What do you want?

All February long, I’m going over some of the basic tenants of writing and how to make sure you’ve mastered them before you really start your story. Previously, we’ve talked about world building, setting defining, and characterization. This time, we’re talking about something slightly more difficult to quantify.

Defining your goals

Basically, I want you to know why you’re writing this story, before you start writing it. And yes, I do in fact know that this can be a very difficult question to answer. For some of us, we’re just writing for the sake of writing. Others are writing to market (which, though it can get you a great deal of sales, I still say is a cop-out). What I want to challenge you with, however, is the fact that you really ought to have at least a basic reason of why you’re writing this story, a goal you wish to achieve, before you get very far in.

And don’t worry; some of us won’t find out how to define this until you’re a few chapters in. That’s totally okay, and completely normal. Sometimes we have to get a little bit into the story before we can make sense of this.

If you don’t know the point of your story, if you don’t know your goals before you get very far into the book, your readers will notice. There’s an element there, a depth of story, that won’t be there if you don’t know the answer.

But, what could your goals possibly be?

Maybe you want your readers to learn something. Maybe, you’re the one who wants to learn. Maybe your main character has something they desperately need to achieve, and you believe this story holds some moral for your readers. Perhaps you’re conveying a story of your family, or your friends, and you believe people ought to know it. Or maybe you’re writing this story for the sake of getting it out of your mind, to release it from your thoughts and let the world view it as you have for so long.

It doesn’t matter what your goals are. It really doesn’t. When an author has a goal in mind, when they have something like this that they wish to convey to their readers, those readers sense it. When we read the book, we see how deeply the writer is connected to the story—and it connects us to the story as well.

That’s what we want, as writers. We want our readers to be connected to our stories. We want them to feel our stories the same way we do.

Know your goals, know what you want to do with this story, and you’ll be one step closer to that.

[love]

{Rani D.}