I hear you, @de-rock!
"Put your protagonist up a tree and shoot at him" - I get it. Yes. We need challenges for him/her to overcome. But sooooo often, in Hollywood movies, TV, best-selling novels, what I see is contrived conflict and over-used tropes for character arcs. "Tropes" are actually fine and good; it's the ubiquitous and gratuituos tropes I hate, like every chick flick or women's fiction seems to require a gay best friend who urges her along and helps her transform or get enlightened somehow. It's always a guy. Never a gay woman (lesbian). At least, not in what I've read.

Advice to imagine "the worst thing that could happen" to your character led me to write in a sub-plot in my first novel, and at 500 pages I reached "The End," but somehow it felt "off," and I came to realize why: the "worst thing that could happen" would be for the father (the eye of the storm in this novel) to learn his child was someone else's daughter (that someone being the person he most resents and hates). Maybe it was such a great idea, it needed to be broken into second novel - or maybe the girl's mother was right. One day. 30 years after I'd written this novel, the mother told me she would NOT have cheated on her husband, no matter what a jerk he is, and she did NOT deserve to be so maligned in this way... ok, I spend too many hours in the hot sun weeding, and my brains get baked into idiocy, but this all got me thinking how many stories might be better if the author had NOT contrived a "worst-case scenario" for the plot.

This is not to undermine any of the suggestions above; just, "I hear ya, de-rock," and as a writer, I tend to dig in my heels and resist talk of STRUCTURE even though I know it's as important to writing as math and chemistry are to drawing and painting.