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.
To keep a reader engaged for the 200+ pages it will take to solve the book-level goal, you need goals on nearly every page. Multiple, developing, shifting goals in every single scene, chapter, section, and act.
That might sound overwhelming, if not nearly impossible – but I’ve found it helps to redefine “goal” closer to that Vonnegut quote. Think about what your character wants, hopes, and desires at every moment. Humans are nothing if not chock full of (contradicting) hopes and desires at all times.
This holds true even for protagonists that are still figuring things out. It holds true for passive characters, who might not act, at first – but boy, do they have some desires about what they want to do! About what they wish they could do!
Look at the opening to Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, a famously “quiet” (not much external action), introspective novel.
The novel opens in media res, with young James Ramsey’s mother saying that they can go to the lighthouse tomorrow if the weather is good: “if it’s fine.”
“To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy …”
James reacts and the following long paragraph “grounds” the reader in his surroundings. Then:
“But,” said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, “it won’t be fine.”Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it.
What violence! The beauty of internal desires is that they can be wild – the wilder the better. Those internal desires should be paired with external desires – even a glass a water. Unless the setting is a desert or a water-less planet, getting a glass of water can be a mundane act – but being delayed or thwarted from moving towards the sink and turning on the tap can spark irritation – conflict – and a cascade of interesting interiority.
In To The Lighthouse, James wants to go to the lighthouse. Simple, redundant even, but this desire, made clear at the outset, allows for shifting, developing (even outlandish) desires as the scene unfolds.
Try this out in your writing – at the top of a scene, structure in a simple or mundane goal, and have fun exploring your POV character’s thoughts and reasoning as the goal – or simple desire – is challenged or thwarted.
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