Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (14 page)

What the protagonist must overcome to achieve her external goal tends to be pretty straightforward—that is, the external plot-driven obstacles that stand between her and success—but what about her internal goal? What stands in the way of that? In the you-have-to-fight-fire-with-fire category, the answer is, internal obstacles—usually in the form of longstanding emotional and psychological barriers—that are forever holding her back. This, then, is her internal issue. We’re talking about the fear that whispers,
What the hell do you think you’re doing?
as she approaches each hurdle. It’s a voice that gets more convincing as the hurdles escalate in difficulty until by the end, the protagonist stops dead, sure there is absolutely no way she’ll be able to overcome that last hurdle—not with that voice nattering in her head, anyway. While in real life such a person might just pop a Prozac and watch the problem recede into a comforting haze, in a story she has to do it the old-fashioned way—cold sober and on her own.

In order to construct these internal obstacles, ask yourself:
Why
is the protagonist scared? What,
specifically
, is she scared of that keeps her from achieving her goal? By now I’m guessing you know that the answer probably isn’t,
She’s afraid of losing her true love, going broke, or dying
. Even though, plot-wise, that’s
exactly
what she’s afraid of. Hell, it’s what we’re
all
afraid of—hence it’s general and generic, and it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. So although it’s a good beginning, it is
only
the beginning.

Like the protagonist’s goal, her fears spring from, and are defined by, her life experience—something we’re going to be talking about in depth in
chapter 5
. But for now, let’s take the most obvious fear: fear of death. I don’t blame you if you’re thinking,
Oh come on—that needs an explanation?
It’s universal, you don’t have to “learn” anything to know that the last thing you want on your daily to-do list is
Toddle off into the great beyond
.

Fair enough. I’m not going to argue with that. I’m going to sidestep it, because it’s not the issue. The issue is: what does dying,
at this minute
, mean to the protagonist? For instance, who will she leave behind who needs her now more than ever? What won’t she accomplish that she swore on her mother’s grave she would? What burning promise won’t she be able to keep? What wrong must she live till dawn to set right? The answers to these questions will tell you what dying means to your protagonist, beyond the big “Uh-oh!”

Yep, it always comes back to this: what do these events
mean
to the protagonist? What
is
her true goal? Knowing this will allow you to make her goal specific to her, rather than leaving it as a surface (read: generic) goal that we all have.

Why, then, do writers lob generic problems at their protagonists all the time? Sadly, it’s often because they’re following one of the great myths of storytelling.

The myth that external problems add drama has plagued writers from time immemorial and has been inadvertently perpetuated by the myriad versions of the “hero’s journey” story-structure model, which mandates that certain external events must happen at certain specific points in a story. The result is that writers craft
plots
in which these
events occur rather than crafting
protagonists
whose internal progress depends on said events occurring. Such stories are written from the outside in: the writers throw dramatic obstacles in their protagonist’s path because the timeline tells them to rather than because they’re part of an organic, escalating scenario that forces the protagonist to confront her inner issue. Thus the dramatic events aren’t spawned by the story itself but by an external by-the-numbers story-structure formula.

To create organic, compelling obstacles that work, you must make sure that everything your protagonist faces—beginning on page one—springs specifically from the problem she needs to solve, both internally and externally. This will help you avoid a very common pitfall: using a generic “bad situation” to create the protagonist’s goal.

I’ve read countless manuscripts that began encouragingly in the midst of an upheaval: the protagonist’s husband just walked out; the protagonist is driving to work when a huge earthquake strikes; the protagonist missed the jetty back to the cruise ship and now she’s stranded in Venezuela with nothing but what she’s wearing—a string bikini and flip flops. This is all good. The problem was, these authors had merely plunked their protagonist into a dicey situation to see what would happen next. But because the protagonist didn’t have a long-standing need that was then put to the test, her “goal” was nothing more than getting out of the horrible position she unexpectedly found herself in. Thus the spotlight remained on the
problem
rather than the
protagonist
. Sure, things happened, but they didn’t affect the protagonist on anything but a surface level. Because we had no clue what her specific desires, fears, or needs were beyond the very obvious one-dimensional need to get out of the current situation ASAP, we couldn’t anticipate how she would react to the things that happened, except in a generic, that’s-what-any-person-would-do sense. And that, my friends, is boring. Why? Because we all have a pretty good idea of what “any person” would do. Where’s the suspense in that? We turn to story to tell us something we don’t know. So while we don’t care a whit about what
“any person” would do, we care passionately about what your protagonist would do—as long as we know why.

