Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (13 page)

It’s a sobering thought, isn’t it? So in this chapter our goal is to zero in on how to define your protagonist’s goal, since it’s what bestows
meaning on everything that happens. We’ll examine the difference between her internal and external goals, which are often at odds with each other; explore how both are driven by the core issue she’s struggling with; and discover how to create external obstacles for her that add drama rather than stop the story cold.

Mirror neurons allow us to walk a mile in the protagonist’s shoes, which means he has to actually be going somewhere. The good news is that everyone—real, fictional, or somewhere in between—has a goal. Even those who want to remain exactly as they are and never change an iota have a goal—in fact, it’s the biggest challenge of all. Staying the same in the face of the constant onslaught of perpetual change is no easy task, no matter how snuggly you strap yourself into your La-Z-Boy recliner, how firmly you close your eyes, how deeply you stick your fingers into your ears, and how loudly you hum.

The even better news is that what your protagonist wants dictates how she will react to everything that happens to her. None other than former president Dwight D. Eisenhower perfectly captures the essence of a successful story: “We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.”
⁷

In a story, plot-wise, what all other considerations bend to is the protagonist’s external goal. Sounds easy enough, until you add the fact that what her external goal bends to is her internal issue—the thing she struggles with that keeps her from easily achieving said goal without breaking a sweat. As we’ll see throughout, this internal struggle is what the reader came for, whether he’s conscious of it or not. The driving question is: what would it cost, emotionally, to achieve that goal?

Let me give you a quick down-and-dirty example. In the movie
Die Hard
, what’s John McClane’s goal? To stop pseudo-terrorists from
murdering everyone at the company Christmas party at Nakatomi Plaza? To kill Hans Gruber? To live to see the dawn? Sure, he wants to do all those things. But his goal, which the movie makes clear in the very first scene, is to win back his estranged wife, Holly. And so everything that happens forces him to confront the reasons she left him and to overcome them, while at the same time running barefoot through broken glass, dodging machine gun fire, and leaping into fifty-story elevator shafts.

If you don’t provide your protagonist with a driving deep-seated need that he believes his quest will fulfill, the things that happen will feel random; they won’t add up to anything. Without knowing what he wants, or what his issue is, “There is no there, there,” as Gertrude Stein so famously said (okay, she was talking about Oakland, California, but still). Without it, there’s no yardstick by which to measure your pilgrim’s progress, no context to give it meaning.

As a result, it’s impossible to envision the coming chain of events—that is, the story itself. It’s like watching football with no idea what the rules are, or how points are scored, or even that it’s a game at all. Imagine that the protagonist, Hank, a massive man in a padded spandex uniform, catches a prolate spheroid (you wouldn’t know it was a football). Suddenly, a whole bunch of other spandex-clad bruisers are rushing toward him. Now what? Should he run to the right, run to the left, throw it to the guy in the red uniform? Bury it, maybe? If you don’t know what the objective is, everything appears random. The action doesn’t add up, so there’s nothing to follow, which makes it impossible to anticipate what will happen next. It is anticipation that creates the intoxicating sense of momentum that hooks a reader, so stories without it remain unread.

Before we dive deeper, it’s important to keep one thing in mind. It’s something we live by when we read but tend to forget as writers: readers assume that everything the writer tells them is there on a strictly need-to-know basis. Our assumption is that if we don’t need to know it, the writer won’t waste precious time telling us about it. We trust that each piece of information, each event, each observation, matters—right down to how the protagonist’s hometown is described, the amount of hair gel he uses, and how scuffed his shoes are—and that it will have a story consequence or give us insight we need in order to grasp what’s happening. If it turns out that it doesn’t matter, we do one of two things: (1) we lose interest, or (2) we try to invent a consequence or meaning. This only postpones our loss of interest, which is then mingled with annoyance, because we’ve invested energy trying to figure out what the writer was getting at, when the truth is, she wasn’t getting at anything.

