A tactic…handles an object.
So you’ve identified the action your character embodies in the narrative and the objective throughout the entire story. Next you picked out a list of transitive tactics used in individual scenes that show re-actions to individual circumstances. Those tactics are also transitive, so they must be acting upon or interacting with something. What exactly are those tactics affecting moment to moment during a given scene?
After you pinpoint the overarching objective your characters care about most, you can see the dim outline of their story arc. Everything they are and do focuses on that one intention regardless of risk or damage. Maybe it’s a house they want to buy, a reputation that needs rescuing, an unmerited promotion, an impossible marriage, a shocking masterpiece, a lucrative crime…over the course of your story, all their effort, anxiety, and strategy will bend toward that target with gravitational force: a single objective that means more than anything else in that character’s world.
The trouble with abstract objectives is that they leave room for reader confusion and doubt, and that delays and complicates the pattern recognition process. Knowing what the character wants in a story doesn’t always help you navigate individual scenes.
Learn to dramatize abstractions and make them visible on the page. I’m not suggesting you need to boil subtle complexities into cartoons, but audiences want a story, not a theoretical argument. Characters cannot interact with concepts. Give your readers something they can visualize. They want to know what the hell is going on!
Scenes are always about characters negotiating spaces, things, people, and power outside of themselves. You need to know what they want in each moment as they deal with obstacles and opponents in pursuit of that big, shiny objective that drives them through the whole story.
“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
T.S. Eliot79
A tactic is a strategic re-action… to handle an object.
Happily, writers already have a word for those scene goals too, one that is both grammatically accurate and technically useful: object. An object conveys both a literal target and a simple linguistic idea: the noun that takes the action of the subject.
An object is a precise, discrete, visible goal during a scene. A canny author uses objects to make the objective visible, to create mini-MacGuffins to keep the modern reader connected to the action.
For best results, a singular objective galvanizes your character across the entire story, and you must make that objective clear and tangible in every scene via an object. The object acts as an avatar of that thematic objective. Thus, the action is what the character does throughout a story to accomplish an objective. The object is the person or thing they do it to in a scene. It creates the predicament this person needs to deal with in this moment. The objective is broken down into those objects as steps along the path of pursuit.
Every subject requires an object. You want people to pay attention, so something significant must happen, which means you need a character to do something and a target they can aim at. To do anything in a scene, a character needs an object they can be the subject for. People cannot exist in a vacuum. Stories require meaningful context, and an object provides the obstacle or opponent during a scene.
The average reader may find an abstract objective difficult to visualize and dramatize in the nitty-gritty of story events, but an object distills the objective into something specific, tangible, and interactive during each scene.
• An OBJECTIVE is the story goal, the desirable outcome pursued by the character throughout the book made specific, tangible, and interactive during each internal beat. The objective is the why of the story and the reason the story involves the character.
• An OBJECT is the scene goal, the character’s objective made specific, tangible, and interactive in an external beat. The object is the why of the scene and the reason this particular scene includes the character.
The transitive verbs of the character’s action and tactics impact the objective and objects, making the character’s internal state externally visible during a scene and making the external events internally meaningful. The readers need to witness the character interacting with the object in the scene during the moment, not off-page or offstage, but as events unfold.
The tactics align with the action, so the objects align with the objective.
The easiest way to dramatize that objective is to find concrete, interactive objects that connect directly to that objective so that an audience can track the cause and effect of the character’s actions. A spinster’s objective may be “to get married” in the abstract over the course of a story, but giving her a specific suitor to pursue or cads to rebuff creates tangible stakes and tension. Generality resists dramatization while specifics simplify the task of telling the story by aligning your efforts.
When you visit your in-laws, your objective can be to “keep the peace.” Keep is your action and peace becomes a shiny objective (story goal) for your entire visit… except that peace remains vague and slippery as a target moment to moment. What exactly does peace look like, sound like, smell like? Can you show what steps peace might require? How would an outside observer identify peace? Would anyone understand that peace if they didn’t know the family intimately?
By breaking an objective down into tangible objects, you map a course for your character as they work for what they want. Your action is to “keep the peace,” but your objects in individual scenes might be any number of specific targets: chores, debate, your kids, relatives, television, repairs, noise, a loan, the dinner, and finally the car keys so you can make your escape. Individually you keep those objects under control and thereby “keep the peace.” The overall objective of peace is built out of the mosaic of objects that comprise its keeping. Make sense?
Objects are pieces that come together to solve the puzzle of the objective. When a character encounters an obstacle which creates conflict, they calibrate their actions by choosing a tactic that targets their object.
