From Edie: Discover how to predict your story’s ending from the first page by mastering Goal, Motivation, and Conflict—your key to stronger plots and characters.
How to Know the Ending of Your Story from the Beginning: Using Goal, Motivation, and Conflict
by Sarah Sally Hamer @SarahSallyHamer
One of my favorite things to do when I teach a writing class is to brag a little. I love telling the eager, bright-faced, writers (newbies or oldies) that I can tell them the end of their story if they tell me the beginning. Of course, they don’t believe me but, truly, if you know the system, it’s not hard at all.
So. Tell me the beginning of your story. Tell me who your main protagonist is, the one the book is really about. Give me a couple of character traits. Then, tell me what that character wants.
In a nutshell, that one piece of information is gold. It gives us as the instructor (me), the author (them), and the reader (you), enough information to get started. Dorothy (The Wizard of Oz) wants to save Toto – yes, for those of you who haven’t heard me and dozens of other instructors who taught me, it’s NOT that she wants to go home. She is home at the beginning. It’s not until she gets lost in Oz that she wants to go home. She wants to save Toto. Once we know that, the whole story starts to roll.
Next, I want to know WHY she wants to save Toto. The movie doesn’t really give us a lot of background, purely because it’s simple, at least for my inventive mind. She’s living with an older set of relatives, with no immediate family in sight. Surely she had a mom and dad but something bad must have happened. I believe that Toto reminds her of them. Besides, he’s the only character (and dogs are characters, as far as I’m concerned), she really connects to, at least in Kansas. So, she loves her dog and will do anything for him, including running away from the only home she really has.
Then comes the conflict. WHY NOT? Why can’t she save Toto? She tries. She begs for his life. She tells him she wants to go somewhere they can both be safe. And, as the story unfolds, she is willing to put her own life in danger to save him.
By the way, if this sounds like Goal, Motivation, and Conflict, that’s exactly what it is. I know some folks don’t really like GMC – they think it restrains their creativity too much. That may be true. But I really think that knowing just those three items about your characters can carry you through an entire story, even if there are flying monkeys involved.
So. These three things set up the story.
- 1. She’s running from danger. She has to leave her “ordinary world” to save Toto’s life, since she has no control over what is happening. She’s in a reactive state of doing as she’s told and can’t change anything in her current state of “knowing.”
- 2. She’s not able to attain her goal because she doesn’t have the knowledge and ability to get there. Learning control and to be pro-active, where she makes her own decisions is the entire middle of the book. She has to have “a brain,” which she gains with the Scarecrow, “a heart,” which is what the Tin Man teaches her, and “courage,” which she learns from the Cowardly Lion. She has to learn lessons and come to realizations of exactly what is most important in her life.
- 3. Then, she has to make a very hard decision about what she really wants for her to triumph.
I know how the movie ends (and I imagine you do too), so I know she’s going to follow those three “rules” to find the correct path to achieve her goal. She has conflicts, including those flying monkeys, a narcissistic Wizard and a green Witch, and even having to make the final decision as to whether home is more important than Toto, when Toto chases the cat at the end. See, she ends up with conflicting goals – Toto or home – and that choice is probably one of the hardest she ever made. It’s the right one, of course, because she ends up with both the dog and home, but she couldn’t have made that decision at the beginning.
Figuring out the ending of a story is entirely based on how it’s set up. It’s a matter of recognizing what must happen.
I found that some students didn’t agree with me on how this works. They wanted to have a different ending of their book than I suggested. And, it’s a show of strength on their part to have that kind of a discussion in a classroom full of people. Yes, I’m wrong – often more than right – but the great part of this is to simply change something in the beginning. Usually it’s something very, very small in retrospect. For instance, if Dorothy’s goal at the beginning was ONLY to go home, she really doesn’t have a story. She is home, as far as she probably has one. If what she considers home is really with her real parents, it’s an entirely different story. So, if you don’t like the ending, based on how this system works, we can tweak the beginning and still have an entire story, wrapped up in its own red ribbon.
I think that consideration of this type of planning (and, yes, I can hear the folks who don’t want to plan their books but only write them hollering!) is important to simply keep us on track. You do notice, I didn’t suggest any scenes or how chapters should end or make any great soap-box-speeches about how the book needs to go. It’s simply a compass, showing which way is North. You don’t even have to look at it again, if it makes you nervous to think that you’ve stifled your creativity. It just lays a path before you, and lets you follow all the bunny trails you want.
Want me to tell you how your book ends? Post it in the comments and I’ll be glad to give you some tips.
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A teacher of memoir, beginning and advanced creative fiction writing, and screenwriting at Louisiana State University in Shreveport for over twenty years, she also teaches online for Margie Lawson at WWW.MARGIELAWSON.COM and atHTTPS://NOSTRESSWRITING.COM/. Sally is a free-lance editor and book coach, with many of her students and clients becoming successful, award-winning authors. You can find her at SALLY@MINDPOTENTIAL.ORG
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