Percy’s Six Elements of Story: Create Lower-Order Goals

[This is the fourth in a series of six posts started on December 2, 2020. We’re exploring Benjamin Percy’s foundational elements of story as found in the opening of his book Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction.]

Create Lower-Order Goals

So, you have the narrative goal and a protagonist with the unwavering urgency to pursue that over-arching goal. You have laid out the obstacles that will hinder this character all along the way and create tension. The next concern is building the scenes that will form the overall story. 

Scenes can be thought of as mini-stories. Each scene moves the protagonist along in their quest. The best scenes have a goal, what Percy calls a lower-order goal, that propels that particular scene forward under the overall arc of the story. Just as the human urgency speaks to the DNA of the protagonist, these lower-order goals should as well. These goals should not only provide momentum but also develop the character, be integrated with what they say and do, and deepen the setting as well. Of course, the primary concern in this is your reader. Bring your reader along with pace and tone that creates the certainty––the certainty they will turn the page.