They had mistaken the story for what happens in it. But as we’ve learned, the real story is how what happens affects the protagonist, and what she does as a result.

Remember, when we’re lost in a story, we’re not passively reading about something that’s happening to someone else.

Outlining the plot before you develop your protagonist traps you on the surface of your novel – that is, in the external events that happen.

In fact, often the opposite is true, because we’re much better at teaching something that we’ve learned through experience than we are at teaching things we innately know. When we innately know how to do something, we assume it’s part of the standard operating package we’re all born with.

What is it I want my readers to walk away thinking about? What point does my story make? How do I want to change the way my reader sees the world?

The narrative voice is almost always neutral, meaning that as omniscient narrator, you’re invisible and just reporting the facts. Your characters, on the other hand, are free to express their opinion on whatever they so desire. As long as the reader knows whose head we’re in – that is, who the point-of-view character is – you rarely need a preamble at all.

In short, when we read a story, we really do slip into the protagonist’s skin, feeling what she feels, experiencing what she experiences. And what we feel is based, 100 percent, on one thing: her goal, which then defines how she evaluates everything the other characters do. If we don’t know what she wants, we have no idea how, or why, what she does helps her achieve it. As Pinker is quick to point out, without a goal, everything is meaningless.6 It.

That’s why in every scene you write, the protagonist must react in a way the reader can see and understand in the moment. This reaction must be specific, personal, and have an effect on whether the protagonist achieves her goal. What it can’t be is dispassionate objective commentary.

If you don’t know what the objective is, everything appears random.

We think in story. It’s hardwired in our brain. It’s how we make strategic sense of the otherwise overwhelming world around us.