In grammatical terms, the dramatic conflict is the “but” in the dramatic sentence: “In order to [action], [character] needs to [tactic] [object], but [conflict].”
Notice that comma in the sentence. That slight punctuated pause signals the friction facing the sentence’s subject. A character pursues an object and attains it; no pause. A character pursues an object but faces conflict—you instinctively hitch your breath to indicate the complication and escalation.
The object provides your characters with their obstacle or opponent in a scene to keep the conflict clear.
If anything, transitivity is even more critical when it comes to choosing tactics because tactics appear whenever a character’s action collides with a new object in a scene. As an example, consider the infamous abortive proposal scene in Pride and Prejudice:
• In order to preserve his feelings, Mr. Darcy must court Lizzy, but she scorns him.
• In order to preserve his composure, Mr. Darcy must denigrate Lizzy’s embarrassing family, but she rebukes his manners.
• In order to preserve his civility, Mr. Darcy must brave Lizzy’s mockery, but she attacks his reasons.
• In order to preserve his honor, Mr. Darcy must flee Lizzy’s rejection, but her words haunt him.
Darcy’s action and objective (Preserve: Honor) remain consistent, but he shifts tactics to pursue his object: Lizzy, whom he courts, denigrates, braves, and flees. None of this happens in a vacuum. What keeps him central to the story are the conflicts that compel escalating action and, therefore, updated tactics. This complexity of Austen’s famous proposal scene comes from the shifting tactics, and that level of complexity doesn’t (and shouldn’t) apply to every scene.
Obstacles and opponents provoke empathy in readers and ingenuity in characters. Nobody likes to be told “No.” Evolution hardwired humans to create “desire paths” to get where they’re going when the path doesn’t exist.
Literally, a desire path (also known as a footpath, goat track, game trail) is a crude, organic walkway created by the erosion via regular usage of the shortest or easiest distance between two points. In other words, it’s a user-created solution to a design flaw or opportunity in an environment. When kids cut across the grass or animals wear a hole through a hedge, they’re creating a desire path. They know where they need to go; it’s only the well-intentioned dummies who laid the pavement who got it wrong.80
Essentially, each scene in a story is a desire path that cuts across the lawn to reach the character’s objective, advancing one object at a time.
Objects work best when they focus the character tactics in a scene and connect clearly through a sequence of events to a character’s ultimate objective. The audience should be able to connect the dots for themselves, which creates strong emotions in the reader and satisfying closure in the scene.
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feel of being rained upon.”
E.L. Doctorow81
EXERCISE: Monkey Wrench
Objects aren’t static. By tapping their energy, you can electrify even the dullest, paint-by-numbers scene. How many ways can a single object act as an opponent or obstacle in a scene? How many different scenes can you wring from a single potent object?
1. Choose an object for a specific scene that is a step on the journey to the overall story goal (objective) for that character.
2. Make a list of all the characters in the story.
3. Decide how this object would create problems and friction for each character, noting if there are multiple possibilities for any cast members.
4. Narrow the list down to the three characters who will have the most trouble and the most types of trouble with this object.
5. Write the scene three times, each time making one of those three troubled characters the subject of the scene’s object.
• BONUS ROUND: Make a list of different functions the object can serve in as many scenes as possible by steering various escalating tactics in its direction.
Pay attention to the amount of mileage you can squeeze out of an object with transformation and revelation. What happens when you combine or split objects? How (and how long) can you keep escalating an object’s impact over the course of a story?
A tactic is…adopted by a character in order to handle an object.
Pinpointing the object in a scene also improves the focus and energy of every interaction and eliminates narrative vagueness or indecision so that your characters do something to something with consequences. In each scene, the character will pursue an object they believe will eventually lead them toward their overall objective, if they’re lucky and living in the right genre.
As scene goals, Objects represent the immediate opportunity.
Objects anchor individual beats for the reader by supplying tangible, meaningful opportunities for character progress and setback. In a sense, objects put a character through their paces on the page, forcing them to weather disasters and decisions in each stage before the finish line. The kinds of objects your characters pursue will define the stories you tell and the audiences they’ll attract.
Since the object connects to their objective, every scene will advance their part of the story. The object creates a meaningful context for the character and helps the audience engage and empathize. For best results, the object must be:82
• SPECIFIC: The object must be tangible so that the character (and your audience) knows what success or failure will look like.
• EXTERNAL: The object must appear in a measurable context so that your character (and your audience) knows how much effort and risk is required to affect it.
