Workshop #4: The Central Question & the Conflict Box

[Kieran]

I am forging on! Even though I was worried because Jenny said she didn't get what I was asking.

Rox, now that you have helped me with the visible goal, my charcter is no longer floating around scenes, seeking futile revenge about the failed engagement and having as her ultimate goal marrying that guy (which would have made her no better than the women she scorns who are after him as *their* ultimate goal).

My heroine has a higher purpose! Linked to her passion! With stakes that are not just personal! All because of the McGuffin that I painstakingly identified yesterday. It's like a whole new book.

Thanks again, Rox. :>)

[Rox]

It's like a whole new book.

Thanks again, Rox. :>)

Yay!  And you're welcome.

[jensoko]

Okay, reviving the slumbering here...I have finally identified my protagonist and antagonist (my heroine and her bad brother), and my heroine's goal is (I think) to find her other brother (who is the good brother but a fugitive)...but it's really to escape her impending situation and/or preserve her freedom (but that's a negative goal so I had to find something concrete and the best I could come up with was "find her fugitive brother."

My question is this--it seems glaringly obvious to me that finding her lost brother isn't going to get her out of her impending political alliance marriage...or really change much about her future...but she believes it will and part of the story is her coming to understand that what she thought would save her isn't going to cut it.  Her goal seems to want to become "stop the bad brother"--but is that too much of a negative goal?  I guess I'm having trouble coming up a concrete representation of stopping her bad brother's plans.

Is she still too REactive rather than PROactive?  Am I nuts?

[jenifer]

I guess I'm having trouble coming up a concrete representation of stopping her bad brother's plans.

At Cherry Con, Jenny said something during one of the classes she was teaching that helped me grasp this concept better.  She said that the concrete goal should be something the viewer of a silent movie can see and understand.

What does your heroine have to actually do to stop her bad brother's plans?  Blow up his headquarters?  Kill him?  Have him arrested?  Break into his house and steal the microchip with all the secret passwords on it?  Whatever that is, that sounds like it would be your concrete goal.

[Jenny]

Can you take it a little farther?
What does "stop the bad brother" mean?
Stopping him from running the family business into the ground?  Then the goal can be to take control of the company from the bad brother: that's a postive goal.
Is it to stop him from framing the good brother?  Then "save the good brother" is positive goal.   
Then all you have to do is figure out how you'd show that, in a concrete way.  The bad brother is taken off in handcuffs and the good brother moves into the family house, or whatever.   

[Melthegreatest]

The negative goal thing confused me too. In my last WIP the heroine needs to stay for her mother's wedding (in 30 days) in order to get the family home. So I know the mother is the antagonist. She won't just hand over the home like the heroine believes she should. It's her dead father's and her mother plans to move anyway. That goal I'm clear about it's the one with the hero that gives me pause. Not to fall in love is a negative goal.  So.. would be "get the house without emotional entanglements" still be a negative goal?

[jensoko]

Ooo...ooo...I...I think I know this one.  She has to find special people before her bad brother does.  I think that's a positive goal.  In this case, these special people serve as a mcguffin...I think.  Keeping them away from Bad Bro will thwart his plan.  Soo...hide the special people from Bad Bro sounds more positive.  More active.

One more question - concrete goals seem to change in some stories.  I seem to pick characters who are fated to learn that their beginning goals are not what they thought they'd be, and they must change those goals to something new. 

This is okay as long as they are unified in what they represent?

[Jenny]

Those early goals are probably false goals, the ones that the protagonists can admit to because they're not ready to cop to what they really want.  Or sometimes as you said the internal goal is the same for all the external goals, so that the plot peeling off layers of false goals to get to the true one.  But I do think for unity's sake there should be at least foreshadowing of the final goal in the beginning. 

[KatrinaDuv]

Okay. ARGH! I know this lecture made me think and think and I fully intended to either 1) go back and reread the entire lesson or 2) buy the book Jenny refers to. Since I can't seem to access the original He Wrote/She Wrote Workshop anymore is there a way to have this re-explained to me, OR can someone direct me to where this idea/concept originally came from.
I finally go the missing pieces of a trilogy I've been stewing over for a very long time and it is time, as they say.
Help. :(

[Jenny]

Katrina, I'm going to go open a topic on this now in the regular Writing Craft section, so if you'll meet me there . . .