If you pick up a book on writing fiction, you will be surprised by how it reflects our lives. That makes sense because it didn’t we probably couldn’t get any sense out of any story we read. Every character in the story has to be seeking something, a goal. The goals must be well defined for central characters in the story. If it’s a romance novel, the main character is seeking love. If it’s a mystery, the main character is seeking to solve a murder and so on in the genre novels. There are great novels that don’t fit in any genre, but the characters in those novels still have some goals in mind.
Those goals might be single-minded. If they are single-minded, they probably represent a character who is mentally flawed. That’s because we all have multiple goals. There are short-term ones like mowing the lawn or cooking supper. Their intermediate goals, such as “I want to lose 10 pounds before my brother’s wedding.” Then there are long-range goals such as “I want to become the chief financial officer in the company I work for.” Those long-term goals will support a novel. When the goal is reached, the book ends.
In real-world lives, we have goals we reach and dreams we do not. Also, as we grow and get older, our plans change. I’ve written a novel with the title Billy. It starts in the 1950s and tells about our hero, Billy, from just after high school graduation until his children in college. There was a draft in the 1950s, and Billy knows that he must serve in the military before he can plan anything long-range. Billy would say, “I know it will make a mess out of life for a couple of years, but I must serve.” Billy’s short-term goal was to get his required military service over and done with. At the same time, he has a vague goal of “succeeding in life.” Billy’s not even sure what that means.
I think we are all a bit like Billy. After leaving high school, we might have a goal of getting something out of the way. It might be getting more education or merely getting a job to do “our things” with the money we earn. With that said, isn’t the story of your life made up of short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term goals? You may not think of your life is a novel, but has all features of a well-written one.
