Character, Plot, or Message-Based Novels?

(A discussion of my own approach to developing character goals, part 2)

Short Story Character Goals

I take a big-picture, plotter approach to developing the goals of characters within novels. But for shorter fiction, my character goal formation is more relaxed and possibly more creative. I keep in mind my basic novel order of author goal (message) first, followed by a character’s macro-goal governing the story arc that I punctuate with micro-goals.

This time, rather than plotting each scene ahead of time, I sketch out my main story message, then occupy the page with people developed along the way. Shorts don’t need as much attention to keeping track of actions, more focused because of the brevity of this “slice-of-life” style. Thus, I give my short story characters only one main macro-goal, based upon my authorial goal of message, and then as many micro-goals as needed, according to length and number of scenes.

Blurbs Keep Me Focused

What helps me keep to the basic direction and character goals of my short story is to write out a very condensed blurb that often ends up introducing the story once published. I follow the format of online movie descriptions. For example, here’s the blurb for the film Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris:

A widowed housecleaner in 1950s London feels invisible until a Dior gown sparks her imagination and sends her on a life-changing journey.

Reading the blurb, one suspects the grieving traveller—feeling insignificant and needing her soul awakened—is looking for joy, her apparent goal. The blurb of another recent movie—the theologically and politically charged flick Conclave—indicates main plot, conflict, and, again, implicit goals:

When Cardinal Lawrence is tasked with leading one of the world’s most secretive and ancient events, selecting a new Pope, he finds himself at the center of a conspiracy that could shake the very foundation of The Church.

The wording of this brief come-on hints about the Cardinal’s goals: to take responsibility, to break through secrets from the past, to battle a world-shaking conspiracy.

Writing a blurb before starting to draft my short story often helps guide me to clarity of character goals. Following are several of my blurbs appearing in my 2024 collection of stories and novellas. In parentheses I’ve included the theme for each—that is, the authorial goal driving the message—with sub-points giving examples of character macro- and micro-goals:

• “The Curious Tourist” (His Word, a never-changing standard, is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.): Terra Célèste, visiting mystical Montpellier in the South of France on a subconscious quest for more than store-bought souvenirs, bunks in the attic of wise and aged mapmaker Great-Uncle Elroy, who warns her against straying from the safe and true path.
  • Terra Célèste’s desire to tour the “real” Montpellier (macro) leads her to the door of an antique shop specializing in the occult (micro), from which she bolts (micro) as she rejects evil (macro).

• “Wet” (Trinity is God as one in essence and three in persons.): Drowning in trauma and pursued by pain-soaked memories, Beth has bolted from the west-coast island home of her childhood for the drought-ridden Canadian prairies, returning home now to face her sorrows, responsibilities, and long-lost joys.
  • Beth’s immersion into a farmhand identity (macro) has her building a barbwire fence (micro), exposing her to a prairie storm (micro) that makes her face her identity (macro).

• “Clanging Symbols” (Symbolism without substance leads nowhere.):Doran, an American tutor in 1970s’ Japan, disenchanted with love and the Christian faith he once embraced, plunges into Kyoto’s pantheistic culture.
  • Doran, rejecting the cross of Christ in favour of Eastern thought (macro), finds himself praying at a Shinto shrine (micro), exposing him to a false “deity” (micro) that eventually proves to be empty (macro).

• “Reconstituted” (Resurrection is the ultimate answer for our resistance to getting old.): Aging ex-pat Dolores tours a Mexican mummy museum to face the fear that drove her from family and the grace that calls her back.
  • Dolores, hating her wrinkles (macro), compares her aging to corpses (micro) and to the dewy youth of her granddaughter (micro), who also exudes a spiritual life (macro).

A Few General Tips

• Do brainstorm imaginative character goals (possibly using the 101 fun ideas from last article). You might employ the “SMART” framework popularized by the business-management community to ensure your character goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound.
• Don’t get too many story goals going at once. Even longer pieces and novels must be boiled down to the minimum in your mind so that your direction is clear.
• Do allow character goals to formulate the plot, conflict, climax, and resolution.
• Don’t force your characters to do or be what doesn’t suit the story—even if you’ve set up goals for them. Allow yourself to rewrite goals as your story unfolds, but do this within reason, as changing too much in the midst of the tale can leave you (as it has me) rewriting large chunks of earlier story segments.
• Do resist the impulse to clump all resolutions at the end of the story. Instead, with the macro-goal unfulfilled but ever in mind, allow the character’s micro-goal actions during the course of each scene to produce a change in the next scene’s micro-goal. Nurture the most conflict-producing problems and character goals scene by scene to heighten tension until the story climaxes, and only then resolve the macro-goal.

FICTION: LITERARY OR GENRE?

Back in 2010, when my newly acquired agent asked for the genre of my debut novel (The Third Grace), I identified it as literary fiction. He immediately corrected me: “No, no. We’ll call it contemporary women’s fiction. No one today reads literary fiction.”

