Make another attempt more frightening by having the danger damage the very ability the character needs to escape it.
Middle-story spoilers for the wet-foot accident and the failed fire-building attempts. The final outcome is not described.
A man new to the Yukon is walking to a camp in extreme cold with a dog but no human companion. He has been warned not to travel alone in such conditions. He can recognize some hazards and builds a successful fire at lunch. Later he breaks through a hidden patch of ice and wets his feet, making another fire urgently necessary.
He builds beneath a spruce because the fuel is within easy reach. Pulling twigs shakes the tree, bringing snow down onto the fire and putting it out. He starts again in the open, correcting the location, but his fingers are now too numb to pick out good fuel or hold a match. He scoops up dropped matches with both mittened hands, tries striking one held in his teeth, and finally lights the bunch between the heels of his hands. He gets a small flame going, but moss falls onto it. His clumsy effort to remove the moss scatters the burning twigs, and the fire goes out. Knowing what to do has not restored the movements needed to do it.
If the character simply forgets how to do a familiar task, the failure can feel arranged by the author. Keep the knowledge and show what prevents its use: sensation, strength, access or reliable equipment. In London's scene the snow falls after he pulls at the tree's twigs, not because the fire melts it.
To Build a Fire, in Lost Face: the lunchtime fire; the passage beginning 'And then it happened'; the spruce-tree collapse; the attempts with numb hands through 'The fire-provider had failed.' ↗
Complete short story checked in Project Gutenberg ebook 2429, transcribed from the 1919 Mills and Boon edition of Lost Face. This is the unnamed-man version, not London's earlier version with a named protagonist. The account of repeated attempts is editorial analysis; the shelter coordinator scene is original.
The man has already shown that he can make a fire. What changes is his body's ability to carry out the task. The cold that makes a fire necessary also takes away his grip and control, so a second attempt begins in worse conditions even after he corrects his first mistake. The story makes that loss concrete through dropped matches, unsuitable fuel and movements he cannot steady. Repeating the task therefore reveals new problems rather than replaying the same setback.
Choose a task your character can normally do and identify the ability it requires. For an everyday version, imagine a coordinator at a crowded shelter calling family names to reunite separated arrivals. The loudspeaker is broken. At first people hear her and come forward. As the room gets noisier, she repeats each name louder; after an hour her voice is nearly gone. She still has the correct list, but the next family cannot hear her. She writes their name on a board and walks through the crowd until they spot it. The board works, but each search takes longer than a call across the room, and the waiting queue grows. In a scene involving danger, also establish what the delay puts at risk. For your own scene, write the next attempt: what does the character correct, what helps, and what can they no longer do as before? Consider who or what could take over and how reaching that help would change the situation.
Use in my storyMake a running joke develop: each attempt to get rid of a nuisance should inconvenience a different person in a different way.
Keep several failed attempts interesting by making each fail because of a different person's motives or assumptions.
Let a threatened character infer a deadline from the preparations being made around them.