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

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:

• Inciting incident (qualities & traps)
• Progressive complications (qualities)
• Progressive complications (traps)
• Content genres

Transcript

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You've built your story so carefully. You've mapped out the story structure, and you've been checking off every one of the six elements from the inciting incident to the resolution. But something's not quite right. The turning point isn't packing the punch that it needs. conflict happens, but it doesn't seem to matter in the way that, you know, it should. Every element of story seems to be doing its job on paper, but in practice it feels weirdly disconnected and flat. Here's the thing, the six elements of story don't work without an engine to drive them. In order to make the turning point rock your protagonist's world to make the crisis a devastating, all is lost and the climax a cathartic payoff. You must understand what your protagonist is really trying to achieve, and that is trickier than it sounds most writers think the goal is simple. The character wants X. Save the world, get the girl solve a crime. But that's only half the equation. The other half, the part that gives your story, its meaning and power is what your protagonist doesn't want to do in order to get X what they're trying to avoid. what would feel like failure, even if they technically achieved their goal? And in this episode, I'm breaking down both sides of that equation. I'm sharing the framework that captures this tension and becomes the engine of every great story. It's deceptively simple, and yet it will bring every piece together and bring your story to life. Welcome to your next draft. In our series of episodes on the six elements of story, my favorite story structure framework. We've covered the inciting incidents and progressive complications, which means that the next logical step is the turning point. I was super prepared to put the turning point under the microscope for this episode. I spent a month gathering my ideas and running them by Kim and Brannan, my editor colleagues. I had all the pieces, the things I look for, and the traps that writers fall in and examples. and then I sat down to write that episode, and within three sentences I realized we can't talk about turning points yet. Something huge is missing the goal. In order to understand the turning point, first we have to understand the protagonist's goal because the turning point is the event that makes it clear the protagonist cannot accomplish their goal in the way that they wanted to achieve it, which means we literally can't have a conversation about turning points without talking about the goal. as you've probably guessed, based on every other episode in this series, I have a lot to say about goals. So I set the Turning Points episode aside. We'll come back to it, I promise, and I set out instead to share the way that I think about goals in a story. The goal is the engine that drives the protagonist through the story. It's the conflict at the heart of the story's purpose and meaning. It's the glue that ties all the elements of story together. It is essential incredibly. It is also easily distilled into a simple and hyper useful framework. This framework was codified by Sean Coin and Story Grid, and I absolutely love it. So get ready for a deep dive into the goal. We'll cover a super simple framework for a character's goal, a breakdown of each part of that framework. The way that this framework captures the meaning of a story by weaving the internal and external arcs together. A bunch of examples so you can see how it works. And a sneak preview of how the goal glues all six elements together. Let's kick it off with the framework. Here it is. A character wants X without Y. That's it. A character wants X without Y. Told you it was wonderfully simple. Feel free to stop this episode right here if you feel like you've got it. Want more? Let's break it down First, what does want X mean? This is the thing the character is trying to get or achieve. It's a specific, literal, external thing the character wants. Okay. every content genre has a stock goal that a character in that type of story is always pursuing in an action story where the core need of survival, the protagonist wants to save a victim from a villain in a crime story where the core need is safety. The protagonist wants to uncover the truth in a love story, where the core need is connection. The protagonist wants to fall in love or gain a relationship if those feel generic. That's because they are, they are the broad categories that stories fall within, and there are many, many, many ways to create nuanced variations of those goals. The goal of a specific character in a specific story will be a narrower, more specific version of those stock goals. Let's look at some examples. Pride and prejudice is a love story. Elizabeth Bennett wants to marry for love. Ender's game is a war story. Ender wants to protect himself at first, and ultimately he wants to protect all of humanity. Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is a prison break crime story. Andy wants to get out of prison. How to Train Your Dragon is a status story and an action story. Hiccup wants to gain the approval of his tribe. Red, white and royal blue is another love story. Alex, the son of the United States President wants to date Henry the Prince of England. Marry for love, save the world, get out of prison, gain approval and respect, get the boy. All of these are specific concrete goals. They can be externally measured. Is Andy in prison or out of prison? Does hiccups community ridicule him or honor him? Is ender alive or are he and all of humanity obliterated? And all of these goals align with the content genre of their story. Elizabeth Bennett doesn't want to save the world. She's in a love story. Andy doesn't have an opportunity to get a girl. He's in a prison break. Crime story ender doesn't have time to solve a crime. He's in a war story to be fair. Hiccup wants to gain respect, keep his community safe, and get the girl. That's because he's in an internal status story and an external action story with a love story subplot. But one of those genres must be the primary genre because three things is too many things to measure all at once. And so we can distill all of that down to the thing Hiccup wants most to gain the approval of his community. So that's the want X side. There is a specific, literal, external thing that the character wants to get or achieve. What about the without why side? Well, the character doesn't just want to get X at any cost. They want to get X in a specific way. Under specific circumstances. There are things that they do not want to do, and it would feel absolutely horrible if they had to do them to get X. If they did Y, they might still feel like they failed, even if doing Y allowed them to gain x. So the without y side is the thing that the character does not want on the way to achieving x. I think of this in two categories. The first category is avoid the character wants to avoid doing something. There is something that they do not want to do, an action they do not want to take. The second category is preserve. There is something the character wants to maintain, an existing state that they want to keep. They like something about the way things are right now and they do not want to break it. Avoid and preserve are two sides of the same coin. The way that characters preserve an existing state is by avoiding taking an action that would disrupt that state. But I mention these two categories because they give you some flexibility around how you phrase Y in the without Y framework. The character wants X without taking an action, or they want X without disrupting an existing state. Let's look at our example stories and see what our intrepid protagonists do not want. Elizabeth Bennett wants to marry for love without changing her judgment of people. That's an avoid, an action. She does not want to take Ender wants to save himself and ultimately save humankind without hurting his enemy. That's another avoid. Andy Dufrene wants to get the freedom that he justly deserves without breaking the law to get it. This is phrased as an avoid, an action that he doesn't want to do, but I think it's actually easier to see Andy's goal from the perspective of preserve. If you walked up to him and asked him what he wants, he wouldn't tell you that he wants to not break the law. He'd tell you that he wants to get the justice he deserves within the law. He wants to preserve an existing external state, his innocence of the crime that he was convicted of, and an existing internal belief that the justice system provides justice. How about hiccup? Hiccup wants to gain the approval of his tribe without killing a dragon. This is another avoid, And Alex wants to date Henry without outing either of them or their relationship to the world. This is a preserve. He wants to maintain their safety within the closet. So that's the without y, Y is a specific literal external action. The character does not want to take, or an existing state that they do not want to disrupt. They do want to get X, and they want to get X very, very badly, but just as badly as they want X. They do not want y. Y might be too high a price to pay. Can you see where this is going? The entire story will force the character to pit X against Y. Sure. The character wants X without Y. But what if X is impossible without Y? What if Y is inevitable? What will the character do when their goal is impossible to achieve in the way that they wanted to achieve it? Let's add one more layer. Thus far, I've emphasized how both X and Y are specific, literal, external things. They aren't feelings or thought experiments. They are actual, literal, tangible things, but where this gets really rich and powerful. Where it carries the meaning and purpose at the heart of the story is the way that it ties the internal and external stories together. The reason why characters want X without Y is because they believe that X without Y is possible to get. They believe that there's a way to thread that needle, to have their cake and eat it too. They're not out here dreaming impossible, irrational dreams just for the heck of it. They are grounded in realism in everything they have ever learned and seen and experienced, and based on all of that, they truly believe that X without Y is possible. Or that Y is not worth sacrificing for X pitting X against Y challenges not only their external circumstances, but their internal beliefs about themselves and the world. Take Andy Frana again. Andy wants to get his just freedom from prison without breaking the law. That's because he genuinely believes that the justice system meets out justice. He believes that if he could simply present the true facts before a judge and jury, they would see the truth and act justly in accordance with it for as long as he believes that he will not attempt to break out of prison because breaking out of prison would put him on the wrong side of a just