The Dude Just Wanted His Rug Back and Other Scene Goals
Have you ever written a scene that just didn’t work with your overall story, and as much as you tried, you couldn’t figure out why?
Do you wonder which scenes to cut and which scenes are missing in your story?
Often, the solutions lie in examining the goals of your characters, both in your individual scenes and overall story. And you might be surprised how these goals are similar, how they differ, and why it’s critical to your story that you know the answers. In this article, I provide those answers and a prescription for how to apply them to your scenes.
Every scene in your story needs a goal for the overall story AND within the scene. One way to accomplish this is to make sure your protagonist wants something that is difficult to obtain or accomplish; this want will take multiple scenes to obtain.
The macro goal helps characterize the protagonist and create your story arc. The protagonist’s macro goal has to be big, such as to save the victim, restore justice, solve a puzzle, or gain redemption.
Your choices for micro (scene-level) goals are practically unlimited and quite specific to your unique story. At the scene level, we don’t have to focus on the protagonist’s wants but the point of view character (the character through which we interpret and experience the scene) in the scene. After all, the protagonist isn’t (necessarily) in every scene. The point of view character can want any number of things in a scene as long as the results of the scene impact the protagonist.
Sounds a little complicated? I have some solutions.
One of the best ways to both simplify scene content and direct your scene choices is to hone in on the expressed desires of the point of view character within each scene to what drives the story arc. For example, the character wanting to clean their house is a fine goal, but if your point of view character’s main goal is to rescue a victim before the antagonist kills them, the scene goal of a clean house doesn’t connect to the overall story, and therefore wouldn’t be a worthy scene goal.
Scene goals must forward your story and drive it toward the big resolution. Scene goals are connected to one another like chain links. For example, the scene one goal creates a result which creates a new goal for scene two. If you miss an important scene goal and break your chain, your overall story will suffer.
The overall story goals might require several scenes for the protagonist to accomplish. But with each scene being a link in a longer chain, each scene must have its own story goal.
So, let’s take a closer look at story goals versus scene goals.
Your protagonist’s story goal will persist throughout the story. It’s the main problem they need to solve and how the reader knows if the protagonist wins or loses in the end. For example, in a Crime story, the protagonist’s story goal might be to identify a murderer to bring them to justice. Each scene goal needs to be an attempted step toward that goal. One goal in front of the other, one scene at a time, a story chain.
“But,” you say, “My protagonist doesn’t start off knowing what they want.” That’s okay. However, in the first scene and every scene after, they are going to want something, even if it’s just to maintain their homeostasis or to avoid the truth.
For example, in scene one, the protagonist knows they want to sit on the couch all day and eat pizza undisturbed. The actions in the scene must therefore make it very difficult for him to maintain that goal. Someone or something must push him off the couch or disrupt his pizza experience. Maybe their father comes in, turns off the TV, and tells them they have 24 hours to move out of his house. Then, in scene two, the protagonist must deal with the results of that scene by attempting to change their father’s mind. In scene three, having failed to change his mind, the protagonist must take the first step toward securing a place to live, etc. The scene goals will lead to the overall story goal, which might be to gain financial success.
A famous example of a modest goal that kicks off a great story arc is The Big Lebowski, where in one of the first scenes, the dude just wants his rug back.
Even subplots and supporting Story Types must eventually, meaningfully connect to the overall story arc. If you find you’ve written a scene that does not make this connection, you know you need to cut that scene.
What are your choices for scene goals?
They could be just about anything that moves your individual story forward. But most scene goals fall into the following broad categories in which the point of view character wants to:
Obtain the tangible (jewels, documents, a lover)
Gain the intangible (approval, answers, a promotion)
Rescue someone or themselves
Stop someone from acting or stop something from happening
Avoid (pain, vulnerability, entanglements of love)
Escape the physical (jail, illness, a dangerous location)
Escape the mental or emotional (terror, a broken heart, self-hate)
The way your protagonist will attempt to achieve one of the wants above could be to seek something, hide something (could be themselves), attack or confront another character, destroying or locate an object, sacrifice something important to them, etc.
Now for the practical and applicable prescription that I promised. To test your scene goals, ask yourself these questions:
Is the goal integral to the overall story arc?
Will the result of this scene lead to a new goal?
Does the scene show, in action, what challenged the point of view character’s scene goal and their decision about how to proceed?
Does the outcome of the scene impact the protagonist and the point of view character (if they are different)?
With your scene goals determined, you’re ready to examine the structure of the individual scenes, which is a giant step in creating scenes that work.
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