Character “goals”

The idea that every character must have a goal and a motivation, not only for the overall story/plot but for each and every scene in that story, has always been something that I have had trouble with. That is, until I realized that my difficulty was due to workshop- or creative-writing jargon, rather than to the substance of the idea.

You see, to me a “goal” is something relatively large and meaningful, “the object of a person’s ambition or efforts” as the dictionary defines it. “Motivation” also sounds a lot more important and potentially ominous than “reason.”

“Fix breakfast” does not look like a scene goal to me, and “because I’m hungry” is a good reason but seems much too obvious and pedestrian to be a character’s motivation. There are, however, a number of scenes in The Lord of the Rings where the thing the characters (especially the hobbits) are focused on and trying to do is to fix breakfast because they’re hungry. Which is what finally tipped me off to the fact that the jargon was pointing me in the wrong direction, especially when it came to scenes.

Talking about the characters “goals” and “motivation” makes the writer’s choices – particularly at the scene level – sound larger and important. Paradoxically, this often makes the specifics far less useful when it comes to doing the writing. Knowing that a character’s ultimate story goal is to defeat the Evil Overlord is not much help when it comes to deciding on the specifics of how that character goes about doing so. It’s particularly unhelpful if, like Frodo, the character initially has no idea that there is an Evil Overlord who needs defeating, and therefore cannot have a conscious (or even unconscious) goal of defeating one.

On the scene-by-scene level, there are certainly some stories in which every scene is a deliberate step on the part of the protagonist toward trying to reach the eventual story goal. Highly focused thrillers sometimes require that every scene (or nearly every scene) be a conscious – and increasingly desperate – attempt by the protagonist to find the kidnap victim before they are killed, catch the terrorists before they set off the bomb, etc. Most stories, however, have at least some scenes in which the protagonist is just trying to get some lunch, plan a party, or talk a potential victim into leaving town (which, while it may temporarily thwart one of the villain’s plans and/or save the potential victim’s life, doesn’t contribute much to the story goal of catching the villain).

The workshop/creative-writing jargon advice goes something like this: “Every protagonist must have an overarching goal for the story and a compelling and believable reason for wanting to achieve it. In every scene, the protagonist must have a scene goal that is believable, compelling, contributes to the overarching story goal, and causes the character to grow and change.” This sounds reasonable, but it also implies (at least to me) that I can’t have a quiet scene where everyone is relaxing and reminiscing around the campfire, because there’s no “compelling” scene goal that contributes to defeating the Evil Overlord.

Translating the jargon into everyday English gives me something like this: “Every protagonist of a story should desire to do, to be, or to get something, for Reasons that are realistic enough for readers to accept and see as strong enough to keep the protagonist moving toward the eventual story outcome. In every scene, the protagonist should be intending to do (or keep doing) something the reader can believe the protagonist would do at this point in the story; the events of the scene should move the story forward in some way, whether or not the protagonist is able to do what he/she intended.”

That’s a lot better, from my viewpoint, though I really dislike all the “shoulds” and “everys,” and there’s still an underlying implication that the protagonist’s desires are what drive the story events from scene to scene. There is also no recognition that what the character wants and what the writer wants can be two very different things. The protagonist can start out wanting to have a quiet evening at home; the writer wants them to solve a mystery, and forces the issue by throwing ninjas through the window. On the scene level, the protagonist’s starting intention may be as simple and story-irrelevant as mowing the lawn, or as complicated and story-relevant as running a meeting between several touchy generals who the protagonist needs to have working together to plan for the villain’s attack next Thursday. The writer’s intention is to provide a reason for the protagonist to be far from the house when the tornado sirens go off and the character spots the twister heading in, or to further complicate the character’s life by starting a feud between the generals.

Similarly, the eventual story outcome the writer wants may involve the protagonist doing, being, or getting something completely different from what they started out wanting, or completely failing to do, be, or get whatever they wanted. Tragedies and cautionary tales are some of the most moving and enduring stories we have, but I can’t think of one that is built from a series of scenes where the protagonist has “a scene goal that is believable, compelling, contributes to the overarching story goal, and causes the character to grow and change.” In a tragedy, the protagonist’s “overarching story goal” is seriously different from the writer’s, because the protagonist wants to take and hold the throne, but the writer’s goal is to show that killing the rightful king on the advice of three witches, and then going on killing people, to get and keep a throne is a really bad idea, especially if you want Birnam Wood to stay put.

The jargon version doesn’t break any of this out, or recognize that most stories are a lot more complicated than “Character have goal. Character get goal. Ugh!” At the scene level, particularly, about 90% of my characters’ “goals” and “motivations” at the start of the scene are either ordinary and straightforward – finish the job they’re working on, find so-and-so to ask a question – or they’re so blindingly obvious that it seems silly to spend time analyzing them – rescue the kid who just fell in the river, go get the book that the king asked for in the previous scene, win the fight that just started. In a significant number of my scenes, what the viewpoint character starts off intending to do is not what happens; their “scene goal” changes on the fly because of what happens during the course of the scene.

It isn’t the character doing/being/getting some “scene goal” that is important; the real key is the way scenes progress, both from beginning to end of scene and from each scene to the next one.