“Why me?” asked the protagonist.

I’ve said before that “why” is one of the most useful, and therefore important, questions a writer can ask. Most of the time, this is because figuring out why your characters need to do something is the first step in figuring out what your characters need to do next.

One of the earlies “why” questions is “Why do these people have to solve this problem?” There are a bunch of general answers that work:

It’s their job to solve this sort of problem. Detectives and police investigate crimes;...