• DYNAMIC: The object must transform so that it presents a meaningful challenge to the characters trying to have an effect on it.
Think of each object as a problem that needs solving during the scene. What a character must deal with on the fly forces them to adapt to the world around them. For plotters, objects anchor scenes in concrete specifics, and for pantsers, an object provides a perfect springboard for improvisation. For audiences, objects help them keep track of who wants what, when, and why.
The object’s distance creates a desire path through the scene between what the character has and what the character wants. The dynamic between the subject and the object is what unleashes all that energy on the page by creating meaningful patterns and an emotional ride.
The object holds the energy of the scene like a battery. Emma Woodhouse sketches Harriet as bait for Mr. Elton; Zaphod Beeblebrox steals the Heart of Gold to track down a lost planet; Sethe’s family is devoured by Beloved, one by one; Bilbo surrenders the Ring to Gandalf unwillingly as he leaves the Shire; Valmont deflowers Cécile to punish her mother. During a scene, powerful characters situate their energy in the object.
A heroine laughing or a villain weeping doesn’t necessarily make an audience laugh or weep. By expressing the emotion, they release the emotion, providing closure for the reader and resolving the tension. One of the quickest ways to make an audience feel something is to trap the character’s feelings in an object. Situating a powerful emotion outside of the character in the object gives the reader room to experience the emotion for the character…creating closure that the story hasn’t provided.
Objects create meaningful gaps for audiences to close.
I’m reminded of a canny directorial note from Declan Donnelan: instead of saying to yourself, “What is my character doing?” ask yourself, “What is the object making my character do?”83 As long as the object is specific, external, and dynamic, the character must take clear, visible, tactical action in the scene.
The object energizes the characters and their scenes. Vague targets leave your readers unmoored, unsure what’s at stake, and why it matters. The more characters focus on themselves rather than the object, they steal energy from the scene, the more the story will sink into backstory, mood, and the second-act swamp. Witness the mopey, moody, grandstanding characterizations in hack fiction and the sleaziest TV. Generality paralyzes action as the subjects reduce themselves to objects, victims to forces beyond their control.
That doesn’t mean outrageous behavior guarantees great characters. One of the most insidious traps in characterization is the belief that energetic or violent characters are inherently fascinating. Genre fiction gives us hams and grandstanders out the hoo-hoo…the louder, tougher, and pushier the better, right? Not necessarily. Plenty of forgettable books star aggressive loudmouths that leave readers numb because they don’t merit attention.
Grandstanding and scene-stealing are just behaviors, sometimes effective as meaningful tactics but inappropriate for many characters. Caterwauling and aggression can only make readers pay attention if the character’s object is clear and the stakes manifest. Identifying the scene’s object is easy once you know:
• Objects are external, specific, active, tangible, dynamic, evolving.
• Objects are not internal, general, passive, hidden, fixed, complete.
As readers we expect both: life-changing objectives in the story that torment and inspire characters in ways we can grok, and in each scene, fascinating objects that tease and twist, incite and ignite the character’s hopes of happiness.
No pressure.
Hannibal Lecter’s action throughout his series is to savor. In The Silence of the Lambs, his overall objective is freedom in every sense of the word: freedom from restraint, stupidity, laws, scrutiny, boredom, rudeness, morals, humanity. At every moment of that book, he works like hell to savor whatever freedom he has. But in individual scenes, you cannot depict “freedom” as something specific, visible, and interactive. Trying to do so would render your characters talky, passive, and static.
Instead, we see Lecter savoring any number of objects: his books, his art, his music, his privacy, his education, his eidetic memories, Clarice’s scent and cheap shoes, her childhood traumas and tough mind, the anxiety of his captors, Chilton’s panic and posturing, Senator Martin’s rage, pain, and terror, his own brilliance, human flesh, and the game he plays against everyone in his path. By giving him different objects and character re-actions to savor, different contexts and tactics, Thomas Harris paints a fascinating portrait of a monster, with one continuous unfolding of his action and objective: to savor his freedom.
Lecter directs his tactics in each beat and each scene toward different objects, and the energy in those scenes comes from the object impacted and the resultant event. Almost like nuclear fission, the slamming together of his energy (Savor: Freedom) and the object of his attention in each scene creates a series of small explosions that change everything.
Objects are necessary because characters achieve objectives in stages and tactics require someone or something upon which to exert their force.
This is where transitive verbs become the Swiss Army knife of characterization.
• For pantsers, tactics allow you to just write forward because you know the energy and flow of a scene even if you aren’t sure exactly what will happen in any given moment until you write it.
