Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring-fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we,"
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
And there you have it, the beginning of an adventure, with a clearly stated goal.
I began writing fiction in my dotage, at the age of 73, so Iām new to all of this. I havenāt had the chance to practice, to make mistakes and learn from them, to seek advice from editors and others with real knowledge. I just wrote. That one million awful words that Neil Gaiman says you need to write before you get to writing the good stuff? Not there yet.
At least Iām smart enough to know that I donāt know much, so I sought the advice of people whoāve been at this writing business for a long while now. I asked someone to look over the first page of one of my WIPs. The response was, āWe donāt know anything from this about [POV character]ās hopes and dreams.ā
Ah, so Iām supposed to put that on page one? āHopes and dreamsā didnāt resonate with me. It sounded too upbeat for what I usually write. So I substituted āgoals and aimsā. āWants.ā āNeeds.ā āDesires.ā But it still didnāt seem to fit well into the opening scene, which I felt was a strong one otherwise. I did what I usually do when confronted with a new idea. I looked to works Iād read, for examples.
Whether itās Brother Cadfael or Miss Jane Marple, Nick and Nora Charles or Nancy Drew, Kinsey Milhone or Jimmy Perez, the MC in a Who-Done-It has a built-in goal, to find out who done it! So thatās off the table as a source.
āIt is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.ā Jane Austen was clear about where this story was headed. The reader knows in advance that the modern descendants of Pride and Prejudice, romance novels, are going to end at the altar, no exceptions. Scratch that genre, too.
.
I looked to a few books that I think of as well-written, that I had enjoyed tremendously, but where I didnāt remember a stated goal on Page 1. First up, Pearl S. Buckās The Good Earth. We meet Wang Lung on his wedding day, when heās probably in his early 20s, and follow him to his deathbed as an old man. Page 1 was all about the wedding preparations, no obvious life goal stated. Itās only in retrospect that you can look back and see where he got the beginnings of his obsession with possessing land, later in Chapter One. So he had nothing at that point that became the reason we wanted to keep reading.
I read A Wizard of Earthsea approximately 15 minutes after it was published. The beginning scene was in Gedās home village, where he first used his powers, but it didnāt give a long-term goal for him until well after that. So is his goal hidden there and I havenāt noticed?
How about To Kill a Mockingbird? Itās another book I read as soon as it published. I donāt think it was Jean Louiseās goal to get Tom Robinson to trial, but if you ask most people what the story was about, the trial is what they remember. For months, as I thought this over, I was sure there wasnāt a stated goal in that book. Silly me! It was, similar to Pride and Prejudice, on the very first page, paragraph two. ā. . . it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.ā If you look deeply into the events of this novel, all the events over nearly three years led to Arthur Radley emerging from his house. Only for one night, and of the three child conspirators only Jean Louise saw the goal achieved, but everything else was side plots and novel dynamics leading to the end result.
Goals arenāt always reached. Thatās okay. In Sounder, we learn you always find what youāre supposed to find. The boy didnāt find his father, but he did find something that changed his life.
And those three fishers in the poem? No, they didnāt catch any fish, either, since the āherring-fishā were the reflections of stars on the water. But did it matter?
Challenge: (Pick one or more)
1. Pick a book you consider to be written well, not a who-done-it or romance, and find the earliest mention of the MCs goal, and if it was reached, not reached, or changed along the way.
2. Write an opening scene that gives a goal for the MC in a way that sets up a story.
3. Tell us how you set up the long-term goals for your works. Is it obvious or subtle, or only implied? How important is it to you that your POV character reach the goal?
And you can sing along!
Write On! will be a regular Thursday night diary (8 pm Eastern, 5 pm Pacific) until it isnāt.
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