system. if the system is just, it would be irrational to commit a crime to gain his freedom. In that case, the system that would have freed him would instead re incarcerate him, and this time he would deserve it. In order for Andy to finally choose to do X with Y. To gain his freedom by breaking the law, he must first realize that his belief was wrong, that the system is not just, and he can never gain freedom through it. This is an internal revelation that makes his external action possible, and so that without Y side is a tangible, literal, external thing. But more than that, it represents Andy's internal worldview, which will be tested throughout the story. In order for Andy to gain his freedom, He must first realize the truth about the justice system that's imprisoning him. I point this out because I want you to see that the without why side of the equation isn't random. It's not about some mild discomfort or annoyance or inconvenience. It's about the core challenge that the character is being tested in throughout the entire story. Elizabeth Bennett doesn't want to marry for love without eating mediocre boiled potatoes, for instance. She wants to marry for love without having to confront her own proclivity to biased prejudices, snap judgments and incorrect assumptions about people. Elizabeth's story is about what happens when we meet a person worthy of our deepest love, and yet our judgments and pride prevent us from recognizing them. Iner doesn't want to save humanity without like embarrassing himself by losing a battle at battle school. He wants to protect himself and everyone and everything he cares about without hurting his enemy. Because deep down, he cares about his enemy as deeply as he cares about himself and destroying his enemy feels like destroying himself. Ender's story is about what it costs to protect ourselves and the people we care about, and how much we're willing to destroy in order to guarantee our safety. get X without Y is the literal physical pursuit that externalizes the essential internal conflict of the character. The goal summarizes the heart of the story, the core conflict, the essence of what it's all about. A story asks whether it is fundamentally possible to get X without Y, and what a character is willing or able to do. If it's not, where does that leave us? If we cannot possibly get X without Y, what in the world should we do? The goal is central to everything. Without it, there is no story. And so that brings us back to the goal as glue, the binding agent that ties all six elements of story together. I'll dig deeper into this in each elements individual breakdown. But here's a crash introduction to the whole structure so you can see how the goal fits in the inciting incident kicks off the character's goal. This is the catalyzing event that establishes the desire for X, the thing that they want, and the constraint of Y, the thing that they don't want. The inciting incident sets the character in motion in pursuit of the goal. The progressive complications are the space where the character attempts all the ways to get X without Y. Sometimes they get the character really close to achieving X without Y, and sometimes they take the character far away from X and they call into question whether it's even possible to achieve X without Y. The turning point though is the event that makes it inescapably clear that it is indeed impossible to get X without y. Which sends the character into the crisis. This is the central question at the heart of the story, It's a binary choice. the truth is revealed and the chips are down, will the character choose to do Y in order to gain X Or choose to sacrifice X in order to avoid Y. The climax is the moment when the character takes action on their crisis decision. They do Y to gain X or they sacrifice X to avoid Y. And the resolution is what the world looks like afterwards. It's the result of their decision, what they have gained and what they have lost now that they have taken action. So that is why the goal is so essential. That's why this framework is so powerful. It is the engine that drives the entire story. It's the glue that holds every element together, and it's the core purpose and meaning that the story is truly about. We cannot use the six elements of story effectively without it. And so I invite you to play a game. It's called, what's the goal? And I bet you can guess what the game is. Think of your favorite stories and try to spot the protagonist's goal. What is X? The thing they want? What's y, the thing that they don't want? And when you put them together in the get X without Y framework, does that describe the conflict at the heart of the story? This is great practice to start seeing goals out in the wild in the stories that you know and love so that you can find them in your story as well. Plus, I don't know about you, but I think that it's a really fun game. I'm super fun at parties. Alright, we've covered everything I need you to know about goals. Now, one more thing before I go. If you enjoyed this episode, would you do me a favor and consider leaving a rating and review in Apple podcasts? Reviews really do help more writers to find the show and determine whether it's worth listening to. And if you have an Apple device, you can leave review in Apple Podcasts, even if that's not where you usually listen. I also read every review and I appreciate every single one. So that's my little plug. And there you have it. Your crash course on goals. Congratulations. You're now ready for the turning point episode. Until next time, happy editing.