• For plotters, tactics energize the inert rigidity of any structure, giving scenes dramatic thrust and escalation at each point.
• For so-called “plot” writers, fascinating tactics add depth and subtlety to the “thin” characterization that fooled you into thinking you don’t write character.
• For so-called “character” writers, tactical coherence and escalation will bolster the “flimsy” plotting that convinced you plot was your blind spot.
Plus, all that rigorous, vigorous language amplifies the depth, dexterity, and impact of the finished product. By aligning the characters’ actions and tactics, you allow the reader to experience them as real coherent people and also make the best use of writing time. Audiences follow a character’s desire path through each scene with their eyes on the horizon, eager for that objective. Verbalization pays mind-boggling dividends at every stage of your process.
“The hope in fiction, as Aristotle says, is to discover not the history of what happened, but principles of what is possible.”
Dr. Keith Oatley84
EXERCISE: Loaded Dice
An object acts as a container for character feelings, forcing them to re-act during scenes so that situations change and an audience can create closure. How can you? How does an object share its charge with everyone in the scene? What will the object make each of them do and why? Let’s trap scene energy in an object for your characters.
1. What’s happening and why does it matter? Choose a scene and its object and make a list of the characters participating.
2. What’s at stake and why do they care? Describe the object from each character’s point of view, highlighting its personal meaning and impact for each individual.
3. How would they access and interact with this object? For each character, identify the types of energy in the object for them and the method(s) of extraction.
4. What is each character’s desire path? Indicate where and how they start the scene and the terrain they have to cover to reach that object. Don’t make it easy, and don’t let them wimp out in their tactics.
5. For each character, explain how the object would interact with 3-5 of their tactics to produce meaningful results during each interaction. How does the object shift, irk, and provoke re-actions from everyone present?
• BONUS ROUND: Transform the object in a way that materially alters its desirability during the scene and/or severs its ultimate connection to character objectives. How does each character react to the reversal? How do the desire paths change? Who forfeits and who won’t relent? Who imagines or invents connections between the changed object and their objective?
A tactic…handles an object significant to a scene.
Whatever success looks like in a scene, it mustn’t come easy.
Audiences have zero interest in watching someone do nothing for no reason with no consequences. Identifying your character’s object gives the action of the scene somewhere to go, as the story unfolds in each instant. In a scene, the object will act as the obstacle or opponent for the other characters.
Rather than cardboard cutouts, your characters have a clear task that brings them to life and makes the stakes visible in a given moment. Keep it
• SPECIFIC: By definition, an object must exist at a single, clear point. Your characters need to be able to target the object. Generalities bore and distract people; details fascinate them. Remember, art is the business of attention. If you want your audience to pay attention, your characters must pay attention, and that means specificity is your greatest ally. Aim requires accuracy.
• EXTERNAL: Anything at which a character aims must exist at a specific distance from the character. Whether the gap between subject and object is real or imaginary, it is the source of your story stakes. Placing the object situates your story. Even emotional objectives require an object outside the character. The tension between “I want” and “I have” or “I need” and “I get” creates reasons for characters and audiences to care. People can only act in context.
• DYNAMIC: Any story-worthy object presents a challenge, otherwise the stakes are nonexistent. Because the object exists in a state of flux and motion, the character must pay attention even in difficulty and doubt. Static or inert objects make for static, inert stories. The more dynamic the object, the more energy your character can draw from it and the more dramatic the resultant story.
In The Color Purple, Shug Avery (Celebrate: Blessings) faces Celie Harris as her object at different points and re-actions. Celie initially resents Shug’s welcoming a safe home out of the limelight. Shug cheers all her lovers, broadcasts her own money and clothing, toasts strong women, extols the quiet hand of the Almighty in the world, and ultimately urges Celie’s brave escape to a new life. At each point, Celie’s action (Question) derails the outcome of Shug’s action (Celebrate) in a different way because individual objects force their tactics to keep changing.
Often a single object will suffice for several different scenes. To avoid repetition and redundancy, make sure escalation and variation transform the object in each new scene appearance so that it keeps raising the stakes and forcing your character to adapt anew. Objects don’t just sit there, they morph and poison, shift and tease, tempting bystanders and provoking re-actions.
Whenever audiences complain about “objectified” characters, what they’re criticizing is inertia. If your entire cast uses another character as an object without that character ever taking action as a subject themselves, they stop being a person and become a device. Pro tip: An easy way to guard against sexism, racism, homophobia, and most other forms of prejudice in your fiction is to subjectify traditionally objectified characters. Let people act as the subjects of their own scenes and give them their own objects to act upon.
