Plot? Characters? Conflict? HOW!?

How do people come up with this stuff? Honestly? 

I made the decision to work through this textbook and I've not gotten very far. There are seven exercises at the end of chapter one. My last two posts were exercises three and four:

• Exercise three: Write a short paragraph outlining the conflict between two characters. Then write the crisis scene for this conflict, a scene in which one of the characters “changes his/her mind,” or realizes something, understands something not understood before, moves from one emotional state to its opposite. Make sure the internal change is shown in, or triggered by, an external action.

• Exercise four: Write a short story that is a short story in exactly 100 words. Notice that if you’re going to manage a conflict, crisis, and resolution in this short compass, you’ll have to introduce the conflict immediately.

Exercise four took four times as long as exercise three. Partly because it's so short. Partly because it took me ages to figure out exactly what the conflict, crisis, and resolution were in concrete terms even once I had a topic in mind. Partly because my entire personality as a writer is setting the scene, apparently.

Anyway, I hated it. The next exercise is to write a short story under five pages where the protagonist seems weaker than their opposing forces, but they have one balancing strength that leads them to triumph.

The problem is, where do the characters come from? Where does the plot come from? Let me paint an atmospheric picture all day, but when it comes time to populate it and pull the little puppet strings... where does that stuff come from? I don't have a shop full of puppets and play scripts rattling around up here.

I wanted to tackle the next exercise while I'm here at the library — I can't write at home, my laptop died. But, I finished the final 45 words of Talia (last week's library time netted me 55 words), read the next prompt and promptly wanted to exit the building. I figure at least if I can't bring myself to write more fiction, I could at least write a blog post and complain about the whole thing.

So here we are. I need this textbook to tell me where these ideas are supposed to come from. I'd really like to say, "Well, I completed 5 out of 7, that's not bad. Time for the next chapter!" But the whole point of this is to really challenge myself and to actually practice things I'm not good at. So I'M GOING TO DO ALL OF IT.

Or eventually give up out of dread and the misery of self-imposed pressure.

The conflict? Me vs. me, trying to create something out of nothing. The crisis? Facing this next textbook exercise. The resolution? TBD.