Sleepless babble
A side effect of being a Lady of a Certain Age is that I tend to wake up in the middle of the night with my skin on fire. Or bathed in sweat. Actually, more often bathed in sweat, but last night it was skin on fire. This may or may not have been exacerbated by the flu shot I got yesterday morning. (Probably was.)
I had gone to bed at 11pm and woke up (involuntarily) at 3am. And that was it for the night. I courted sleep for the next 4 hours, but he wasn't interested.
Fortunately, as I spiraled ever deeper into the dissociation of lack-of-sleep, my brain solved the current plot problem. Once again my protag is having a Heroic Blue Screen of Death (warning: TV Tropes link). She does that a lot. Or some other version that's a despond of despair, taking to her bed and staring mopily into space because the antagonists really know how to mess with her psyche. (The antagonists are...specialists at that sort of thing.)
Obviously "moping around" is not what you want in a protagonist. Your protagonist should protag.
So in the depths of fevered, pie-eyed sleeplessness, I managed to turn my brain to the question of what is my girl gonna do after she reboots from the Heroic BSOD. And the first answer was "be broken," because holy crap, what drove her to the BSOD really should have broken her. But I've established the character as one who has exceptional mental resilience. Further, if she passed the Despair Event Horizon, she would be down that hole and going deeper for the next six years of story time and would never come back and there goes the story.
So I reminded myself of the importance of the protagonist protagging. When she wakes up and this insoluble problem is still there, she is of course going to get her shit together and go do SOMETHING. The only question was what. And the Gordion knot could be cut by her slitting the right throat.
(My girl tends to think throat-slitting is a good option for many problems.)
No, she's not going to succeed. Because there are other protags who disagree with her throat-slitting ways. And if she succeeds, the book must go one way, and if she fails the book goes another, and I want it to go that second way.
A lot of my author choices are predicated on keeping heroes alive to torture them some more, and keeping antagonists alive so they can torture the heroes some more.