Goals: Your Narrative North Star (Scene Alchemy #1)
You don’t need to spend thousands to start editing your novel. You just need to know where most stories go wrong.
After six years as a developmental editor, more than 95% of the books I work on suffer from the same issue.
This series is about fixing it.
Driving Without a Destination
I’ve edited over fifty novels at this point, and almost all of them struggle in the same ways:
The protagonist(s) doesn’t have a clear goal.
They have a goal, but don’t do enough to reach it.
The author fails to structure effective conflict around the character’s attempts to reach that goal.
Goals are the guiding light in speculative fiction books. They’re what gives the novel a sense of identity, and what creates the forward momentum that keeps our readers glued to the page.
They’re also the foundation of every single scene—the building blocks of our narrative.
Pick up any fantasy or science fiction novel from the last ten years, and you’ll see the same cycle play out over and over again throughout the story:
The character wants something. A temporary goal that’s a step on the path to their goal for the whole novel.
They take some kind of action towards that goal.
An obstacle or problem arises to get in their way.
The character tries, fails, and tries again to overcome those problems until we reach...
The outcome, where they either achieve their temporary goal, or fail to reach it.
Either way, a complication comes up and creates a different problem.
This complication leads to the character’s new goal for the next part of the story.
It’s not meant to be rigid and dogmatic. It’s a roadmap—a rhythm or refrain that echoes in the background from the very first page to the last.
And it’s where almost all my writers get into trouble.
The results are painful to say the least, because when this goes wrong, it undermines the whole foundations of a story—leading to scrapped drafts and countless rewrites.
If you want to avoid this (and give your book the best possible chance to thrive), the best way is to learn the base rhythm of scene structure until it’s in your bones.
In this new Scene Alchemy series, I’ll be helping you do just that. And it all begins back where we started: with your main character’s goal.
Your Story’s Guiding Light
A great character goal is almost always...
one single thing
concrete, tangible, and clearly defined
something the character wants badly (and would sacrifice anything to get)
something that arises internally—that is, something they want for themselves
the single thing they’re focused on in every scene
something they either achieve by the end, or lose forever
All too often, writers fall at this first hurdle. Their protagonist is caught between two different goals, or their goal is vague and intangible—a woolly “deal with the situation” instead of the more concrete “imprison the evil mage that’s corrupting the kingdom.” The character might not really care about their goal, gets easily distracted, or it might not even be something they want in the first place: handed down to them by a king, captain, or diplomat.
It might be a preference more than a burning desire, or something they want but aren’t actively fighting for.
And whenever we go down any of these paths, we’re causing fundamental problems for our novel. Problems that cascade down through every level of our story, poisoning each scene along the way.
That’s why it’s the number one thing I look for when I open a client’s novel:
Does the protagonist have a single, concrete, powerful goal?
Are they constantly pushing towards it?
If so, the writer has already won half of the battle and given themselves (and their story) the best possible chance of success.
Following the Path
Once we have that north star grasped firmly in our hands, the next step is to start walking.
A goal that floats above the novel is no use at all. If it’s going to drive the book (and keep our readers desperate for more) then we need to put it to work. That process begins with taking our character’s novel goal and breaking it down into a number of different scene/temporary goals.
Working example: Evelyn
Let’s say our protagonist is an aspiring knight named Evelyn, who wants to join the same order her father belonged to, because she’s desperate to measure up to his legacy. Along the way, she finds out that her dad wasn’t the man she thought he was. He was corrupt, taking bribes, and the leader of a gang of bandits that’s still plaguing the kingdom after his death.
We might take her goal of “become a great knight like my father” and break it down into smaller chunks, like this:
Pass the entrance exam and get into my father’s knightly order.
Earn my first commission and knight’s sword.
Investigate the corruption uncovered during my first commission.
Learn more about my father’s involvement with it.
Confront my father’s friends about his link to the bandits.
Destroy the bandit gang he founded and become the knight my father should have been.
Each one of these can then be broken down further, until we have a bunch of smaller goals—one for each individual scene. Let’s take “learn more about my father’s involvement with the corruption” as our example. That might lead to scene goals like:
Track down my father’s best friend.
