What to Write Now: Nailing Purpose and Effect
By Donald Maass | February 5, 2025 |
[Note: This post is occasioned in part by a discussion of “what to write now” begun here in January by Rachel Toalson and David Corbett.]
Last month I suggested that any work of fiction has one of two main purposes: 1) to show us what to do, or 2) to show us who we are. I like breaking fiction down into dichotomies. It clarifies things. I stand by last month’s dichotomy, and the loose association of those purposes with two types of stories, stories of fate or stories of destiny.
Another useful dichotomy is to look at fiction as having one of two effects: to cause us to fear, or to cause us to hope. It’s a spectrum. Dark to light. Horror to healing. When we understand a story’s primary purpose and intended effect, then it is easier to shape that story to give it the desired impact.
The problem, as I suggested last month, isn’t choosing one story purpose or effect over another; rather, the problem is that in many manuscripts the writer seems not to have made a strong choice in the first place. The story’s purpose is muddy. The story’s effect is soft.
I sense this especially when in manuscripts “good” and “bad” are tacitly assumed and weakly defined. We are supposed to fear something, for example, but more for its possible evil and for its scary implications. Similarly for antagonists: Bad people are signaled as bad but less often do they actually do terrible things.
Likewise hope: Good outcomes—that for which we should yearn—are assumed and unspoken, not detailed and specific. Likewise, people. Good people often are not demonstrably good but instead are presumptively good because they are victims of bad: they are put upon, powerless or in some other way, to some degree, objects of pathos.
This hazy blending of good and bad, right and wrong, weak and strong, may feel realistic to the writer, but for the reader the result is fiction of low impact. What can help? Like I said above, it starts with understanding the primary purpose—the intent—of a given story. That intent, in turn, points to the effect that you want to have on readers.
Every writer thinks that they understand the purpose of their story, and believes that the story is having a strong effect, but I rarely find that’s true. Manuscript reading doesn’t bear that out. This month, I’d like to strengthen those understandings with a longer list of primary purposes that a given story might have, which in turn will suggests ways in which to sharpen that story’s effect.
So, here we go. These are some primary purposes that I believe that any given story might have:
- To condemn what is wrong.
- To inspire us to do right.
- To restore order.
- To upend the established order.
- To feel empathy.
- To feel disgust.
- To get us to see what we did not.
- To make us laugh at the absurd.
- To cause us to forgive what is forgivably human.
- To make peace with ourselves.
- To find higher meaning.
Which of those most strongly expresses the primary intent of your WIP? As last month, the answer “all of above” is not allowed. Choose one primary intent. Go with your gut. Choosing one primary purpose is important in counter-acting vagueness of intent and low effect, which I see in so many manuscripts.
Achieving an Effect
The step after pinning down a story’s purpose—it’s intent—is to achieve its effect. That brings us first to the two primary effects: to cause us to fear, or to cause us to hope. You might imagine that because, say, there has been a murder or, for example, that a heroine has returned to her hometown to face a troublesome past and heal, that a story’s purpose is baked in and that its effect will be automatic.
Not so. There is a deceptive security when fiction falls back on story patterns that are too familiar. The word genre today is a marketing advantage and a badge of pride, and while new twists on old formulae can be refreshing, there is also a danger of staying comfortable and safe.
What produces story power? That power is rooted not in the story itself but in the author. To find that power, it’s first necessary for you, the author, to dig deep into your own psyche and to be open to whatever is that you viscerally fear or deeply hope for. Let’s start with those feelings.
What’s your biggest fear? What’s your greatest hope or dream? Write down either one. Got it? Fine. Sorry, but that’s not enough. Throw that out. When I ask writers those questions, what I get in answer usually are generalities. The answers come from the head, and barely from the heart. They are the answers that are correct, expected and safe.
Let’s get to fear another way. When you were younger, what hurt you the most? What single episode most shaped you into the defiant or avoidant person that you are today? What real world events or actions of others in the present make you furious? Good. Now, anger comes with—and probably comes about because of—the terror of helplessness. Helplessness, in turn, occurs when agency is taken away and the very essence of who we are is crushed.
To drill down to fear, then, answer these questions: What makes you feel not only furious but helpless? Trembling with both outrage and terror? Earlier in your life, what was the single greatest moment when you felt powerless? When and where did that happen? What was the situation? Who did that to you? What is the detail from that moment that most sticks out, and which upon recall can trigger that same feeling in you even now?