What an object reveals is the limits of a character’s power, how far a subject is willing to go to accomplish their objective. By specifying stakes, an object situates characters within a world and a worldview. Nailing down a specific object can change an entire scene and a sequence of objects can tell an entire story.
When Edmond Dantès (Avenge: Persecution) must avenge the persecution he suffered, he faces several possible objects, each with slightly different stakes and intention charging it, using a different tactic for each. To achieve his objective, he
• escapes his Chateau d’If cell as a faux corpse. (object: cell)
• reclaims the Sprada treasure to fund his revenge. (object: treasure)
• drives Fernand to suicide by shaming his family. (object: Fernand)
• ruins Villefort by exposing his treacheries. (object: Villefort)
• produces Caderousse’s letter to get Benedetto arrested (object: letter)
• bankrupts Danglars, to prison and penury. (object: Danglars)
• frees Haydée from enslavement and weds her. (object: Haydée)
Each of these objects subtly shifts the focus on Dantès’ behavior, the targets for different tactics without altering his essential need to (Avenge: Persecution). The more abstract and internal the character’s tactic in a scene, the more specific, challenging, and external the object needs to be to serve as an appropriate scene goal.
Because the character must grapple with the object in a scene, the character must process developments and re-actions to improve their next strategy for the next object. If we consider this grammatically (Verb + Target + Progress), then in each dramatic beat, a character’s steps toward happiness would be rendered as: Tactic + Object + Response = Scene. What does the character attempt? How does the object respond to that tactic?
Frankenstein is haunted by his creature. Zaphod Beeblebrox steals the Heart of Gold to find a lost planet. Sam Spade’s entire world is rattled by that Maltese Falcon. Kizzy Waller’s family is doomed by forged papers. Catherine Moreland is galvanized by Northanger Abbey and all it insinuates. Every corpse in every mystery unleashes havoc upon the surrounding community. Matches need making. Crimes need solving. Monsters need fighting. Bombs need defusing. Banks need robbing. Villains need thwarting. Journeys end in lovers meeting.
To put it another way: The hunger is in the meat.
The audience needs something they can hang on to in the flood of incidents, a story preserver that buoys them through a scene. Arthur’s objective may be to unite England, but what does that look like? Not for nothing the folklore gives us Merlin, Excalibur, Guinevere, Camelot, a Round Table, Mordred, a Grail, and more medieval tackle as individual objects so that we grok what he’s after in the long run. Herein lies one of the great truths of myth and folklore and one of the challenges of epic storytelling: massive thematic objectives require extraordinary objects to hold attention. The more abstract the objective, the more tangible the objects need to be so that readers can follow the flow of the narrative.
As long as the object stays in motion, the character must adapt and adopt new strategies. Remember: the audience isn’t fascinated by the character changing the object, they are fascinated by the ways the object changes the character. They want the character to abandon their illusions and see the object as it truly is. The minute you stop providing objects to handle, the audience gets bored and you won’t accomplish anything but character assassination.
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
Arthur Schopenhauer85
EXERCISE: Direct Object
The power of transitivity can make abstractions concrete, internal states interactive, and memories tangible. Depending on your genre and subgenre, your characters’ internal states can manifest as external targets that are precise, visible, and interactive to keep info active.
By creating a specific object, you’re providing characters with a target for their tactics in a given scene. This prevents the dreaded exposition dump by making information active during their beats. How would you reveal…?: (Pick one of each for the character in question.)
• THOUGHTS: childhood memory, error, discovery, wit, opinion, investigation, solution
• MOMENTS: breakup, exposure, promotion, deadline, loan, abortion, fight, triumph, funeral
• CONDITIONS: addiction, wealth, illiteracy, talent, illness, scandal, insanity, probation, genius
• EMOTIONS: loneliness, joy, anxiety, calm, irritation, panic, unrequited desire, surprise
• RELATIONSHIPS: toxic family, first love, conspiracy, divorce, BFFs, affair, colleagues, distrust
The trick here is to show, not tell the reader what matters. Consider how one object can be understood in several ways by different people. Look for opportunities to transform, disguise, or unpack the object further without exposition. How many things can it make them do? How many forms can it take? How will it morph and adapt to their efforts?
• BONUS ROUND: Take a single object and make it charged and meaningful for 5 different contexts or characters in a way that tells an entire story starring them. Allow the objects to force the story into the open, demanding tactics from them and making their ultimate actions and objectives clear.