So, the last post was about raising the stakes, and one way we made things more exciting was by changing what was at stake for our hero if she fails in her mission to the store. And that can be super fun to write. But that was just to show what we could do. We’re actually going to keep the original stakes for the rest of the time we are building this story.

In the interest of pushing on, here is where we last found our protagonist:

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Lemon looked at the ground near the scene of the…crime? It felt like a crime. It was clumsiness, but it felt like a crime. She looked at the ground and a chill wracked her chest.

“No. Not there,” she said quietly. Lemon slowly walked over to the sewer grate and, after a moment’s hesitation, she looked down into the wet, shadowy grave. And then Lemon said a word that not even her mother knew that she knew.

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So now, let’s just keep going:

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With her hand on her stomach, she leaned over and looked closer at the sewer grate. From a distance, she looked like she was going to throw up into it. That wouldn’t have been far off.

Lemon stood up and looked around.

“Okay… okay. Okay. There is probably a way to solve this. Um…” Lemon looked around, but not even she knew what she was looking for. Then she looked back at the sewer grate and knelt down. “Eww…”

She slowly pushed her arm through the spaces in the grate, trying to reach the money. But as much as she stretched, it was still too far. About twice the length of her arm.

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Now, at some point, Lemon has to come to the conclusion that she could use some chewing gum on the end of a stick to help her—if you remember, this is the thing that is going to drive her into the store to ask the clerk for some help.

But here is a plot problem: how do we get her to have this realization all of a sudden? If it just pops into her mind out of nowhere, it’s going to seem forced and unbelievable to your reader.

This is where we bring in something a little sneaky. And the thing we are going to bring in is a little hint, a foreshadow of this very moment. We are going to go back to the beginning of the story and drop in a tiny experience or observation for Lemon—something that will be in her memory that she can draw on now when she is faced with the sewer problem.

So, we go back to the opening scenes. Remember this?

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“Lemon!” her mother called. “Come down here. I need some help.”

Lemon raced down the stairs and into the kitchen where she found her mother covered in flour and bits of eggshell. Lemon stood and stared.

“Lemon,” her mother continued, “I just ran out of milk and I need to finish this recipe for the bake sale. Take some money out of my purse over there and run down to the store and get some for me, will you?”

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But now we are going to add in this:

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“Lemon!” her mother called. “Come down here. I need some help.”

Lemon raced down the stairs, past her little brother who was up to something again. He was sitting at the top of the stairs, dangling a magnet on a string over a pile of toy trucks he had left at the bottom. He was whispering to himself like he was talking over a radio or something.

“Bravo Delta, we need an extraction. Our truck went over a cliff and we need to lift it out of there with the chopper. Over.”

Lemon rolled her eyes and went into the kitchen…

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Now Lemon will have something in her memory to work with when she is figuring out a way to perform an extraction of her own.

So why is this sneaky?

Well, just because your audience reads the story from the beginning to the end, that doesn’t mean you have to write it like that. If there is ever a time when you need your hero to solve a problem in a certain way, but that certain way seems out of character or out of nowhere, just go back into the stuff you already wrote and work in a little hint about them doing that sort of thing in the past (or seeing that sort of thing, or whatever).

And you can do this all the time. If you get to the big, final climax of the story and you suddenly think of a really cool way your hero could get out of it, you still want to make sure that it’s going to be believable. And one way you can make it believable is by working in an earlier reference to it (preferably way, way earlier so that maybe your reader has forgotten about it until that very moment. That’s a really fun way to give your reader a more satisfying experience. And it’s ‘super fun to write’—which is a phrase I put in the first couple of lines at the beginning of this very blog post. See what I did there?).

Happy writing, young writer.