Goal

The EastEnders character Bianca (the show’s highly strung eighteen-year-old) was storylined to have a nervous breakdown, and the writer assigned to the episode flatly refused to write it. When asked what they were going to write instead, they answered: ‘Bianca’s lost her hairbrush.’

The episode aired, and Bianca had indeed lost her hairbrush. The rising panic with which she greeted the news, the search that spread from her bedroom to her parents’ house to a blazing confrontation in the Queen Vic… that was Bianca slowly descending into a full-blown nervous breakdown. They didn’t need any exposition, or interior monologue.

A story only starts when somebody wants something. If your protagonist doesn’t want anything, they’re passive, and a passive character is as good as dead: nothing to root for, nothing to fear, no reason to keep watching. But wanting isn’t enough on its own. ‘Tell me what you want,’ said Anton Chekhov, ‘and I will tell you what manner of man you are.’ The fastest way to reveal a character is to show us what their goal is.

The director Elia Kazan described screenwriting as the art of turning psychology into behaviour. Making the intangible tangible. Your audience can’t see power, love, or heroism, but they can see a throne, a person, or a ring. So the great stories run the conversion for us.

When Aaron Sorkin needed to introduce Steve Jobs on screen, he didn’t write a speech about perfectionism. He wrote a man growing steadily more furious because his brand-new Mac won’t say ‘Hello’.

The best part is that the object itself doesn’t really matter. In North by Northwest, the entire cast spends the film chasing microfilm of an unspecified variety, and nobody in the audience cares what’s on it. The object’s importance is bestowed by the pursuit.

A goal is good. A tangible goal is better. A tangible goal soaked in emotion, one your audience could fight for, is perfect. And don’t discount a goal your protagonist doesn’t merely want to attain, but to possess or destroy. Revenge is a good example. Lee Child wrote the first Jack Reacher novel after being made redundant at forty, and a hundred million books later, readers are still queueing up to settle scores by proxy.

Goals are a Trojan Horse for the things we truly care about. They’re a symbol that makes the complex digestible. But to fully unlock their emotional power, you must infuse them with risk. An object of desire increases in value the moment there’s something to lose in reaching for it. Ask what failure would cost your protagonist.