Does anyone else remember Swat Kats? I love this cartoon. Razor and T-Bone are heroes with a souped-up fighter jet, hearts of gold, and a common goal: protecting MegaKat City from villains. However, they sometimes disagree on how to go about it. Razor’s more cautious, strategic, and sensitive. T-Bone’s the stubborn tough-guy who relies on muscle and insane piloting stunts. So it’s not surprising that they come up with different ideas for handling a situation, or disagree on what their top priority should be.

It’s also not surprising they handle disputes differently. T-Bone has no qualms ignoring Razor, or shouting him down. Razor will try to argue his point, but often gives up once he realizes T-Bone’s not listening. Then there are other times when T-Bone relies on Razor to do all of the thinking. However they resolve their disagreements, they do resolve them- always in time to save the city.

In a story, your characters are juggling tasks, mysteries, grudges- all sorts of issues. There’s a lot of ways they could approach those problems. But when you have a set of characters working together, it can be easy to have them fall into lock-step, all of them going through and addressing things in this order without any debate because, well, that’s the order you envisioned.

Instead, think more like Swat Kats. Characters may all want to do the right thing, but they may not fully agree on what that is. One guy may think THIS is the top priority, while someone else thinks THAT is. Or they may agree on priority, but not on approach.

Play up these disagreements, and their consequences! The reader learns a lot about each character involved by seeing (a) what everyone values most, and (b) how everyone handles conflict. This also livens up scenes that would otherwise be boring because the people in them are just nodding along with each other. Yep, time to go save the Mayor again, I guess…!

What’s your favorite example of a good-guy team that have their differences, but always set them aside in time to save the day?