Bad Habits of Worse Authors: Man vs. Author Conflict

When I was in seventh grade, they taught us about the four types of conflict that can exist in a story: man vs. self, man vs. man, man vs. society, and man vs. nature. What they mean is that there are four basic types of conflict that can drive the plot of the story, but each story can, of course, have more than one. Man vs. self, for example, is a story about a character struggling to overcome personal demons or limitations. Following the same logical path, one can infer what the other three types of conflict are.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, at the time of writing there are three or four other types of conflict that my teacher did not tell us about. Unfortunately, neither list included the most important type of conflict: man vs. author. This is a special type of conflict that exists in works of shitty writers. It is a plot that involves a character who is impossibly and inexplicably unlucky.

A good example would be a little girl walking with her legal guardian, a kind old man. As they are walking, the old man slips and falls down a cliff, breaks both his legs, and bleeds to death while the little girl watches. The little girl is so traumatized by the experience that she gets cancer, face cancer. If an author pulls that bull shit once, it takes me a significant suspension of disbelief to not call it.

Unfortunately, some author uses this shit as the primary driver for the plot. I would expect this from an emo/goth 15 year old that just discovered that the world, on average, is a pretty shitty place. It is less acceptable coming from a person who has a 3 book deal from a major publisher. For this type of author it is a cheap cop out when an author cannot figure out a believable reason for a character to have misfortune. It is a deus ex machina. The writer has put the characters in such a positive and fortunate position that she cannot figure out how to believably inject more drama in the plot. She takes the easy way out: incapacitate the protagonist’s benefactor and put the evil uncle in a position of power. I wish this was an isolated incident, but most of the books that I have read recently have pulled this crap.