Having a firm understanding of what your protagonist’s specific goals and fears mean to her provides you with concrete plot guidelines. For instance, let’s take the disappointing manuscript that opened with the protagonist’s husband walking out. This was the story: the wife, Deb, blindsided by her husband Rick’s unexpected departure, simply picked herself up and got on with her life, rather than whining about it (which was too bad, because a little pointed whining would have at least given us
some
clue as to what their marriage was like, who she is as a person, and what her personal arc might be). Trouble was, with no real problem predating the breakup of her marriage, Deb was way too well adjusted to be interesting—so well adjusted, in fact, that the reader immediately wondered both why Rick left her and why she had married such a deadbeat in the first place. Ironically, that was the
only
sign that there might be more to Deb than met the eye, but since it was never developed, it read as what it was: a plot convenience.

So, does Deb’s story need to be scrapped? Not necessarily. Let’s take a shot at developing Deb’s dilemma ourselves, shall we?

First stop, Deb’s backstory (something we’ll be talking about in far greater depth in the next chapter). What if Deb had stayed in a bad marriage because she didn’t have the courage to admit, even to herself, that she was terrified she couldn’t make it on her own? Thus Deb’s goal isn’t simply to move past a bad situation; it’s to overcome a problem that
preceded
(if not caused) her current dilemma. Now we’ve expanded the premise: when Deb’s husband walks out on her, she’s forced to see whether she can, indeed, make it completely on her own—the one thing she’s always feared most. This is a much bigger and more engaging
question, one that opens the door to a whole slew of follow-up questions worth exploration:

Wouldn’t you read on to find out?

But wait—now that we’ve mapped out the roots of Deb’s goal and fears, how
do
we get them onto page one without beginning: “Deb was born in 1967 in a little cottage.…” Remember, we’re not trying to tell the reader everything there is to know about Deb and her predicament on the first page, we’re simply trying to
imply
that there is a lot to know. Our goal is to make the reader
feel
like they know her, and—this is essential—to care enough about her to want to find out what will happen to her. Which means we’ve also got to establish two things—that big changes are coming and all is not as it seems—and we have to do it as quickly as possible. Let’s give it a try:

Can you see the elements of Deb’s backstory planted there? For instance, “Not that Rick ever hit her; something that bad, and she’d actually leave,” tells us that, in Deb’s view, Rick
has
been doing bad things to her, but that, short of hitting her, she considers it livable (suggesting that Deb is an ace rationalizer). The phrase, “Shopping, cleaning, and exercising as if it mattered,” tells us that being in shape hasn’t netted her much—perhaps Rick hasn’t noticed? It’s pretty obvious what’s meant by the sentence, “She told herself she hated him, angry that her pulse quickened anyway”—although there is enough ambiguity here to make us wonder about it. This sentiment is then echoed in: “It struck her this was the first time since Rick’s sullen departure for work that morning that she’d been aware of her senses at all,” which also gives us a glimpse of what Rick is like—at least according to Deb. Next, the example of what Deb then hears and smells aren’t random just-because-they-were-there sensory details, but each has a definite subtext: “the sound of a car pulling out of a driveway” (we’re about to find out that Rick has left her; maybe it was him in that car?); “leaves that had been moldering under a tarp in a corner of the front lawn since fall” (just as Rick and Deb’s marriage was allowed to decay in plain
view). And finally, as we discussed in
chapter 3
, notice that although the story is written in third person, it’s clear we’re in Deb’s head, viewing everything from her point of view.

From there Deb’s story seems pretty clear-cut: it’s the tale of a conflicted woman whose husband has lost interest in her and is probably heading out for greener pastures. Or is he? Because so far, all we have is her side. What about Rick’s? Could part of what Deb needs to overcome be a fundamental misunderstanding of what Rick’s agenda actually is?

The foundation of a story is often rooted in just this kind of misinterpretation, which arises from the fact that because Deb isn’t a literal mind reader, she interprets what her mirror neurons tell her based on her own understanding of the world and what
she’d
mean if she were Rick. We all do it. Someone does or says something that sounds hurtful, and we’re hurt. But sometimes that hurtful utterance, which can trigger a story’s arc, turns out to mean the exact opposite of what the protagonist thought it did.

Jennie Nash’s keenly insightful novel,
The Threadbare Heart
, turns on just such a natural misunderstanding. The protagonist, Lily, has been married to Tom for over twenty-five years. It’s been a good marriage, and Lily believes she knows Tom deeply and that their bond is solid. On page five, however, feeling safe, secure, and happy, she decides to risk having a bit of chocolate, knowing it might trigger one of her debilitating migraines. Noticing, Tom demands to know what she’s doing, and she tells him not to worry: she’ll deal with the consequences should she get a headache. She’s stunned when he then angrily informs her in no uncertain terms that her headaches are
his
problem and always have been, at which point he stomps out. Suddenly, she’s not sure if she knows him as well as she thought she did, and the world feels like a far more dangerous
place. The reader, too, immediately shares Lily’s unease—for about four pages. And then on page nine, Tom reflects on what happened: