{"id":637,"date":"2015-07-22T11:30:50","date_gmt":"2015-07-22T15:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/?p=637"},"modified":"2015-07-22T11:30:50","modified_gmt":"2015-07-22T15:30:50","slug":"objective-objectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/2015\/07\/22\/objective-objectives\/","title":{"rendered":"Objective: objectives"},"content":{"rendered":"

On March 26, 2015, Kenzi Parsons wrote, How do you brainstorm a non-cliche plot when you have the characters and situation already? I find I have a really hard time coming up with a plot if I already have characters–I LOVE my characters but struggle with the story. Any ideas?<\/em><\/p>\n

These two responses came in:<\/p>\n

Erica Eliza: Look at the relationships and the conflicts that will arise between characters. Sort through other story ideas that never took off because they weren’t big enough to carry a whole book by themselves, and see how your characters would handle them.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tracey Dyck: If you have your characters in place, they can help drive your plot. Look at their individual goals (which might conflict with each other!) and what obstacles, both personal and physical, might stand in their way. The Rafe-Stella situation Mrs. Levine invented in this post kind of touches on that.\u00a0<\/em>(March 18, 2015)<\/p>\n

Kenzi Parsons answered: These are all great!! Reading these, I think my problem is that my character doesn’t have an objective to motivate the plot. Huh… I’d never thought of that before! How do y’all come up with goals\/objectives for your characters if you created them before the plot?<\/em><\/p>\n

More ideas followed:<\/p>\n

carpelibris (Melissa Mead): I almost always come up with character before plot. (I have a dickens of a time with plot!) Usually who the character is helps determine what she wants, whom she hangs out with, what she will or won’t do, etc., and the plot grows out of that. For example, a lot of my characters are loners\/misfits, which tends to make them either want to fit in, stand out, or get out of where they are.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tracey Dyck: What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are their desires–what they want more than anything? What do they want almost as badly, something that may run contrary to the primary desire? Could be situational, personal, etc. Maybe one person wants to feel needed, another wants to gain confidence, someone else wants to fix a relationship, and yet another person wants to stop an impending disaster.<\/em><\/p>\n

These are wonderful.<\/p>\n

In case Kenzi Parsons\u2019 concerns weren\u2019t completely resolved, here are some more thoughts:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to believe any idea is good if we\u2019re worried about cliches. My entire writing career–my whole body of work– wouldn\u2019t exist if that were much on my mind. A Cinderella story? Fairies? Dragons? Princesses? They\u2019ve been done repeatedly. I\u2019d be sunk!<\/p>\n

We all build on old ideas. We have to. Originality comes from what we do with those tired tropes. Yes, sadly, it is possible to write a story that sounds like a dozen other stories, and we don\u2019t want to do that. My strategy for avoiding such a fate is notes, and within notes, lists. It\u2019s a strategy that can help in plot-from-character creation.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with what we\u2019ve come up for our character, whom we\u2019ll call Tamara. On the good side, she\u2019s loyal, kind, and funny. On the bad, she has a one-track mind. When something captures her attention, all else sinks in importance. At those times, she\u2019s irritable or even angry with anyone who tries to divert her. She has curly hair, long fingers, a wide smile, and small eyes. Kenzi Parsons may have gone much further than this, but for our purposes we have enough to get started.<\/p>\n

We review Tamara\u2019s attributes and think what her objectives might be. Her one-track mind suggests possibilities, so in our notes for this story we list what she might be obsessed about right now, and we keep in mind all the other things we know about her. We pledge to ourselves that we\u2019re going to come up with at least ten possibilities, and, further, that we won\u2019t judge any of them. Nothing is stupid or cliched when we write a list:<\/p>\n

\u2219 She\u2019s raising money for a daycare center in her town.<\/p>\n

\u2219 She\u2019s working on a stand-up comedy routine.<\/p>\n

\u2219 She\u2019s determined to rescue her best friend from a bad romantic relationship.<\/p>\n

