Goal-oriented Storytelling

We must strike a balance with—and coordinate across—our characters' short, medium, and long-term goals.

This post is part of the Write With Me series. For more like this, check out the writing your novel page.

As I've emphasized in both this post and this podcast, our characters' goals ought to play a foundational role in everything we write.

With that in mind, pop quiz—what is your protagonist's primary goal?

The most common response will likely be similar to the [must] section of your manuscript's logline. In other words, that your character's primary goal is what she must accomplish.

That's a perfectly fine response generally speaking, but, when examining a manuscript more closely, that answer both lacks temporal clarity and ignores the multi-dimensional nature of goals themselves. That is to say, there's no apparent deadline, and characters with any sort of definition will also surely have more on their minds than just one singular goal in most situations.

What am I getting at, then? I'm talking about striking a balance between short, medium, and long-term goals: what they are and how they're interdependent.

With that in mind, let's deconstruct each type of goal, beginning with the most over-arcing.

Long-term Goals

A common criticism I've heard shared between critique partners is that the action on the page seems "far away" from what the story is really about. In other words, the character's short- and medium-term goals aren't clear enough to readers (or, in some cases, we as writers ourselves). Because of this lack of clarity, it's difficult for readers to understand what any one scene might contribute to the narrative arc as a whole.

In order to properly address this criticism, we have to first understand our characters' longest-term goals. Again, let's consider our logline, but this time include the entire relevant construction.

[Character] must [act] before [deadline] or face [consequences].

Earlier I mentioned that the goal component to the logline is what the character must do. Why, then, have I bolded the deadline and consequences aspects of the logline instead?

Simply put, the [act], [deadline], and [consequence] components of a logline are inextricably tied; together they comprise the foundation for what I'll call our goal pyramid.

If we only have a sense for one or two of the three components, we've got a line or a dot instead of a pyramid, and remember: our goal is to work in three dimensions, no fewer.

Medium-term Goals

Once a three-dimensional long-term goal has been established, we can then move on to establishing our characters' medium-term goals. These often become the centerpieces of our subplots, or the checkpoints that characters must reach along the way to achieving (or failing to achieve) their long-term goals.