Kurt Vonnegut famously said: Every character should want something, even if it’s a glass of water.
It’s a simple concept: Give your character a desire. That advice has been largely translated to goal. Give your character a goal.
This classic writing advice gets lost in translation when it gets associated only with book-level goals. For example: My character is broke, trapped in a loveless marriage in a foreign country and just wants to make it home.
Goal: Get Home. A good, noble, goal! But this is a book-level goal. This is what the character wants to achieve by the end of the book. Catch the killer. Solve the mystery. Get the guy.
Book-level goals are essential, but not the only “goal” a successful character needs.
Read more...This summer (2025) marked the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the movie JAWS. National Geographic released a documentary: Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story.
Anyone can tell you that the iconic movie is about a shark that terrorizes a beachside town.
That’s the central conflict. So, it was fascinating to hear director Steven Spielberg say:
It’s about home. Longing for home, getting home, returning home, already being home.
Read more...In prior posts, I've argued that it can be helpful to think of backstory (past narrative summarized within present scene events) as interiority.
That’s because backstory, along with imagination and future anticipation, are all a part of a POV character’s thought process and rationale.
Thoughts alone don’t create interiority. Interiority is a process.
proc·ess
/ˈpräˌses/
noun
- a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.
The interiority process is an art, not a formula, but the concept is relatively straightforward:
Read more...Fully dimensional characters have history! They have a unique perspective on the world that they developed from past experiences.
Few modern stories begin with a character’s birth—Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead a recent notable exception. Of course, Kingsolver had clear thematic and structural reasons why to begin at birth, but that’s a post for another time :)
The vast majority of books follow Matt Bird’s advice: Your story isn’t about your character’s life, it’s about their problem.
Plot and story drive focus on a present problem. The point of view (POV) character makes sense of present story circumstances (their developing problem) based on their unique history of past events.
Compelling story characters make things worse for themselves based on a false or self-protective belief they’ve developed because of past events—often referred to as the “lie,” stemming from the “wound.”
Modern books tend not to start with the development of the character’s wound(s) and subsequent lie, but with the effect the lie has on the character as the story opens.
As the story progresses, backstory that pertains to a character's lie develops.
The question of how to incorporate past events into a present timeline is a question that confounds most writers—at first.
Read more...Time to talk interiority! So much energy in early drafts goes into external events, i.e. what happens in a novel or memoir.
External events = things that could be acted out on stage, like dialogue, and action.
It’s an incredible amount of work to get down the external flow of events in your book. External events are the perfect thing to focus on in beginning drafts.
But when you go to revise, don’t fall into the common trap of polishing sentences that only add to the external story.
What happens only matters as much as the context and meaning a character (or former self in memoir) gives to those story events. Interiority provides that context and meaning.
Read more...
