The Hidden Half Of Your Protagonist's Goal (That Makes Story Structure Work) Your Next Draft podcast

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The Hidden Half of Your Protagonist's Goal (That Makes Story Structure Work)

3d ago 19:45

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If your structure is perfect on paper, but your story still falls flat, this might be what you're missing.

Have you ever structured a story with all the right pieces, but something still feels flat?

You check all the boxes on paper:

✅ Inciting incident
✅ Progressive complications
✅ Turning point
✅ Crisis
✅ Climax
✅ Resolution

And yet it still falls flat. They mostly align, probably, you’re pretty sure. But somehow, they’re not working together the way they should.

The turning point doesn’t pack the right punch. The crisis doesn’t feel devastating enough, even though all is technically lost. The climax doesn’t feel like a cathartic payoff, but a gentle womp-womp.

All the pieces are there. So what went wrong?

Here’s the thing: in order for the six elements of story to work, you have to understand your character’s goal.

Most writers have a vague sense of what their protagonist generally wants. But that’s not enough.

You need to know specifically the thing that they want—and the thing they don’t want.

So in this episode, I’m putting the goal under the microscope. You’ll learn:

Why it’s not enough to know what your character wants
A super-simple framework for a character’s goal (seriously, it’s ridiculously easy)
How that framework summarizes the meaning of the entire story
And how the goal glues all six elements of story together, driving the entire story from inciting incident to resolution

Without a clearly defined goal, all the structure in the world won’t make your story come alive.

With it, everything else falls neatly into place.

Dig deeper with these related episodes:

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