Holy smokes, this podcast completely made me rethink how I thought about competence. And how you can use competence (and lack of it) to make important story adjustments. My favorite example they use here is Harrison Ford movies in the late seventies and early eighties. I'd always thought of Indiana Jones and Han Solo as incredibly competent. But they're really not. They're each good at one thing (Jones at archeology and Solo at flying) and get dragged into situations they are really bad at handling (fighting fascists). But they try, even when they should probably give up (that's the pro-activity coming into play, we'll get to that in a minute) and they are loyal to their friends. And that makes up love those characters (Harrison Ford's "aw shucks" attitude doesn't hurt either).
If none of this makes sense to you, go check out the pod cast.
Rating: 4/5
Homework: find something for your hero to suck at. Making sucking at that thing an important part of the story. Because of that thing they suck at, make your hero fail at something.
Link: http://www.writingexcuses.com/2014/06/22/writing-excuses-9-26-adjusting-character-competence/