Hard Fictional Lives for Our Characters

I think there's something to be said about pacing and conflict with good fiction writing.  That and difficulty, which I guess is the easy way to put it.  What we want to read about is our characters overcoming adversity and triumphing over challenges.  But back to pacing and conflict.

I was doing some light editing of my urban fantasy novel today and I was thinking about a change that I made in a scene that gave me a lot more good stuff to write about.  The opening scene is supposed to be the hero accepting a job from a band of local orcs in the Sacramento area.  In the original writing the scene was only a page and a half long, if that.  The orc comes to his house, Jaden is distrusting at first but he lets the orc in and they get to talking.  I stopped writing right there, thinking in my head "This isn't compelling." And it wasn't.  Do we really want to read about the time that chumbo went to the grocery store and bought a gallon of milk and nothing bad happened?  No.  Have somebody rob that grocery store while chumbo is inside and now I'm interested.  I had the same problem in my manuscript.  I needed some shit to go down, as it were.

The change I made was a simple one but it ended up yielding a lot more compelling material in the end.  I had my hero Jaden react differently to the orc messenger appearing at his home.  He became distrustful and paranoid.  This enriched his character on its own, and when the orc turned to leave Jaden followed him.  Now I had something to write about.  Jaden ended up infiltrating the orc camp and nearly getting strangled to death in the process.  That's compelling fiction.  What had been a mere one and a half pages had blossomed into a sturdy ten page scene that showed character, conflict and setting simultaneously.