@Cy: Cool! You should contact me (click through the about link on my blog and you’ll find contact info.) I have a friend who writes YA who’s starting a website for Asian American writers. I’ll put you in touch with him if you like, so you can check out the website when it’s done.

@Belongum: indeed! The advice I tend to give my students sounds very authoritative, but when it helps them (they tell me), it does so simply because it broke them out of the thinking that they were stuck in, and gave them permission to do something else. Sometimes I think writing is just a alternating process of impetus and permission-giving.

I think in romantic stories, like Claire pointed out, the glow of that initial blossoming can kind of keep things going for the reader. I’m not a big reader of romance as a genre, but I do read plenty of stories that feature romantic relationships, and I know I enjoy basking in the protagonist’s happiness for a bit. A recent read that comes to mind is The Time Traveler’s Wife. There’s a period of time when twenty-something Henry and twenty-something Clare meet (iirc) and things are going pretty well for them, before the tension of their struggles to have a baby are introduced, that I just ate right up.

I’m not positive other kinds of stories can get away with drawing that out, though. Luke finds out pretty quickly that there’s more for him to do after he rescues Leia. (Heh. That reminds me of the end of most worlds in Super Mario Brothers: “Thanks Mario . . . but our princess is in another castle.” AAARGH!)

@Adrian: I just got my contributor’s copy of Narrative Power from Aqueduct Press, an anthology about narrative and politics that I contributed an essay to. I’ve only just started reading it, but the first piece by Carolyn Ives Gilman talks about alternative narrative forms and alternative constructions of time and reality — alternative to the western one, that is. You can find the book here: http://aqueductpress.com/

So there’s always that moment where the character goes “phew, I’m safe, I did it” and then they realize that no, they haven’t — either because their goal is taken away from them again, or because after achieving the goal, they realize that it’s not as easy as they thought.

To look at the Matrix again, Neo’s problems with the nature of reality aren’t over once Morpheus tells him the truth and he takes the pill.

What I love most about his use of such a ‘tool’ to develop his yarn – is that it’s firmly rooted in the fact that a good plan – can change! It’s fluid – that’s the secret of a good plan. Nothings written in stone so to speak and if it was – well, it’s your plan – you can actually change it if you want, so long as you achieve the aim you were looking for – what’s the worry eh?

People get caught up very easily in this – they set themselves in a kind of mental concrete and it’s really difficult to shift once you’ve put yourself in that position.

Cheers for reminding me of this…

Regards

Ron

@Joe, that sounds really interesting and I’m trying to think of examples where that has been tried before and am drawing a blank. Can anyone think of examples?

I think the key to making such a strategy work would be to place the first attainment of the goal early enough in the story so that it ends up being just another step towards achieving the goal. Each step towards achieving the goal is followed by a bit of down time in the tension of the story. The tension doesn’t go all the way down, however, and gets ratcheted up again when the protag takes the next step.

And do think about how you can make this step important to the story. Perhaps, by achieving the goal for a moment, the protag starts to question the worthiness of that goal, thereby introducing a nice complexity to the conflict. Or perhaps the goal now becomes not just to get the thing, but also to keep it, which necessitates a change of strategy.

@Adrian: I’d like to know, too! I’ve never really investigated this, but I’ll bet there are a lot of internet resources. Maybe it’s time I did that. Anyone have helpful hints?

I have a question about something that cropped up just today when I was baking a short story idea. I was toying with the notion of having the protagonist attain her main tangible goal well before the end, only to have something snatch it away from her again. I worried, though, that in those moments when it seemed she had attained her goal, the story would sag. What do you think? Is it a bad idea to actually let a protagonist hold the goods for very long? Can I keep the momentum going by temporarily focusing on a less prominent goal?