Tough choices

One of the things that made the movie Eclipse superior to Twilight was the choice.
For those who don’t know the series, Bela is in love with sparkly vampire Edward, but she also has a strong passion for Jacob, the American Indian werewolf. And he reciprocates. And he’s a great guy, so it’s not as if choosing him would be a horrible mistake. But she has to choose, and she picks Edward.
Choices like that make for good drama (this is such a standard observation in “how to” writing articles, it’s like saying “Conflict makes stories more interesting.”). Where you have no easy decisions because whichever way you go, someone’s going to get hurt. Or someone’s going to die. Or you have to sacrifice the needs of the few to the needs of the many. It’s painful for characters and if it’s done right, it’ll be painful for us.
I remember an Aquaman story from the seventies in which arch-enemy Black Manta has captured Aquaman’s infant son and stuck him in a bubble of air (he’s too young to be able to live more than a few minutes without water). He then tosses Aquaman and Aqualad weapons and informs them that he’ll let the baby go as soon as one of them is dead. Aqualad tries to fake a fight in hopes of seeing a way to rescue the baby—but Aquaman, to his horror, makes a real attempt to kill him (“I’m sorry—but that’s my son!”).
It’s still powerful to me because it’s an awful situation to be in, and because in that situation, heroes aren’t supposed to take option a or b, they’re supposed to pick C. Having Aquaman make the choice made for an intense story (in case you were wondering, he does find a way to free his baby after a few seconds of fighting, but too late—his lungs have stopped breathing).
I tried for something in the same spirit in my steampunk novel Questionable Minds (still out at a publisher’s). My protagonist’s daughter is kidnapped and he’s informed he’ll have to deliver an innocent man to a mad-dog killer to get her free. He goes ahead and does it—always looking for a way out, but ready to let the man die if that’s what it takes to save his kid.
Hopefully the publisher likes that as much as I did.