Complications vs. Situations

Fall has come to my sunny Florida, and it looks like it's here to stay, after a few false starts this year. The sky is overcast and gray. I am fighting letting its gloominess drag me down. I've been thinking about the change in the weather all day today and realized, after much grumbling, I am reacting to a situation (a perfectly normal one for mid-November) and not a complication. The chill in the air and the sky's dreariness is not keeping me from doing anything I want, after all. I still went out and ran errands, enjoyed a quick lunch at a favorite diner, got my hair colored (bonfire red). In fact, the cooler weather made my hot coffee even more of a treat.

Thinking about the weather has made me consider complications versus situations in plot development. I am reading Monica Wood's essay "The Plot Thickens" in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, which contains a thought-provoking section on the subject. Wood writes,

Remember this: A complication must either illuminate, thwart, or alter what the character wants. A good complication puts emotional pressure on a character, prompting that character not only to act, but to act with purpose. If the circumstance does none of these things, then it's not a complicaton at all - it's a situation.

Reading Wood's essay makes me question to what extent I have complicated the lives of my characters versus just creating interesting situations to place them in. As writing coach Jessica Page Morrell insists, writing good fiction is about saying "no" to your characters. Am I saying "no" enough? How can I complicated their lives in order to stir them to act with purpose, rather than merely react to a situation as any one else would.