The stakes might be life-and-death or something less than that, but what the main character is focused on from scene to scene is that finding and securing.

Someone or something must be found, gotten, held, retrieved, and probably delivered somewhere. Note that these 7 goals can exist across genres, but when you really whittle it down to what the main character must do and is trying to do, it’s pretty simple and “primal,” as Save the Cat would say: 1.

So let’s get into what that tends to involve - these types of story goal that there may really only be 7 of… Ideally your logline would focus on that. They’re trying to do something, and that something involves action in their external world of situations and relationships. And sometimes the problem is mostly just something internal, which has its own challenges.īut at the center of any viable concept for a movie, series or commercial novel, in my opinion, is a sense of mission for the main character. Sometimes there’s not much they can do, making it probably not the best choice, since we get most invested when the main character of any story is actively in pursuit of something. Other times it can seem more like a proactive “goal,” and their “problem” is that they haven’t reached it yet, and it would really make their life better if they did.īut what I see in a lot of scripts I read - in fact it may be the most common major note I have - is that although the main character has a problem, they’re not really doing that much to try to solve it. Sometimes it seems more focused on the “problem” and the “goal” would simply be to fix it. I’ve also noted that “problem” and “goal” are two sides of the same coin, in that the main character of a story usually has both. In the past I’ve blogged about the different kinds of problems at the center of a story, and how it’s good to make sure you’ve chosen one of these, so the stakes seem big enough. I started trying to list them, and came up with 7. As I’ve been brainstorming on my next script I found myself looking at the main character’s external want and realizing that there really are a very limited number of types of story goal.

Castle story goals list