Cherie Saenz

Story goal. You need one, and you need it clearly defined before you start writing anything.

If you’re like me, your ideas probably come from a mishmash of places. Conversations overheard at the grocery store. That movie that you watched and thought, “Gosh, what if instead of x, you had y?” Research from some seemingly unrelated topic. Whatever. You put it together and you get your basic premise, a main character, a setting, etc.

Now you need a story goal.

Your story goal is what your main character wants to do over the course of the book. It must be external. It cannot be “to grow as a person,” “to discover who she really is,” or anything like that. Don’t get me wrong. You want your character to grow, to have self-discovery, but on their own, these goals are not enough. You need something more.

If you are writing a romance, you probably need two goals, one for each love interest. They should seem to be conflicting, but able to be resolved in the end. Your storygoals cannot be “to get the guy,” or “to win over the girl.” A strong romance novel must have goals outside the romance. Maybe the girl is fighting her way to the alpha position of her werewolf pack, and falling in love with a human would be taken as weakness and ruin her chances. Maybe the guy is trying to win a science scholarship, and has no idea that the strange DNA he found belongs to the beautiful girl he’s been too nervous to ask out. You see where I’m going with this? Aim for external goals that bring conflict to the love story.

In my experience, goals work best when they are something you would not expect the main character to do. Let’s take J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as an example. A story about a brave warrior taking the One Ring to be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom–it could be good. But a simple, domestic hobbit, torn from hearth and home to face perils he never even knew existed? Even better.

If the story goal is something unexpected, then why does your main character do it? You’ll have to get creative to answer that. Frodo takes the ring to Mount Doom because anyone more ambitious would be corrupted by the ring’s power. His unsuitable-ness is what makes him suitable. You need to come up with a reason for your character.

When you make your character’s goal something unexpected, you’ll find that character growth and self-discovery often come along for the ride, as your main character has to reconcile himself with circumstances that are not what he would choose.

To continue from the last post…

The first book I can remember writing was completely awful.

I was about ten when I wrote it. It was about a beautiful teenage girl, her beautiful older sister, and their beautiful and young-looking single mom. They went to a concert and started dating the boys in the band.

I’m not sorry I wrote it. I wasn’t writing it for an audience; I was writing it for myself, and I enjoyed writing it. But it was a horrible piece of fiction.

The story went something like this. They all went out on a triple date. Then they went out on another date. Then they went out on another date. The boys were sweet and romantic and kept doing sweet and romantic things.

There are lots of things wrong with that little piece of fiction, but the lack of conflict is the most obvious. There’s nothing wrong with writing about a lot of happy dates in a romantic novel. But you need to be setting your characters up for a fall, or have something else going horribly wrong, building to a head in the background. I approached that story wanting to make my characters happy.

True, I was ten. I can hardly hold it against myself that I wrote a boring story when I was so young. I actually commend myself for having the patience and persistence to write a story long enough to call a book. (Which is not to say a ten-year-old can’t write a terrific story.) But I’ve read books since that seem to follow the same model, and they always fall short.

The fantasy will only get you so far. If there’s no struggle to attain it, it doesn’t feel satisfying. The reader will get bored and move on to something more exciting.

An exercise for beginning writers. Think of your favorite book. Think of what happens in that book. Does the main character spend most of the book getting what they want? I’ll bet they don’t.

If you are stuck in the middle of writing this kind of book, take a step back. Look at your main character. What is his/her biggest goal?  Now what can you bring into the story to stand in the way of that?

What is the most important thing a fiction writer needs to do?

There are lots of theories out there, and goodness knows, every author you talk to will have a different answer. But that won’t stop me from giving my opinion.

The most important thing a fiction writer can do, in this writer’s humble opinion, is to treat your characters like crap.

That’s right. Mistreat them. Abuse them. Take away everything that matters to them. Let them lose their friends, their family, their reputation…all of it. Decide what matters most to your character, then take it away from them.

And give it back to them at the end.

That’s my biggest advice to any fiction writing beginner with aspirations toward publication. You are not your character’s friend. You are the Hand of God, come to reach down into her life, take her out of her happy, stable existence, and plunk her down into a world of misery.

Because it’s such a classic, let’s use J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series as an example. Frodo has a happy, peaceful existence in Hobbiton. No excitement, no adventure, just a happy, comfortable home–and that’s all he’s looking for. And then his uncle Bilbo leaves him a ring, and Gandalf turns up on his doorstep, and next thing you know, he’s ripped from his happy home and set upon a suicide mission to destroy the One Ring, with his mind being slowly corrupted from the inside all the time. If the ring doesn’t destroy him, well, the orcs surely will.

Or let’s look at another classic: my favorite book of all time, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. It might not be fantasy or paranormal, but it’s just good fiction. Jane’s unhappiness starts right from the beginning of the book, as an unloved orphan living with distant relatives who despise her. Things start to look up when she is sent away to school: maybe now she’ll get a fresh start. But no, the school conditions are horrid, and she is starved and mistreated. She grows up and applies for a governess position, begins to build a new life, and falls in love. But no, that, too, is taken from her when her master’s peculiar situation is revealed. Bronte sets Jane up for fall after fall, throughout the book.

So why torment your characters? Reason #1: It makes for good conflict. The more dismal the main character’s plight, the more we sympathize with her. The more we sympathize with her, the more involved we become in the story. The more involved we are in the story, the more satisfaction we feel at the end when things finally work out.

A character who gets everything that she wants without difficulty is boring.

Reason #2: If your character loses everything she values throughout the course of the book, she can’t help but grow as a person. Character growth is one of the most important elements of good fiction.

In fact, I would say this is a great recipe for coming up with story ideas. Make up a character. Give her a goal. Decide what’s most important to her as a person. Then figure out how to take it away.