FROM DRAFT ONE TO DONE: THE MISSION

PART ONE: THE MISSION

Welcome to From Draft One to Done. In this ongoing series, our goal is to teach you how to step back and examine your novel’s strengths and weaknesses by asking targeting questions, and tackling the answers. Perhaps you’re outlining or organizing your work, or perhaps you’ve got a draft and want to gain traction on it. If you’re a burgeoning novel writer, this one’s for you. 

This blog is going to focus on the first question everyone wants to know: what’s the book about? 

wHAT’S THE bOOK aBOUT?

Your job is to answer this in one simple sentence. 

You want me to what?

We don’t want you to write us a logline here, nor a marketing blurb. Those are important for querying, but your job right now is to know what this book is about in the most simple way possible. How do you do that? We look at the protagonist. The Golden Compass (Phillip Pullman) is about an 11-year-old girl who sets out to find her kidnapped friend. The Way of Kings (Brandon Sanderson) is about a prisoner who protects those around him, despite their horrible odds of survival. A Court of Thorns and Roses (Sarah J Maas) is about a huntress who after making a fatal error, and therefore strikes a bargain to live out her days in a foreign kingdom. 

If you’ve read any of these books, you know that the book is about SO MUCH MORE than what we’ve just described. There’s huge worlds, and magical systems, and other main characters, and so much more to dive into. If you’re a fan of any of these books, you’re shaking with rage, wanting to share ALL THE THINGS! 

We get it. But hear us out. 

When people want to know what your book is about, they want a taste of what this story has to offer, and STORY is all about the protagonist of the book. Nobody wants a twenty minute deep dive into shardblades if they’ve never heard of The Way of Kings, as cool as that is, because what someone is asking when they pick up a book is, “Will I care?” 

When readers care about the protagonists, they recommend books. 

In each example we gave above, there’s one key element about the protagonist that we give away: their initial goal. 

We’re rooting for you!

READERS EMPATHIZE WITH A GOAL

Look at the current draft of your novel. Write down how many characters we follow. Write down how soon we clearly understand their goal. For each main character, we should understand what they are trying to achieve very early on. This is part of the hook of the story. Without it, you’re dropping us into the minutiae and drama of their lives without us knowing what to root for. If you’re ever had someone say, “I just don’t know why I should care,” this is one potential reason, and it’s very common. 

The Golden Compass is a fantastic book that everyone should read. It drops us into the action immediately. Lyra, our protagonist, wants to be with her father, who will travel north on an expedition. When her friend Roger goes missing, she wants to find him. A woman offers her a chance to do both, so Lyra decides to go with her. 

There’s still so much more to cover here, like why everyone has an animal companion, why those companions can talk, why Lyra’s can shapeshift, and who the gobblers are. But immediately, you know what Lyra wants. She chooses her path for better or worse, and you root for her. When she’s stuck, or when things get tough, we feel it with her. We don’t even need to be told what those feelings are. We get it, because we want to achieve the goal too. 

If we don’t know what your character wants, you’re in trouble. 

When you read The Five Cursed Kingdoms: the Stone of Despair, you’ll see author Lawrence Davidson tackles this in the opening chapters. Vidalm is ordered on a quest, and he wants to succeed. So does everyone in his party. They all have different points of view, and different reasons beyond the quest itself, but the goal is clear. Even in the prologue, which features a different character, Faerytus has both an immediate goal and a long-term goal, clearly stated. 

The longer you go without telling your reader what your character wants, the more risk you take that the reader will lose interest. 

goals and the inciting incident

The inciting incident kicks off your story. This is often something that happens to your protagonist. This should also happen early in your story, and it should be something that changes things for your character. But it is not what establishes an initial goal for your character. 

Maybe you’re waiting for this incident to establish a goal, but again, you’re running a risk. In The Five Cursed Kingdoms: the Stone of Despair, Vidalm wants to stand up to his bully. In The Golden Compass, Lyra wants to go north with her dad. These goals give us something to latch onto with the character right away. 

The goal before the inciting incident might change. It might get achieved. It might get thrown out. The point is, the character wants something. If they get it, or fail to get it, we as the reader need to know what they want next. 

Burgeoning writer, it’s time to look at your draft. How soon does the reader know what your main character wants? If it’s not in their first chapter, you have an edit to do. And if they achieve the goal, we need to know what’s next. If the character is in limbo, goal-less, you better be promising the reader that this will change. The Way of Kings does a great job of this. Give it a read and analyze what Sanderson is doing for yourself. 

All your characters will have goals, but we don’t need to know them all. Just the characters we are following. Side characters can reveal what drives them when the time is right. If we enter their POV, the time just became right. We need to know what a character wants if we’re in their POV. If we don’t, we will be wondering why we’re following this person. 

homework:

Your mission is to ensure your protagonist has clear goals that your reader knows about. On its face, this shouldn’t be over-complicated. Once you know this, and a reader asks what the book is about, you can mention your protagonist and their initial goal. Test it out; you’ll find that many readers will find this compelling. They might ask more questions, which gives you a chance to dive in. The benefit of knowing the goal is that you don’t need to tee us up to get into the story. We don’t want to be teed up. We want to dive in and discover your world. Get in there and give us something to root for! 

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