Convince her to share what she knows.
Follow her, try to find out what she’s hiding.
Spy on the shadowy figures she’s meeting with.
All of a sudden, our goal isn’t just some vague desire. It’s nailed into the underlying structure of every moment. More than that, we’ve made it specific and given it a sense of progress—Evelyn isn’t caught in a novel-length loop of: try to become a knight, fail, try to become a knight again, fail again, etc etc until the reader falls asleep.
Instead, each step along the way (large or small) comes with its own challenges. It’s become a chain of smaller, equally concrete goals she’s fighting for throughout the book.
And that’s what makes a story shine.
A Quick Word on Stakes
The final piece of our goal-shaped puzzle is stakes, a confusing and often-misunderstood part of writing that can be summed up really simply as: “Why is it so important this character succeeds at their goal? What terrible thing will happen if they fail?”
Again, the clearer and more concrete the better, but stakes can often show the powerful, internal forces at work inside our characters, too.
With Evelyn, her goal is ultimately about integrity, and about finding her place in the world. If she fails to join her father’s order, then who is she really? What will she do with her life? To make the stakes even more clear, perhaps her little brother is sick, and Evelyn needs this job to help get the medicine he needs. Suddenly, passing that entrance exam isn’t just something she’d like—there’s an existential dread of what will happen to her brother (and to Evelyn herself) if she fails.
That’s the final part of the alchemical potion that transmutes a series of events into a story. When we combine:
a powerful and concrete character goal
multiple steps and smaller goals to make it happen
a clear (and terrible) cost of failure
At last, we have pure storytelling rocket fuel.
Asking the Alchemist—Questions & Answers
Does the character’s goal have to be stated outright, or can it be implied?
We almost never need to state it outright. It should come alive through everything the character does, what they value, and the actions and decisions they make throughout the book.
Evelyn might tell her sick brother, “The entrance exam for the Rose Order is today” (making her goal clear) and we might see how much she venerates her dead father, through her dialogue and action.
Trust the reader to put the pieces together and feel why it matters so much.
What if the character doesn’t know what they want yet?
Then we (the writer) definitely need to find out! Or rather, we need to make them want something, even if it ends up being the wrong thing.
A character who doesn’t take action, and doesn’t want anything, will sit at the centre of a scene like lead weight—and often drag the whole story down with them.
Can one character have multiple goals?
Yes and no. A character can absolutely have multiple goals, so long as they meet one condition: they come one after the other, and each one leads to the next. You can see that in the example with Evelyn—she moves through multiple sub-goals, but they’re all connected, and each one leads her naturally into the next.
When a character has two or more conflicting goals, we get into trouble. They end up being pulled in two different directions at once, and often, the story goes nowhere.
Remember: your character’s goal should be the strongest force in their life, and if it comes into conflict with anything else, their goal should always win. Maybe it doesn’t win easily. Maybe the choice causes a huge amount of pain and sacrifice. But it should always win.
How do I know if a goal is strong enough to carry a scene?
Is it something the character wants deeply, all the way down into the marrow of their bones? Can you feel that ache when you dig into it? Is it something they will take action towards in this moment?
If yes, then you’re good!
Still unsure about goals, or have questions I haven’t answered? Comment below and I’ll answer them at the end of this series.
Conduct Your Own Experiments
If you want to put this knowledge into practice, here’s where to start.
Pull up a recent scene from your WIP and ask:
What does the protagonist (or point of view character) want in this exact moment?
What happens if they don’t get it?
Do they either achieve this thing or fail to achieve it—either before the end of this chapter/scene, or at least before they start following some new goal?
If you’re not sure about any of these elements, you’ve found a potential place for revisions.
Try answering these questions and rewrite the scene accordingly.
How does it change things?
Does the scene feel stronger and more focused as a result?
🧪 Turn Your Draft into Gold
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This was an excellent and easy to follow break down for wedging those pesky goals into each scene and creating an escalating progression.
Thanks for this article. I struggle a lot with this kind of plotting in longer works.