The Place For My Writers Notes

original posting 26 July 2011

Writer's Digest, October 1992, pages 31 to 34 have an article by Gary Provost with the title, "The Sport of Fiction." The subtitle is "Unless your plot causes characters to strive to win and risk losing, your readers will walk out before the final gun." It's basically an approach to plotting based around sports. Sounds simple enough, right?

Now, Gary is not really talking about basketball, so much as the general framework of sports. As he says, you can apply what he's saying to hockey, football, checkers, just about any game or sport. Let's see what kind of things he has to say.

"The ultimate goal in a basketball game, as it is in most games, is to score more points than your opponent. On route to that goal, there are intermediate goals, such as scoring field goals, scoring free throws and blocking shots. And in order to reach those intermediate goals, one must achieve minor goals such as stealing the ball, grabbing rebounds and getting fouled. All of these intermediate and minor goals are exciting to the fan for only one reason: they move a team toward the ultimate goal, a win."

The key here is that you need to know what the goals are, and you need to know how to keep score. Pretty simple, right? The same thing applies to writing fiction. "For readers to enjoy your story or novel they must know what each character's goals are. They must know how to keep score." The goals need to be specific and clearly defined, and the reader needs to know them from the beginning. Opposition, of course, creates the possibility of losing. And that conflict is what makes up the plot.

"At any given point in your story, your character has a goal. It might be a very minor goal such as he wants to get across the street so he can (intermediate goal) call his friend down at police headquarters so he can (ultimate goal) get the last piece of information that will prove Jenkins is the murderer."

Ultimate goals and intermediate goals. That's what you need to set up. The continuing narrative question in the reader's minds is will this character achieve his goal. But you have to tell readers what the question is.

Make the goal clear, teach the readers how to keep score, and watch their interest go up. Opposition is what makes it last. And pay attention -- everybody has goals. All the characters score and miss.

Notice that missing a basket is just as significant as making one. You want the readers to cheer, but you also want them to be worried. So the scenes need to move characters towards and away from the goal.

Three key points.

1. You, the writer, should know all the character goals all the time.
2. The reader should usually know the character's immediate and ultimate goals. Sometimes, you want to throw the reader in. But pretty soon, let the reader know what the character is trying to achieve.
3. Finally, the character should always know his immediate goal and should believe that it will help him reach the ultimate goal --  as he understands it at that moment. Sometimes ultimate goals change. That's okay.

One of the nice things about this is that character goals let you make boring scenes more compelling. Look for what the goal of the character is in the scene. Then make it clear early in the scene. Voila! Readers will be waiting to see whether the character will achieve their goal or not.

You don't have to specifically state a goal in every scene. But you have to know a goal. Sometimes goals are stated before the scene began. Sometimes they're obvious. If someone is standing at a bus stop, we expect that they want to catch the bus. But do make sure that the goal is obvious to the reader.

Contrived usually means that somebody doesn't have a goal. Look at all the characters and see who's doing things because you wanted them to, instead of for their own purposes -- then rework it so that they have a good reason!

Set up the goal and the narrative question so the readers can keep score right from the beginning.

How you build a plot around goals? Well basically:

• Ask a series of goal related questions for the main character, working from the end of the story. The answers to the questions suggest goals.
• Now ask yourself about the goals of the minor characters who are in conflict with the major character.
• Now outline all the scenes in your story around this idea. Who is the main character in the scene and what's his goal? What minor characters are in the scene and what are their goal(s)? What's the action in the scene? What's the result? Pretty simple, right?

So, set up your goals, and let the teams compete. See who wins. And by the way? Write.

Now there's a goal!