Dog-Eared Corner - 1.2: Goals, Obstacles, & Stakes
When building a cathedral, you cannot help but be aware of the structure’s components. Bricks, wood, and glass. A heavy foundation. Load-bearing walls and pillars. Beams and arches designed to hold up more than what lies above them. (Please keep in mind, I don’t actually know anything about cathedral construction.) But when you’re viewing a cathedral, walking through it, or around it, these aren’t the things you notice. What you see are its features. The nave and transept. Spires and buttresses. Stained-glass windows, bell towers, and crypts.
In the previous post, we discussed the components of Story. Today, we’ll be looking at Story’s features. As with a cathedral (and again, I know VERY little about architecture), where a story’s components build it into what it is, its features define it in the minds of its readers.
So, what are the features of a story then? Or to put it another way, what features do all stories share?
Well, that’s easy:
Goals - Obstacles - Stakes
These are common terms. Nearly everyone should grasp their meaning. Any writer who’s been at it for longer than a month or two should grasp how they apply to Story. But each is extremely important, so I think it’s worthwhile to examine what they do, and why they’re so essential.
Let’s look at them.
GOALS
Also known as objectives or desires, and typically associated with specific characters, Goals are preferred states of existence.
Such states include things like:
Freedom (eg. from Shawshank Prison).
Safety (eg. from the Death Star).
Togetherness (eg. with Prince Charming, Princess Fiona, or Mr. Darcy).
Achievement (eg. of destroying the One Ring).
But of course, they can be anything. These states—absent at the beginning—are where the Story wants to end up. The story does not always succeed at this, but it wants to. It tries to. This is even true when the Goal is to maintain a status quo (in which case, the desired state would be a status quo, un-threatened by change).
So that’s what goals are. But the question remains, why are they so important? What do they actually do? Each of the three Story features serves an essential purposes.
Goals bind the reader to the narrative. They are what invest us in the Story.
Wing, you freaking philistine. CHARACTERS are what bind me to a story. I mean, how can the characters’ goals be more important than the characters themselves?
Too true, my dear rhetorical device. But, as we’ve seen a previous post Defining Character, a story’s characters are created (though not defined) by their goals (rather than the other way around). Wherever a reader sees Goals, they automatically see characters (human, animal, even inanimate object). This is how our minds work; we can’t help it. Goals are the reason readers latch onto characters. Characters may be intriguing by personality alone, but watching them pursue their goals is what invests us in their journeys.
What about interesting ideas though? You can fill your Story with great CONCEPTS and that will draw me in just as well. Goals need not be involved.
Yes, good. Smart comment. But wrong.
Ideas can capture a reader, but they don’t involve the reader in the Story itself; if you take the Story away, nothing will be lost, because the idea is still there. It’s still interesting. Goals are inseparable from the Story. They are the Story’s movement. A story without Goals does not move, and so isn’t a story.
Okay, but whose goals are they? What if the character wants something different than the reader?
Now, you’ll never hear me say that empathy isn’t important in story-craft—it’s desperately important—but the reader doesn’t need to feel what the character feels. And the Goal can be different from what the reader wants. The reader can object to the desired state; they can dread it. In fact, it isn’t even necessarily what the character wants. The characters themselves are incidental to their goals. A character is more a Goal’s avatar than its source. The Goal is where the Story wants to end up (whether it succeeds in getting there or not), and the protagonist, is in fact, a function of the Story’s main Goal (as discussed in the post on Protagonists)
As an example, let’s look to the film Labyrinth, only instead of 16-year-old Sarah (Jennifer Conolly), the protagonist is 1960s-era James Bond (Sean Connery). Changing the protagonist would make a very different film, but the Goal remains: rescue Baby Toby from Goblin David Bowie. It doesn’t really matter who the protagonist is. Bond would, no doubt, navigate the narrative’s Obstacles with a verve all his own, but always toward the same desired outcome. So we see the Goal truly is not defined by the character it belongs to.
Which brings us to our next Story feature:
OBSTACLES
Obstacles, often—maybe even more often—referred to as conflicts, are elements in a story that stand in the way of Goal’s achievement. They can be present at the beginning of the Story or arise as the narrative progresses.
Of Story’s three main features, Obstacles are unquestionably the most prominent, the most noticeable to the reader. They shape the Story by throwing themselves in the path to the desired state. They interrupt action, confounding characters who attempt to achieve their goals, and they also force characters to act, requiring new actions when a Goal would otherwise be achieved.
By this measure, it could easily be said that a narrative is the sum of its obstacles:
All drama is conflict. Without conflict, you have no action; without action, you have no character; without character, you have no Story; and without Story, you have no screenplay.
- Syd FielD
(Screenwriter, Rebel Without a Cause)
Obstacles are a story’s most present, most observable feature, to both the readers and to the characters themselves. Because of this, they tend to be the most diverse. Obstacles can come in the form of forces of nature or physical threats; they can be different characters or societal expectations; they can even be the protagonist themself.
Now, when we’re talking Obstacle categories, there are three main kinds: external, inter-personal, and internal. That is to say, Obstacles arising from the world, nature and society; Obstacles arising from other individuals, and Obstacles arising from the hearts and minds of characters themselves. But you should never feel like you need to choose between these. A story with all thee will be far more likely to possesses both emotional depth and narrative complexity.
(But I digress.)
Okay, hang on there, Wing. If the Goal binds readers to the narrative, but Obstacles—the very SHAPE of the Story—stand in the way of that Goal, why should people keep reading? Why, if THE STORY ITSELF actively pushes them away?
Wonderful question, my dear non-existent friend! I can tell you’ve been paying attention. Frankly, I’m delighted you asked this, because it brings us to our final Story feature:
STAKES
Stakes are a combination of two vital things:
1) everything that must be paid/risked to achieve a Goal.
2) everything that stands to be gained.
Cost and benefit. Risk and reward. They rise in proportion to each other.
Stakes are the subtlest of the Story features. An inexperienced writer may even forget to include them. (Such a story would still have Stakes; they just probably wouldn’t be very effective.) If you find your story lacks Stakes, it may be because the protagonist is too good at everything, or the consequences of failure are too minor, or the Goal is too superficial. In which case, the reader simply may not feel the conflict, nor care about your story as you intended.
Because this is what Stakes do. If the Goal invests us in the Story, Stakes give our investment value. They make us care about the outcome, instill a sense that what happens in the Story matters.
Without Stakes, a story loses its storyness. Because the Goal—i.e. desired state—by its very nature creates Stakes. In a good story, the Stakes are significant. They need not be dire; they need not be urgent, but they must make a reader care about what’s happening, about the Goal, and the Obstacles obstructing it. The risk should be high. The price should be great. The reward should be vital.
——
So there you have it. Goal. Obstacles. Stakes.
These are the features every story has. They may be obvious. Or they can be subtle to the point of invisibility. Any story you’re writing already has them, though. So go ahead and play with them. Puff them up, hide them inside each other, shine a spotlight down on top of them. Use them well and your reader will lose themselves in the twists and turns of your narrative.