At times, my wife Cathy gets sad because she thinks her cancer treatments are putting an unfair burden on me. I tell her she’d do the same thing for me, and she agrees, but still she cries sometimes, particularly in the days following a chemotherapy infusion when she has little energy and her blood pressure is low. It takes her a while to rebound, and during the time of her recovery, I tend to everything there is that needs tending. I cook, I clean, I water flowers, I look after our small vegetable garden and our pool, I drive Cathy to doctors’ appointments, I shop, I insist that Cathy drink enough to stay hydrated. You get the picture. Caretaking, as I’m sure many of you know, is more than a full-time job.

This leads me to a suggestion for anyone who’s looking for an idea for a story or maybe having trouble moving a plot along for a story you’ve got underway. Think about your main character. What matters to them more than anything in the world? Is it a garden, for example, or is it their appearance? Maybe it’s their love of a child, or maybe it’s the music they play, or their collection of. .  . (you fill in the blank). Whatever they treasure is vulnerable. It can be threatened. Pests come to the garden, age changes one’s appearance, a child revolts, professional musicians lose dexterity or breath, a special collection gets damaged. Paradise is only precious because we know at any moment we might lose it.

Pressure is crucial to storytelling. Without trouble and complication, a narrative meanders, never taking us anyplace where the complicated layers of the human heart come into view. We should always have an eye on what rises at the end of a good story. It’s something, as Charles Baxter points out in his book, Burning Down the House, that’s present from the beginning but submerged. It takes the pressure of the plot to bring it to the surface. When it finally rises, the story resonates and becomes memorable. Often, the final turn that invites the crucial truth to appear depends on the art of misdirection. We believe we’re reading a story about one thing when all along we’ve been reading a story about an opposing truth. In Richard Bausch’s story, “The Fireman’s Wife,” for instance, a woman who’s considering leaving her husband, finds herself closing a bedroom door with great care, as if she doesn’t want to awaken a loved one. In that moment, the affection she thought she’d lost appears, at least temporarily, and it stuns the wife. It also surprises us. With that simple action of closing the door, the story, which we’d assumed was a story about a marriage coming apart, becomes something more complicated, and, therefore, more human and more truthful.

Try it. Bring your story to a moment that surprises your main character. See what you discover.

Last night, Cathy broke down in tears after looking at herself in the mirror. Chemo has taken her hair. “I hate for you to see me like this,” she said. I held her and told her she was beautiful. I meant every word. And I remembered how earlier in the day after she’d showered and dressed, she said, “Dang, I forgot to style my hair.” She was joking, of course, because she has no hair to style, and there you have it, the things that can arise without warning—a bit of humor, a moment of sadness. Which story are we living? Both, of course. One makes us laugh, and one makes us cry, and that’s the human part of our experience we embrace as we move ahead.