Character Goals in Fiction

December 8, 2011 By 3 Comments

I talked last week about the Premise in fiction, and how it can help underpin your entire story. I mentioned briefly in that post that clarifying character goals was also recommended to help make my middle grade manuscript The Egyptian Enigma more focused.

One of the exercises developmental editor Kathryn Craft suggested to me was to go through the entire manuscript and write down the characters’ goals for every scene. If your main character’s goal in the scene is not somehow related to the book’s overall story goal, then the scene is either not needed or needs to be reworked.

I figured that would be easy. I mean, my main character is doing all these things to try and accomplish a specific story goal, right? So obviously he has a goal in every scene.

Turns out, not so much.

Or rather, his goal sometimes has nothing to do with the main story goal he is pursuing. When his goal is to set the table, that doesn’t do much to forward the plot. That scene can go.

And of course you must remember that your main character is not the only character in the scene with a goal. Every character in a scene has their own goals they are trying to accomplish—and ideally they should be conflicting with the main character’s goal. This creates tension and conflict in every scene.

This scene-goal exercise does not take a very long time to do. The real trick is to be honest with yourself while doing it. Don’t write the goals you meant your main character to have—write the goals he actually has as written on the page. Once you do that, excess scenes become very clear.

So, to recap: Your main character will have a story goal—what he is trying to accomplish in that book. If your book is part of a series, he has a series goal, which will be resolved in the final book of the series. But he also needs to have scene goals, which drive the scene, give it purpose, and forward the overall plot. Other characters will also have scene goals which will conflict, obstruct, or sometimes coincide with the main character’s goals.

That’s a whole lot of goals—but looking at them closely will give you a tighter focus to your entire book.

The Premise in Fiction

December 1, 2011 By 8 Comments

I recently got my manuscript The Egyptian Enigma back from developmental editor Kathryn Craft. Her 20-page evaluation highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript. Luckily, much of it was good!

The main problem with the manuscript was that it lacked enough focus to really pull everything together. The plot wandered into odd places, and the characters didn’t always seem to have purpose behind their actions. As soon as I read this, I agreed—it was something that had bothered me but I couldn’t explain it.

Kathryn’s solution was 2-part:

1) clarify my protagonist’s goal so I could trim away the scenes that did not directly forward or obstruct his reaching that goal

I can do that!

2) stay true to the underlying premise of the book.

Excuse me, the what?

The Premise.

Now I’m in trouble, because I have no clue what that is.

Luckily, Kathryn is awesome, and she explains in great detail in her evaluation what a premise is and why it’s important: “A premise is kind of like a moral but not as didactic—it is your story’s raison d’etre. The structure of your premise will suggest story movement. That structure is typically:____________ leads to ___________.”

I have two co-authors whom I will have to talk to before crafting a final premise, but for the purposes of this post I will state the premise as: “Digging up information from the past leads to solutions for a better future.”

Having an underlying premise will help guide what plot points are needed to move the story forward. All plot points will show the protagonist “digging” into things, all of which will lead him into deeper trouble. But since we have a premise in place, we will be able to identify any scenes or plot points that are irrelevant and therefore can be cut.

Having an underlying premise also allows you to use your characters to deepen or to refute that premise, thus giving the characters more purpose and stronger arcs. My protag believes the past holds the key to a better future, and so digs at things perhaps best left buried. His brother believes that digging into the past is fruitless and painful and therefore should be avoided. You can also have characters with related premises, such as a woman digging into the past to try to understand and come to terms with her husband’s murder, or a girl digging in the past to gain the attention and favor of her mother in the present.

So having a strong underlying premise helps bring your plot into focus and helps you find new and deeper emotional roles for your supporting characters. A premise is, as Kathryn stated, a moral, but it is also a worldview held by the main character. This will shape the main character’s actions (and thus the plot) and bring him into conflict with people who do not hold the same worldview.

Now that we know what a premise is, and what the function is, my co-authors and I can hammer out a premise to act as the underpinning of our novel. Once we have that and our character’s goal, knowing what to cut or rearrange or rewrite should become much clearer.

Kathryn said that the character’s goal should be like a strung arrow pointing the way to the climactic ending.

If that is the case, then the premise is the bow holding the arrow up.

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