Write those things down. In reading your fiction, then, what will provoke fear in us, your readers, is not the generality you offered earlier, but this. This feeling. This outrage. This helplessness. In thinking about your own experience and writing it down, does it suggest usable things for your WIP? Things that are more visceral and real? A more genuine sense of fear?
I’ll bet that it does. And, at the moment of greatest fear in the story, please use that detail that you wrote down. It will make fear real because it is what makes it real for you.
Now hope. What do you most greatly hope for? Wish for? Dream of? Write it down. Now, same thing. Throw that out. Generalities yield only weak effects. Instead, start with a different question: What single moment on what single day would be, for you, the beginning of happiness without end?
What, for you, would be the end of worry? The end of pain? The relief of acceptance? The joy of reunion? The arrival of peace? When those things happen, where are you? With whom? What are you doing? Building? Eating? Singing? Sharing? What makes you cry to think about? What feels impossible but is something to hope for anyway? What is one specific thing that will be there or that will happen on that wonderful, impossible day?
Write those things down. In reading your fiction, then, what will inspire hope in us, your readers, is not the generality you started with, but this. This feeling. This relief. This joy. Now, think about your story. Where and how does your experience of hope fit in? Who feels it? When is it least possible and most needed? What can your MC cling to—if possible, literally, as in a physical object?
And, at the moment of lowest hope in your story, let your character yearn not in general, but for one specific thing. That will give us hope because that is at the heart of your deepest hope too.
I can tell you this from reading manuscripts: There is likely no problem with your story idea or plot. There probably is nothing to “fix”. Instead, one main thing that is missing for readers is the experience of fear or of hope that you yourself have already experienced. Those feelings won’t be produced by your plot. They can only be evoked, viscerally and honestly, by you. Build from your own experience and the effect that you’re going for has a chance.
More Specific Effects
At the top of this post, I suggested eleven purposes that a story might have, which now lead us to eleven effects that you can go for. To sharpen those, let’s start with the obvious questions:
- What is the greatest wrong in the world?
- What value or virtue is most needed now?
- What force of chaos must be stopped?
- What corruption or systemic injustice needs to go?
- For whom should we feel empathy?
- Who should be exposed and taken down?
- What’s the truth or injustice which we overlook?
- What’s ironic or ridiculous in our world?
- Whom and what should we forgive?
- For what should we forgive ourselves?
- What’s the truth we all need to hear?
As before, throw away your answers to those questions. Generalities don’t help. To get down to what will actually produce the effect you want, try questions that skip past the general and zero in on your own experience:
- What is the greatest wrong you personally have ever suffered or witnessed?
- Who is someone known to you personally who greatly inspires you?
- When and what in your life has made you feel the most secure?
- What is the circumstance in your life and world that desperately needs change?
- Whose plight or misfortune (someone known to you) most upsets you?
- Who is someone (known to you) who in no way deserves what they have?
- What is something beautiful—or ugly—that others don’t see?
- In your world, what is completely ridiculous?
- What’s a failing that you wish you didn’t have?
- Over what do you beat yourself up?
- What do you wish that you understood?
The next step is to take what you know personally and adapt it for your story. Do any of the foregoing answers suggest something concrete that you can put to work in your WIP? Here are some questions to help you bring your own experience to your tale. In your story…
- …what’s the worst thing that can be done to someone?
- …what’s the most selfless thing anyone could do?
- …what’s the place of comfort and refuge?
- …what bedevils your MC about himself, herself or themselves?
- …who can suffer undeservedly?
- …whom do you want to humiliate and destroy?
- …what is a hidden beauty or avoided foulness?
- …who or what in your world makes you snort, shake your head, or roll your eyes?
- …what could be one thing of which your MC is constantly guilty?
- …what’s one thing that your MC could do or say that makes you cringe?
- …what can be a lesson hard learned, or truth resisted…until at last it is proven true?
Have you found something concrete that you can put to work in your WIP? If you are, it’s probably because what you’ve discovered applies not to any particular genre or any specific plot, but because it applies to people. That, in turn, is because it comes from you.
Conclusion
As I think you can see, when you start with you and then follow the trail of purpose to effect, the effect then grows stronger. Put differently, what produces a strong effect for readers is not your story’s plot circumstances. It’s you. Your outrage, inspirations, problems and comforts. Your heartbreaks, hopes, humiliations and laughter. Your insights, lessons, and self-knowledge.
You, you, you.
