy anymore” … with Ryax still doing most of the work.

Now, had Ryax not appeared before, but been a character created for that book, I could have just changed who Ryax as well. But he was fixed already. So I charted out the extrapolations, noted what “rooms” needed to be added or removed to the “frame” that would be the story for each of them, then picked the one that most closely held to what I felt an Axtara sequel should be.

So should it be if you find yourself in a similar predicament during your planning. Extrapolate! Write a quick paragraph or two for what might happen if you keep things the same, or make various changes. Then look at the various paths you have forward, and choose the one that most closely aligns with your vision.

This does mean you’ll sacrifice things. I was looking forward to having brother-sister shenanigans between Axtara and Ryax in book 2, but it had to be cut. At the same time, because of that Axtara’s friend Mia stepped in to fill the gap, and book 2 has more of these two being best friends than the first did, which is great. But yeah, I did have to cut some stuff.

There’s no getting around it: The same will happen no matter what. I could have cut the genre and changed book 2 into an action-packed Adventure Fantasy, thus allowing me to keep Ryax … but at the cost of losing the whole genre and audience that enjoys it.

You’ll just have to make the call.

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Now, that’s all well and good, but what if you’ve already started your story and just now realized you’ve inadvertently set yourself up with a Gandalf Problem? Well, it’s not the end of the world. After all, the namesake is still considered one of the pillars of Fantasy. It’s a classic beloved by generations. You might have entered into the issue before realizing it was there, but you can still keep things on track.

Maybe you do the Gandalf thing and have that character be needed elsewhere. Sands, it might be a great time to work in a new subplot! Something that’ll keep him busy when he’d otherwise be able to make short work of things. Don’t make it an excuse plot, an obvious wink at the audience of “This is a dumb reason but we can’t have them here or they’ll solve everything.” At least, not unless that fits the tone. You might find that in working in a subplot to get your “Gandalf” elsewhere for a moment you actually bring some new elements to the story that shore it up and make it better, which is a win overall!

You could also choose to change your Gandalf. Maybe they don’t need to be quite as skilled as you made them. It will likely mean retooling some early chapters to adapt their character (or maybe even not if you’re lucky), but this is an option. Just tweak how capable they are.

Or tweak the challenge too. Got an honor-bound magical Gandalf that’s gonna carry the protagonist to an easy victory? Put a challenge before them that magic can’t solve. This can be something like a riddle—Speak friend and enter, anyone?—or any sort of scenario where the Gandalf either doesn’t have the overpowered strength or even can’t use it for some reason. Though you’d better make that reason make sense, and not just a contrivance. Again, keeping in mind the tone of the story and characters. I’ve absolutely experienced stories where the Gandalf just shrugs and says “Nah, I handle everything, I think you guys have this. Try not to die.” and sits it out.

Whatever change or course you take, keep your aims in mind. Sure, it might be funny to have the Gandalf miss the fight because they found a restaurant they really wanted to eat at, but does that fit the tone of your story? Or will it end up feeling out of place?

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It’s inevitable that you’ll run into this problem eventually, be that in sequels or in stories that you’re working on fresh. Don’t panic, just recall what we’ve talked about. Lord of the Rings made it work, and so will you. Based on where you are in the story, look at what your path is about to be, then adjust accordingly. It may mean adding a subplot, changing a character, or even switching the story up entirely.

Sands, you might even decide to jump genres and go headfirst into having your Gandalf mow through ever problem in humorous fashion. You have options.

So don’t worry if you run headlong into The Gandalf Problem. You can make it work. You just have to make a call.

Good luck. Now get writing.

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