There must be a reason

Recently, I've read a couple of books that had the same problem. They were otherwise pretty good books. But this bothered me about both of them: The characters sometimes took the long way around for no apparent reason.

Let me illustrate with a made-up example. Suppose a character has the ability to breathe underwater. She is put in a situation where she has to get from a lakeshore to an island in the middle of the lake. But instead of walking right into the lake and using her underwater breathing to go directly to the island, she spends four chapters running all over the place trying to get a boat. And it isn’t that the author explains this—there isn’t a catch, say, such as the girl only being able to breathe in salt water. It’s as if character and author have both forgotten this special ability, while the reader is saying, “Hey, why don’t you just use your underwater breathing instead of wasting all this time and energy hunting down a boat?”

In life, people don’t usually make extra work for themselves; they don’t often do things the hard way when there’s an easier way that would work better. If characters do things the hard way, there needs to be a reason—and that reason needs to arise from the character. The author can’t say, “Well, she needs to be in a boat because she’s going to find the magic stone hidden in the anchor.” That’s the author’s reason for the boat, not the character’s.

Of course, it's easier to spot such issues in someone else's writing rather than one's own--yet another reason that critiquers are valuable. :-)