But by figuring out what your protagonist wants, and the inner issue she’ll have to overcome to get it, you can shape her quest with a confidence born of knowing you have a sturdy framework to guide you. For example: Wanda wants love, so her goal is to find the perfect boyfriend or, barring that, a nice golden retriever, preferably one who’s good at fetch. This then becomes the story’s single overriding objective and—you guessed it—the story question: will Wanda find love, human or otherwise? This is the info we’re hunting for when we begin reading a novel. It’s what tells us how the protagonist will react to what happens. So when Seth makes goo-goo eyes at Wanda, we’ll know her heart is swelling, whereas if she wasn’t so desperate for love, she’d surely see him for the sappy fool we know he is.

But of course there is a wee bit more to it than that. We still don’t know what her inner issue is. Remember, it is the job of a story to dig beneath the surface and decipher life, not just to present it. Stories illuminate the meaning the protagonist reads into events that, in real life,
would not be so easy to understand. Julian Barnes sums it up nicely: “Books say:
she did this because
. Life says:
she did this
. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.”
⁸

In this case, what needs to be explained is
why
the protagonist wants what she wants, what it means to her, and what getting it will cost her. It’s this that we, as readers, “try on for size.” Cognitive psychology professor and novelist Keith Oatley puts it this way: “In literature we feel the pain of the downtrodden, the anguish of defeat, or the joy of victory, but in a safe space.… We can refine our human capacities of emotional understanding. We can hone our ability to feel with other people who, in ordinary life, might seem too foreign—or too threatening—to elicit our sympathies. Perhaps, then, when we return to our real lives, we can better understand why people act the way they do.”
⁹
Or put more simply, as the aggravated newsreel producer barked at the beginning of
Citizen Kane
, “Nothing is ever better than finding out what makes people tick.” Because with that comes the predictive power of knowing when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em, and when to run for cover.

And so, simply knowing that Wanda wants a boyfriend real bad isn’t enough. We also have to know why and what issue she needs to come to grips with before she can succeed. Because there’s no way she woke up one morning and bang! out of nowhere decided she can’t live one more day without a mate. And don’t try the old “but that’s exactly the way it happened to my friend Susan” argument. Remember, a story can’t get away with the things life can—and believe me, Susan actually
had
a good reason for it, whether she knew it or not. This is of key importance, so I want to pounce on it:
No one ever does anything for no reason, whether or not they’re aware of the reason
. Nothing happens in a vacuum, or “just because”—especially in a story. The whole point of a story is to explore this “why” and the underlying issue that, in real life, dear old Susan never let on she was struggling with. Otherwise, how will we, as readers, be able to pick up pointers for navigating our own lives?

Thus the protagonist’s true goal—even if it’s
triggered
by a random external event—is something that’s been evolving for years, although
he might have been completely unaware of it until that very moment. That’s because his desire stems from what it means to him internally, rather than merely what it does for him externally. For instance, Norm doesn’t want that million dollars just because of all the shiny things he can rush out and buy the second he gets it. He wants it because all his life he’s believed having a lot of money is what proves you’re a real man, although of course this is not something he’d admit to anyone, including himself. It is, however, what drives his action. It helps to think of the source of your protagonist’s desire as the answer to the question actors always ask:
What’s my motivation?
Because as we know, the heart of the story doesn’t lie in what happens; it beats in what those events mean to the protagonist.

Let’s take a look at a film that’s much beloved—and hard to avoid, even for the curmudgeons among us:
It’s a Wonderful Life
. It’s pretty clear from the start that protagonist George Bailey’s goal is to get the hell out of Bedford Falls. Why? Because, as he tells his father, the thought of being chained to a rickety desk for the rest of his life would kill him. He wants to do something that matters, something big that people will remember. In short, George equates staying in Bedford Falls with being a failure, which means if he stays there, no matter what happens, he couldn’t possibly be a success—this is the inner issue he’s battling. And it gives him a pretty powerful motivation for getting the hell out. This sentiment underlies everything he does. It’s what he struggles with each time something threatens his getaway.

