All right. Many writers have a tendency to be overprotective of their characters. They take care of them, pamper them and make sure that nothing truly bad ever happens to them. Perhaps this character loses their dog, but find it back before the end of the book, or they get a bruise when bones should’ve broken. Either way, it’s rather easy to spot these books. The protagonist usually sees the world through rose-tinted glasses, and they invariably end with all the conflict tied in a happy little bow. Nothing wrong with a happy ending, but the happy ending will be sweeter if your character had to fight to get there, rather than float nonchalantly through life, protected by the unseen force that is the author’s pen.
These characters are flat, stale, and boring. If you want to see what your character is made of, you need to take them to the breaking point, then beyond it. The worst should happen.
Imagine that your characters are like geodes. They're a bit boring on the outside, with dirty, lumpy bits. But if you smash them, it reveals the beauty inside. And you will never know about that beauty unless you break them.
Of course, there are certain lines that each author needs to draw for themselves. For example, if you don't want to kill any of your characters, have logical ways for them to survive. A character that is always miraculously getting out of life-threatening and usually fatal situations won't be the same as a character who was in a terrible situation, but escaped due to prior planning, or some exploitation of weakness (a kidnapped character being found due to negligence on the villain's part, or a brief moment of freedom to speak with someone not connected to the villain is often more believable than the character being found out of nowhere, because of a single footprint left by a henchman, or something like that. Foreshadowing is key in making things believable. If your villain is a monster, it doesn't necessarily mean that those around him are.)
You can decide that, even though your character might be tortured, they won't be left with any obvious scars. This opens up wonderful opportunities for things like psychological torture and other devious methods of gathering information from someone. Some authors will murder people by the handful, but will never hurt an animal. Some could benefit from letting a few of their characters survive.
So. Kill the dog. Murder the friend. Make your team fight, disagree, even betray one another. Give your character something to fight for, because a character without suffering is a character without substance. Give your happy
Build a character, make them human, give them names and families and lives. And then break them. Your writing will be a thousand times more interesting.
(An important thing to note is that I don't write children's books, and you shouldn't be looking for advice on children's books here. I'm a novelist. Children's and picture books are a whole different pot of tea.)
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