The first thing to do is to figure out what you're doing. If the effect that you're aiming for privileges mimetic realism and in-depth examination of character above richness of invention and the elaboration of incident, then science fiction and fantasy may not be the ideal vehicles in which to carry your story ideas to market.
Let's say that you don't, in fact, want to abandon plotted fiction and external action completely in favor of low-action fiction-of-character kind of stuff. Nevertheless, readers will like your characters better if they have inner lives of some sort. This puts you in the position of having to run two plots at once, the exterior and the interior; the trick is to keep them related and running in parallel, so that from the reader's point of view, they're a single coherent thing. Often, this works best when done from the inside out: First determine what your emotional plot is--the high points, the crises, the changes. After that, when you start putting together your external plot, you can concentrate on finding or creating incidents and interactions that function as mirrors or correlatives to your emotional points. (Avoid, for the sake of not being obvious, the cliched stuff like having it rain outside because your character is depressed.) Give your protagonist external problems to deal with that a) reflect or illustrate his or her internal, emotional problems, or b) make his/her internal problems better, or--and this is where the drama comes in--make them even worse.
While you're doing this, try to keep control of the pacing so that the emotional plot and the external plot unfold at the same rate. The ideal climax should have both plots coming to their finish simultaneously and--in a perfect world--in such a way that the clockwork wheels of one plot engage with the clockwork wheels of the other to set off the bells and the gongs and the fireworks and the chimes and the mechanical knight that comes out of the clock tower and bashes the mechanical dragon twelve times on the stroke of noon and starts the carillon to playing the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
That's in a perfect world, of course. Most of the time, I wind up a book feeling like I'm frantically engaged in packing an immense suitcase for a very long trip with the taxicab already honking its horn at the door and the meter running. No matter how I stuff and arrange things, there's always the fear in the back of my mind, as the taxi pulls away from the curb, that I've left something embarrassing--an ancient bit of underwear mended with a safety pin, or a sock with a hole in the toe--flapping out of the suitcase like a tongue.
And a Bit More on Character, Action-Plot Style
More than other kinds of stories, action plots tend to have not just protagonists, but heroes. Heroes come in differing shades and variations (a good thing, or our books would be all alike), from the wild reckless gallantry that's nineteen and thinks it's immortal to the tired realism of pushing-fifty that's already been beaten and abused by life but--for the sake of an ideal, or a person, or the greater good--gets up and goes into the fight again. And then, of course, you get the Capital-H Heroes, the ones like Achilles or Cúchulainn, who've made the traditional hero's choice of a short and glorious life over a long and boring one. People like that draw trouble like golfers draw lightning, and they're almost as bad as saints for disrupting the lives of everybody around them. When you need someone like that, you need them very very badly; but when you don't need them any longer, you wish they'd go away. As genre protagonists, they often work best when viewed from a position a little apart from the center, through the eyes of a default normal character.
Moody loners and charming rogues, on the other hand, work best as genre protagonists if they're encountered at a cusp point in their personal life-story—or, to put it less delicately, at the point where they're about to grow up. Nor should one forget the Three Faces of the Action Hero (sort of like the Triple Goddess, but different). Instead of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, you've got the Kid, the Gunslinger, and the Wise Old Cowpoke, who can be seen in their full glory by considering the career of Clint Eastwood from his days as Rowdy Yates in Rawhide up to the present. They're also conveniently displayed all three at once in the first Star Wars movie, in the Luke/Han/Ben trinity.
Heroes in historical or alternate-historical fiction can present some special problems. Even people who were howlingly progressive by the standards of their day often exhibit turns of thought and vocabulary which are liable to leave their modern ideological descendants gobsmacked. I don't mind it when a historical romance elides or passes over stuff like that; conversely, it irritates me no end when a writer feels obliged to make his or her characters progressive before their time, as it were. Granted, in almost every age you can find people whose attitudes and beliefs were more in line with those of our era than with their own . . . but their contemporaries usually regarded them as whackaloons. And again, granted, sometimes that attitudinal disjunction is the whole point of the story, but if it isn't, then it's an almighty distraction from whatever the point of the story actually is.
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