Plotting New Character Goals

Welcome back to my newsletter. As I mentioned in my last newsletter, my goal in 2025 is to post bi-monthly. No better time to start a new habit than right away. As in life, you do not have to set an arbitrary future date to make changes in your life. Small, incremental shifts “one step at a time” thinking, can get you going in the right direction.

The same should apply to the characters in your stories.

Write multiple steps

Unless you are writing a short story, your characters’ goals are not likely achievable with only one or two actions (failure then success). For novels and novellas, the central character goals are usually going to take multiple steps, any one of which can be a failure (nope!), a yes, or a yes, but…

Bottom line, your characters will not be overnight successes at achieving their goals. (Unless, of course, your actual plot revolves around how they deal with becoming an overnight success.)

Consider children’s board games. By random chance (a roll of the dice) you get a jump on your goal and move quickly forward, or you can slide backward, or get a lucky roll and skip right past a difficult spot.

Your characters have one advantage, though. They can “break from the game” by changing up what they want, working to change the rules, or even changing their definition of success.

changing what they want

The objective here is that they decide, after a series of setbacks, to set their sights on an entirely different goal. This is Legally Blonde in a nutshell. Elle starts off with the goal only of getting the guy by getting into the same law program, and then shifts to doing something for her own growth. Back to the Future, Part 2, also. Marty and Doc start off just trying to fix his family in the future, only to have to switch to stopping Biff in the past with the stolen sports almanac.

The typical shift of goal is going to be after a series of setbacks in chasing their original goal. By the midpoint (which is before the climax), they’re setting off to achieve something else that either seems more likely, or because the world has so upended their outlook that their priorities have changed.

As the writer of this story, you’re going to write every crash-n-burn, and live by the mantra “when one door closes, another opens”, so keep your character’s eye out for opportunities, introspection, and growth.

changing the rules

The objective in these stories is that the character realizes that the first goal is impossible not because of anything they’re doing wrong, but that the whole system is rigged against them. So they instead set out to change the rules. This is Katniss in The Hunger Games. She won’t kill Peeta and so gets it negotiated that both of them win the Games. The government still wants the upper hand and that launches book 2, but for book 1, Katniss goes from just taking her sister’s place and hopefully surviving, to seeing that another person survives as well, completely against the rules.

There’s a goal shift here, but it’s not a complete abandonment. Your social warrior characters go about changing “the system” on the way to getting what they want. For example, take 42 (the Jackie Robinson story). Breaking the color barrier wasn’t what Robinson started out wanting — he just wanted to play baseball with the best of the best. That meant getting on a professional team. Upending system of segregated teams is something he ends up doing along the way.

changing their definition of success

The objective in this scenario is that there’s a realization, not that the goal isn’t achievable, but through circumstances, the goal’s manifestation will be different, and that will actually make them more successful at the intangibles (work-life balance, for example). This is a character. for example, who wants a promotion, but realizes along the way that this particular promotion is less attractive than that promotion, or even better that they should quit and start their own business. The character growth over the course of the story has given them mad skills — and this “little” promotion over here that they thought they wanted? Nah. They’re actually capable of doing this other thing that would make them infinitely happier.

This is what happens in The Secret to My Success (1987). The revelatory scene, as the writer, that you’re going to need is right at the climax — the character is offered the promotion — but they turn it down. This can be done poignantly — they have absolutely nothing in place for the jump, yet — so the remainder of the story is them getting the pieces in place for their new vision of success. Or they are totally ready and just needed the push (maybe a snide rival or chauvinist boss) to say “no” to pull the trigger and start on their new path.

Happy writing!

~ Lara

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