Need advice - having trouble with main character's goal

One possibility . . . (just a "what if?" kind of idea).

Act I - MC is a loser but then everything changes for him near the end of Act I.

Act II - MC pursues his life of hedonism. Others see he's changed for the worse, and he's damaging himself, but he's having the time of his life. His goal is to have everything he's ever wanted. More, more, more.

Turning point at the end of Act II - He finally comes to see that he's lost more than he's gained. He's lost everything that really matters.

Act III - MC tries to make amends and wants to return to being the person he was.

A couple of other comments: I might change the wife to a girlfriend he meets along the way. To me that might offer more opportunities for conflict, loss and realization. I would also consider making the ending something unexpected. This basic storyline has been done before (what hasn't?); generally the MC either loses everything in the end, or somehow manages to return to his old life poorer but wiser. I would try to come up with a new twist. If you want suggestions, let me know.

What you're struggling with is the difference between plot and theme. The conflict between what a character WANTS vs what a character NEEDS.

What he wants is .... basically a life without responsibility. (Being a child) What he NEEDS is to learn to accept responsibility. That every choice has a cost as well as a benefit. That he gets to be responsible for his choices. So your story is a kind of 'coming of age' - although it's not a chronilogical coming of age, it's a spiritual coming of age.

AlleyCat's suggested structure is a good one. You get to spend ACT 1 setting up his everyday life, how he is frustrated at achieving his desires. (What he WANTS). The big event at the end of Act 1 is the plot device that allows all his dreams to come true. (He wins some sort of magical lottery??? Whatever it is you've come up with). But this comes closer to page 25, instead of 15 as you have it now.

Then you've got all the second act to wallow in how GREAT it is to achieve these desires. The HIGH that comes from actually getting it. What a RIDE! But slowly, we see the worm in the apple. More and more problems come in. "With great power, comes great responsibility" (an age old theme) But he RESISTS accepting the responsibility... with disastrous consequences. The spiral down begins. (The descent) Until finally all is lost. (Whatever that looks like.) Only when he realizes that what he wanted, he already had deep within himself, if only he had known... that happiness comes from within, not from without - does he start the journey back. (Yeah, prolly best not to have him click his heels and say "There's no place like home")

It's a good journey. It's a sound theme - used countless times. It's a universal truth that we ALL need reinforced - so don't be concerned that its been 'done before'. YOUR charge is to find a new way to tell an old truth.

Remember - the difference between what a character WANTS vs what a character NEEDS. Usually (not always) what the character WANTS drives the plot of the story.(It sounds like your plot is first driven by him wanting to have everything, then wanting his old life back, and how to get it back) What a character NEEDS is the last act, the resolution, the denouement. (And typically it is the theme- the 'moral of the story'.)

Keep writing is my suggestion. "Don't get it right, get it written." - Just keep writing until you get to the end. Maybe you'll wind up with a total of seventy pages. Okay. You've got a story. You've got a beginning a middle and an end. You've discovered some things about the character, and even more importantly you've discovered some things about YOURSELF along the way. Bravo, well done. Take a break, take it out and look at it. NOW figure out how to flesh it out, make it fuller, richer deeper, and put the plot points and act breaks and 'beats' where they feel most organic and where they make sense.

The REWRITE will make it happen.

Good luck.

Don't quit. Finish the story. You'll be surprised at what you find out.

Some fantastic advice, by God!

Right away, the movie "Rockstar" popped into my brain as you were describing it. It's not the exact thing of course, but the story points pretty much follow the above. Ya' might check out that script, or watch the film just to see how they dealt with it.

Marky Mark and Jennifer Anniston together in Act I. He becomes a rock star and gets all wild (as we all would). Jenn tells him to go pound sand. But the way the writer treated the ending might be helpful for you. Don't want to ruin the story for you, but suffice it to say, there was not clicking of heels.

I can't add much to the excellent plotting advice. But I WOULD like to caution you about protecting your MC from becoming a first class prick in the grass. If we hate him. I mean, if he has no redeemable traits, you've lost us. Missing the birth of one's baby is Gawd awful, but if we can sympathize with his plight, we might stay with the trouser snake. Or if he's dead charming, but just fallible and flawed.

Protect that man! Not that you have to make him Captain Kangaroo or Mr. Green Jeans or something. But think about Michael Corleone in The Godfather. He did unspeakably horrible things. The dude smacks his wife Kay! Why do we stay with him? Why do we love that monster?

