Q&A: Do Characters Need to Make Bad Decisions? Writing Tension Without Sacrificing Intelligence
It’s not about being wrong. It’s about what they know—and what they don’t.
Question: Someone told me recently that in order to have a story, characters need to make bad decisions. How do I have my intelligent characters make bad choices without making them look stupid?
Answer:
One of the most common myths in writing strong characters is that they need to behave irrationally to keep readers hooked. In writing groups, especially ones geared toward newer writers, this gets flattened into one-line mantras. “Have your characters make bad decisions” is an excellent example of this phenomenon. The spirit of the advice isn’t wrong—stories need tension, and perfect characters kill tension—but the execution often gets misunderstood.
Tension doesn’t require stupidity. It requires friction. And friction can come from anywhere: miscommunication, conflicting goals, ethical dilemmas, trauma responses, societal pressure, or incomplete information.
What that “bad decision” advice is really trying to get at is: your character’s actions shouldn’t always lead to ideal outcomes. If everything goes their way, the story dies on the page. But the why of a decision matters. If a smart character makes a mistake because they’re working with limited or flawed information, or because they’re torn between competing values, then the error is coming from a place that won’t break the reader’s suspension of disbelief.
So, where do flawed decisions come from?
I’ve found that the most narratively compelling missteps tend to arise from:
Conflicting ethical codes
Cultural pressure
Incomplete or skewed intel
Trauma or internalized fear
Other characters withholding key context
These are human errors. They show us who the character is when the stakes are high. Even better, the fallout from those decisions causes ripple effects—forcing everyone else in the story to pivot, reassess, and make their own imperfect choices. That’s how you build a dynamic, evolving cast and keep the tension alive.
So here’s my amendment to that original advice:
It’s not that your characters need to make bad decisions. It’s that their decisions need to cost something.
That cost is where the story lives.