By the same token, what keeps George in Bedford Falls aren’t the external events that befall him, either—it’s not his father’s death, it’s not that his brother Harry doesn’t really want to take over Bailey Building and Loan, it’s not the run on the bank. What stops George from leaving is also internal: his integrity. He can’t leave because, as
much as he wants to, he knows people are counting on him. Thus what fuels his external reaction to these events is his
internal
struggle. It is what causes him to make the choices he does. Notice, too, that all this revolves around what we’ve learned from neuroscience: the brain is built to think socially. It’s not what happens externally that motivates George; it’s the responsibility he feels toward others, and how he sees himself.

George’s greatest reward is, of course, internal as well. That’s why it doesn’t matter that no one except warped, frustrated old man Potter ever
really
knows what happened to the missing eight thousand dollars, or that no one ever proves George didn’t embezzle it. Think about it: when the movie ends, for all anyone knows, George may actually have stolen it and buried it out in Bailey Park. The point is, it makes no difference, because being vindicated on the plot level is small potatoes compared to George’s real reward: the
internal
knowledge that all the concessions he made didn’t rob him of the life he wanted—as a matter of fact, on reflection, George realizes they
gave
it to him. What’s more, George’s epiphany occurs
before
everyone shows up at his door, ready to bail him out. If they’d carted him off to jail that night, he’d have gone a happy man.

But they didn’t, because the other characters responded in kind; their true gift to George is internal, as well. Sure, on the plot level they give him the money to stay out of jail. But what they
really
give him is unconditional love—as hokey as that sounds. He spent his life doing what integrity demanded. And that’s exactly what everyone in Bedford Falls does when they believe George is down for the count. As Uncle Billy tells him, when Mary let people know he was in a bind, no one asked what had happened; they were too busy reaching into their pockets and asking what they could do to help.

Proust observed, “The only true voyage of discovery … would be not to visit strange lands but to possess [new] eyes.”
¹⁰
That is exactly what happens to George Bailey: he looks back on his life with new eyes and sees something altogether different from what he expected. And in
so doing, he makes a discovery often made by protagonists: his external goal and his internal goal were at odds all along.

Often the protagonist’s external goal changes as the story progresses—in fact, that’s often what the reader is rooting for (remember Scarlett?). In
It’s a Wonderful Life
, George’s internal goal is to make a big difference in the world. His external goal is to get out of Bedford Falls and build bridges, skyscrapers, and to “do big things.” He believes these goals are one and the same. The movie then chronicles how his external goal is thwarted at every turn, and instead of doing big things, he always does the right thing. In the end, that’s precisely how he achieves his internal goal—making a big difference in many people’s lives—which brings with it the realization that he actually achieved his external goal as well. He
did
do big things—things that are far more important and enduring than building skyscrapers. Thus, by achieving his internal goal, he was able to redefine his external goal—and, happily, discover that he’d already accomplished it.

But up to that moment, George fully believed that only by achieving his external goal would his internal goal be met. And as real life makes all too clear, this is rarely the case. How many of us have thought, if only I could lose ten pounds (external goal), my life would be perfect and I’d be happy (internal goal)? Fueled by the belief it’s a twofer—achieve the external goal and the internal goal will follow—we lose those ten pounds (and the hard way, no less, without lap belts, stomach stapling, or liposuction). That’s when we discover—alas!—our lives are still not perfect, and now we’re even
less
happy because at least when we were fat we could fantasize about how great it would be once we were thin. It’s only then that we see the fallacy of our original assumption and begin wondering what, exactly, we really do need in
order to be happy. By defining your protagonist’s internal and external goals, and then pitting them against each other, you can often ignite the kind of external tension and internal conflict capable of driving an entire narrative.