Enjoy your ride!

writeaway said:

I realized yesterday that I have a problem with the main character's clear and specific goal.

Story starts with the main character as a loser with big dreams. Through a fluke, all his dreams come true. This happens in the first 15 minutes, because the underlying theme of the story or the moral of the story is be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

So every time something good happens, something bad comes from it. For example, he starts being desirable to women and starts sexing a ton of them, porn stars, movie stars, housewives, something he always dreamed of, then he gets some nasty diseases and an AIDS scare and his wife leaves him. He gets tons of money, but all the problems that come from that, and so on...

The problem is, I always thought his goal was to get his old life back. I realize now, that he isn't actively pursuing that goal until maybe 45-50mins into the movie. In fact, he is LOVING his life and enjoying it until he sees the light so to speak. I was thinking his goal could be to obtain his dreams, but his dreams come true in the first 15 minutes, so that can't be it. Is it possible to keep the goal of him wanting his old life back, but he doesn't even know it?

Click to expand...

Well, by your own description, all his dreams "don't" come true -- in the first fifteen minutes or really until the end.

If they really came true in the first fifteen minutes, the movie would be over in fifteen minutes.

So what this story is actually about is someone who is constantly chasing his dreams -- chasing what he *thinks* is going to make him happy, only when he gets whatever he thinks it is, it not only doesn't make him happy, it makes him worse off than he was before -- and he keeps on doing this, getting less and less happy, worse than he was, until he finally has a revelation that where he was and what he was doing to start with was actually the place where he belonged -- it was the place where he really was happiest in the first place.

That, I think is what the structure of the story is.

NMS

Ah, but are those things really his dreams? It's not exactly a twist, but you could use the same or a mirror scene of the first for the last one- a scene of something domestic that looks boring but is actually desirable compared to his other stuff.

writeaway said:

The problem is, I always thought his goal was to get his old life back. I realize now, that he isn't actively pursuing that goal until maybe 45-50mins into the movie. In fact, he is LOVING his life and enjoying it until he sees the light so to speak. I was thinking his goal could be to obtain his dreams, but his dreams come true in the first 15 minutes, so that can't be it. Is it possible to keep the goal of him wanting his old life back, but he doesn't even know it?

Click to expand...

While the advice thus far has been very good advice, I'm not sure it answers the question.

This could just be me, and its possible that I'm just not seeing it, but I think the answer to your problem doesn't lie within the structure of the script but within the character. Verbal touched on it a bit and I feel I need to expand on it.

The fact that your character doesn't actively pursue getting his old life back until 45 - 50 mins into the film, I think is a minor problem. As Verbal mentioned, we have to like the character. The fact that he is this big dreamer is something that people can relate too...Some more than others , but the fact that by pg 45-ish in the script he has to make this change in himself suggests to me that he very clearly doesn't like who he has become.

So during that time frame it's a matter of showing the audience, explaining to the audience, or any other way you want to put it exactly what this character is missing. His flaw as some would say. That would have to become your main storyline. The MC dealing with all his crap becomes secondary. My reasoning for his storyline becoming secondary is because if we keep him as the focus of the story than there is the risk of making him the character people really don't like. The one people want to see fail.

It's that weird thing people do. It's personally gratifying for someone to see somebody they absolutely hate end up (as a friend put it) "broke, shoeless, pregnant and living in a trailer park". From the sound of it, that's not what you want. So the audience has to learn to feel sorry for the character, not in the "here let me put a band-aid on that" way but in the "look what your doing to yourself" way.

Yes some of this is handled in the structure of the script but I feel the bulk of the solution is in both the Main Character and the Secondary Character (the girlfriend).

I feel that if you focus on that and keep writing then you might see that the real story isn't so much about his dreams coming true; it's more about him realizing what he needs.

The first movie that came to mind by the way was "Big" with Tom hanks and "Click" with Adam Sandler.

I think this is a good sign... Had to drive a few hundred miles over the long weekend, and your story/questions kept rattling around my head. The more I thought about it, the more I thought about "It's a Wonderful Life."

Not that it's the same story (obviously). But I thought it might be helpful to check that script/movie out for its handling of your kind of story structure.

Anyway, it wouldn't leave me alone until I posted.

Go get 'em, slugger.