Endings are hard.
I’ve been plugging through my current WIP and to get a feel for where I’m going I looked over the beginning for a few more clues about the ending.
This led me to the conclusion that beginnings are hard as well.
I think it’s much easier to write a story where the main character wants some concrete object. A bank robber works, because really, money is an easy object to want. However, when your main character wants something weird like the understanding of loyalty; well you have a whole bunch of weird loops to jump through.
First, how do you express this as a want without just coming right out and saying, hey, I want to understand loyalty. I think I screwed it up really bad in the past, but I can prove to you that I can be loyal now.
The only way to do it effectively is indirectly. However, people usually don’t get indirect in the first scene. Hopefully, I’ve left enough clues that something bigger is coming, that the reader will see beyond this bit of hand waving and continue to the second scene, which is where the real inciting incident takes place.
Normally, I would be very much of the opinion that the inciting incident needs to take place in the first scene of a short story, but it’s absolutely imperative that this first scene be there.
Clarity is often so difficult to achieve.
I’m supposed to be writing now, so it seemed like a good time to respond to this.
Here’s my understanding of this: I’d say that in any story the character should always want something concrete. He should always have an outer, visible goal. If you don’t have this, then the reader (and you the writer) don’t know when the story’s done and whether the character solved his problem/achieved his goal or not. This can/should be paired with an inner motivation/goal. “Understanding loyalty” is a good inner motivation, but then you need to figure out what that actually looks like on the outside for that character. Maybe it looks like robbing banks because that’s how he shows loyalty to his gang and what he wants is to be able to stop robbing banks without looking like a traitor and being kicked out of the gang. Those are all concrete things you can show. Because no one says “I want to understand loyalty,” unless they are abstracting from what they really want, which is always something concrete. If your character is saying to you, “I want to understand loyalty,” then you need to ask him “Why?” and “What does that look like to you? What will that get you?” And you’ll end up with something concrete that you can actually show on the page. I think if you have a story that you’re already writing, then you must have a lot of this already, but you need to get out of the abstract level of thinking he wants to “understand loyalty” and into the concrete level of what that looks like to this particular character.
Yes, I’m finding that this is the case with “Restless”. I think I’ve sabotaged myself again with the current story, because it’s still pretty muddy as far as character motivation goes–she wants to help a zombie girl. But why? Because she feels helping the zombie girl will help her find redemption from her own mistakes. It might work, but I should be going for easier stuff. So far, I’ve decided to just keep riding it out, because I might discover what I need during the process. Basically, I’m going to keep banging my head against the wall until something breaks – head or wall, it is yet to be determined. However, the next story, I think is going to be about a highwayman who wants to get his hands on an actual object. At this point, I need to write a few simple stories, or at least plan them that way, because inevitably I will find some way to make them far more complicated than they need to be.