This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
I had some back-and-forth with @jake on this topic, and I think it ultimately comes down to knowing your audience. If you're writing a work intended as pure escapism, your readers will be a lot more forgiving of contrivances and illogical character decisions. If it's meant to be a work of ruthless psychological realism, your readers will expect the characters to act accordingly and make rational, believable decisions: if the characters just do whatever is most convenient for the author, they will feel cheated. You can also aim to strike a happy medium, having the characters make all the decisions you would expect a character in a work of that genre to do, but also include little details and in-universe justifications for "why didn't he just do X?", to reward readers who are reading more closely than the casual reader. (This is arguably the most difficult approach of the three: escapist genres are escapist for a reason, and it takes quite a bit of work to make them seem grounded and psychologically realistic.)
There's also the Coen brothers' favoured approach, which is to have your characters make all the foolish decisions you would expect a character in a noir thriller to make, but establish that those characters are morons in-universe, so that their idiotic decisions seem in-character. Sometimes this can work, especially if the work is a black comedy (as many of the Coen brothers' films are); sometimes it just raises further questions. In Burn After Reading, it makes sense that two airheaded personal trainers have absolutely no idea what they're doing when they attempt to blackmail a former CIA analyst, and end up hopelessly out of their depth. It does not make sense that they are only marginally more moronic than the CIA analyst himself (his alcoholism and grandiosity notwithstanding), or another character who is a US Marshal. Inevitably the audience starts to wonder why such overtly blithering idiots weren't put out to pasture years prior. (All that being said, I did enjoy Burn After Reading, but it's a movie you have to switch your brain off while watching to properly enjoy it, which wasn't the case with Fargo or The Big Lebowski.)
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