I almost gasped. Was it true? My own library was full of literary titles, my writing brain of literary characters and themes:

• Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights with Heathcliff’s smouldering passions teaching me about the human condition and societal influences (the author’s one and only novel);

• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter exposing Hester Prynne’s shame inside the punitive culture of the New England colony (imbued with Christian and religious themes);

• C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia with Aslan pointing to a transcendent world beyond our physical realm (a fantastical series heavy on symbolism).

I loved literary fiction’s motifs, tropes, and allegories conveying abstract ideas—the physical story hinting at the metaphysical meaning demanding active reader learning rather than passive entertainment. But at the point of publishing my first novel, I didn’t yet understand the difference between genre and literary—the two fiction classifications known to the world of general publishing.

Of course, what my agent really meant when saying no one reads literary fiction nowadays was that literary fiction doesn’t sell widely and that publishers must, above all, sign multi-title authors who will produce many books—and genre fiction sells more than literary.

This distinction between genre and literary fiction came into being only in the twentieth century, when publishers began to use labels for mass marketing. Publishing houses were seeking the next bestseller, so they developed main categories (securing genre authors with huge advances):

• Romance (e.g., Nora Roberts)
• Mystery and Crime (e.g., John Grisham)
• Science Fiction and Fantasy (e.g., Ray Bradbury)
• Horror and Thrillers (e.g., Stephen King)
• Westerns (e.g., Louis L’Amour)
• Historical (e.g., Ken Follet)
• Young Adult (e.g., Judy Blume)

What actually is genre fiction?

In broad terms, genre fiction is popular narrative focusing on entertainment and written within the narrow specifications of each category. For example, in general:

• Horror intends to arouse reader dread, terror, even repulsion;
• Mystery/crime centers on the investigation and resolution of criminal acts;
• Romance is about love relationships with happily-ever-after endings.

What is literary fiction?

In contrast, literary fiction is a bit fuzzier to define, aspiring to be artistic; it emphasizes meaning through character, theme, and story style over plot action and prescribed outcomes. In literary fiction, you might find:

• Ambiguous endings not always neat and clear;
• Plot structure not necessarily following rules of particular genres;
• Exploration (sometimes unresolved) of ideas, philosophies, aesthetics, conceptions, and social/political commentary.

Can’t genre and literary fiction overlap?

Of course, the rigidity of black-and-white genre rules versus the open-ended nature of literary fiction blends in all manner of grey tones. We see this fusion when we consider literary titles employing subgenres, or genre stories adopting literary approaches. Take, for example, these blockbuster genre novels of great literary value:

• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is considered historical fiction, its subgenres including suspense and survival. On a literary level, Doerr’s lyrical style encompasses sensuous detail and employs a nonlinear plot structure, ethical and political critique, anti-war themes—and a blighted romance.

• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is a murder mystery with a coming-of-age subgenre, yet Owens’s literary style poses two timelines through atmospheric setting, symbolism around wild animal behaviour, and themes of justice and loneliness.

• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien is wildly popular and one of the best-selling books of all time. It’s what I would call literary fiction but is known as a classic of the fantasy genre. LOTR is another hybrid of literary and genre fiction.

A third classification

In addition to the two broad classes of literary and genre fiction (with, of course, subgenres of religion or spirituality in many flavors), traditional American publishing today distinguishes between the streams of ABA (American Booksellers Association) and CBA (Christian Booksellers Association). “Christian” writing, then, is a third entity, viewed by the publishing world as distinct from both literary and genre fiction recognized by the general market. Writers are forced to decide whether they are targeting secular or Christian readers, as most ABA agents and houses don’t accept explicit faith messages, and most in the CBA won’t abide the grittier aspects of violence or sexuality.

A true crossover between the world and the church doesn’t seem feasible unless publishing independently—outside of both CBA and ABA. I might wish that the distinctions would ease, as I attempt to write literary fiction with genre attributes available to the secular world but understood at a spiritual level. However, I suspect even more polarization is developing in our constantly changing culture.

Literary Fiction with a Theological Twist

As a reader, I crave the entertainment value of popular genre fiction, and yet I love to delve into deeper themes accessible through literary fiction. I’m saddened over the hollow feeling I’m left with by a strictly genre novel I can’t analyze for spiritual meaning, while I’m also overwhelmed by impenetrable ramblings when faced with an artsy literary read that doesn’t grip me through at least one or two genre conventions.

As a writer who is also a Christian, I don’t pen what many would call “Christian fiction”—I don’t swim too easily in that genre stream. At the same time, my own love of Scripture demands fictional expression. To top it off, most of my stories don’t follow rules of the main genres (for example, some of my romantic characters have their hearts broken and some of my endings are unresolved); instead, I try to use symbolism pointing readers back to the Bible.

(For more of my thoughts on this subject, check out my preceding post, “Read It Anew,” found below on this website.)