\u2219 She\u2019s researching plastic surgery to make a person\u2019s eyes bigger. Once she finds out what she needs, she\u2019s going to devote herself to\u00a0making it happen.<\/p>\n

\u2219 She\u2019s preparing to join the army (real army or fantasy army).<\/p>\n

\u2219 She\u2019s preparing to rescue the child hostages from their captors in the warring kingdom of Kuth.<\/p>\n

\u2219 She\u2019s developing plans for a flying machine.<\/p>\n

\u2219 She\u2019s trying to save from extinction a species of tiny frogs that still exist only in her rural county.<\/p>\n

\u2219 She\u2019s deep and dark into magic books to cure her brother of the mysterious condition that caused him to stop speaking.<\/p>\n

\u2219 She\u2019s plotting revenge against a relative who sabotaged her frog project.<\/p>\n

There. Ten. But if nothing pleases us we can go for fifteen.<\/p>\n

Tied up in her obsessions are objectives. She wants to succeed! We can move the plot forward by placing obstacles in her path, some that come from within her, some from circumstances, and some from our other characters, who may want her to fail or may bungle helping her. We can list possible obstacles.<\/p>\n

I chose her one-track mind to concentrate on, but I could have picked another of her qualities, although long fingers might be hard, but I bet we could do it. Anyway, her loyalty is suggestive, too. Here\u2019s a prompt: Think about where her loyalties lie. List ten possibilities. Then think about how they might morph into objectives. Create a story around\u00a0one possibility.<\/p>\n

Kenzi Parsons has created more characters. If we have more, we can keep them in mind as we invent our lists, and we can give them the list treatment, too, remembering as we do that their objectives need to relate to Tamara\u2019s in helpful or unhelpful ways.<\/p>\n

I love lists. If you read the notes for any of my books, you\u2019d find lists cropping up every few pages (I often have over 200 pages of notes for a novel).<\/p>\n

After we we’ve come up with\u00a0our objectives and have thought of obstacles, we start imagining how they might play out in scenes. And we\u2019re off with a starter plot!<\/p>\n

More prompts:<\/p>\n

\u2219 Pick one–or more–of Tamara\u2019s obsessions and use it in a story.<\/p>\n

\u2219 I decided to go with Melissa Mead\u2019s misfit idea and imagined ten ways in which Tamara might be different. Pick one and use it in a story. Melissa Mead already suggested a few objectives, and you may think of more. Here are the ten ways:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. She has only one arm (with those long fingers)<\/li>\n
  2. She has the same genetic condition that caused Abraham Lincoln to be so tall and ??? At the age of twelve she\u2019s a foot taller than everyone she knows.<\/li>\n
  3. Her family have been farmers for centuries. She lives in a farming community. Nobody cares about anything but the size of pigs and pumpkins. She hates all of it. She has a brown thumb, and the livestock hate her.<\/li>\n
  4. She has a different fashion sense than everyone else. She looks wrong on every occasion.<\/li>\n
  5. She\u2019s way smarter than everyone else around her, off-the-charts smarter.<\/li>\n
  6. She\u2019s the stupidest in her family and her school.<\/li>\n
  7. She can’t pronounce the long\u00a0i<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  8. Her brain is oddly wired. Psychologists keep diagnosing her with an alphabet soup of acronyms, but nothing really fits.<\/li>\n
  9. She sees other people as numbers. People who appear as long numbers scare her, but she feels close to people who have a 9 in their number. (Look! This is the ninth in my list! What a coincidence!)<\/li>\n
  10. She\u2019s an identical twin, but although she and her sister look exactly alike, that\u2019s where the similarities end.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    On March 26, 2015, Kenzi Parsons wrote, How do you brainstorm a non-cliche plot when you have the characters and situation already? I find I have a really hard time coming up with a plot if I already have characters–I LOVE my characters but struggle with the story. Any ideas? These two responses came in: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,291,15,118],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":643,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions\/643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}