So, what is your story’s grand purpose? What is the effect it will have? The answer and the raw material that you need is right at hand. You’ve had it all along.
What is your WIP’s grand purpose, and how is its effect resulting from your own experience?
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
[coffee]
I’m so glad I got to hear you speak on this subject at RealmMakers before starting my current novel. I’ve really been able to drill into why I resonate with dragons in my fiction—A lot of it is the tension between wanting to stay within one’s microcosm (for most dragons this is the hoard), and wanting to go into the world at large (a Western dragon normally only goes outside for revenge, whereas an Eastern one has broader relationship to “the land”). I notice most people experience some form of this tension, but it seems to be one of the more defining experiences of my life. My stories, then, run off an engine of commitment and trespass—People who give their lives totally to something, and then collide hard with each other, whether they’re literal dragons or, in other cases, extremely committed people of some other species.
But I’m at a strange crossroads with my current manuscript. I have a full draft, edited multiple times, and my beta readers seem earnestly enthusiastic about it—Images from it stick in their heads, they laugh and even tear up in the right places, and the characters linger with them. The twelve years I’ve put into the craft seem to finally be paying off, and I’ve developed a Watson-style narrator readers love enough as a character (he’s this shoulder-perched, cocky and deeply anxious emerald dragon) that they accept his turns of phrase and ways of thinking—A bit of sleight of hand so that my own way of thinking as an autistic person feels more natural to them. I get to discuss and reference ideas that are very important to me without interrupting the narrative or alienating readers, thanks to the license granted by thinking through this tiny, funny character who accompanies the detective, and people so far seem to love him.
However, I know I can do better. Now I look over this manuscript and I can both see why it works to the degree it does, and the places where my narrative and grammatical structures lack what I see as true efficiency. Craft heroes of mine like Tom Wolfe and Terry Pratchett accomplish phenomenal narrative economy, and I can see that while I have good economy from paragraph to paragraph, and many intense, memorable images that now flow in what readers say is compelling story, my sentence-level economy could be better—I could make my writing run tighter, hit harder, and flow more seamlessly.
My beta readers report feeling exactly the kinds of emotions in every chapter that I intend to create, and yet I find myself wanting to accomplish more. If we have a strong sense of our inner fire, how do we form a crystalline, clear vision of what that should look like on the page? The best novelists seem to write prose that to read feels like walking through deep caves in the earth and witnessing millions of different geological formations, all in contrasting forms of beauty and formed by one prolonged, intense heat. How do we more clearly guide and measure our progress towards this kind of readiness and, eventually, mastery?
Bryan, your novel sounds amazing. I’m especially impressed with the narrator you’ve created. “A bit of sleight of hand so that my own way of thinking as an autistic person feels more natural to [readers].” Smart.
Your question is about prose itself. You make this observation: “The best novelists seem to write prose that to read feels like walking through deep caves in the earth and witnessing millions of different geological formations, all in contrasting forms of beauty and formed by one prolonged, intense heat.”
You want to do more with your prose. One way you could do that is with less words. Punchier sentences. For instance, take the long sentence that I excerpted just above. You could boil it down to something pithier. Maybe, “The best novelists lead us into deep caves. All they have to do is aim one shaft of light down into the dark.”
Something like that. Tightening is fine but try writing punchier.
Thank you, Mr. Maass. This sounds like turning my mind inside out—Akin to your advice on slowing down abstract thought and experiencing human life. I’ll base the next round of revisions on brevity.
I notice that punch usually comes from linear details expressed in noun and verb—Like how in your example, your change to my idea is inside the shaft of light itself, like a warhead. My natural tendency is to focus on spaces, connections, and atmosphere, so my thoughts can wander. I think I understand now, though, that those can all be loaded into linear structures and objects—Which is what I have to focus on. Not only in scenes built around empathetic human experiences like I saw before, but translating for linearity down to the finest possible details, because a field of connections like the one that I imagine can then rebuild itself within the reader, if I aimed right. Opening spaces by writing in flaming arrows. Is that correct?
Flaming arrows. Yes, that’s it.
Wow, this digging down to the basics is revealing and difficult. You are asking me to reveal PURPOSE in my writing. Maybe it was there all along, I think so. But maybe you have unearthed part of it that I DID NOT SEE.
You have read parts of my novel, but I doubt you would remember it. Here are my answers:
• To cause us to forgive what is forgivably human. * To cause us to fear or to cause us to hope. I viscerally feared that my child might be taken from me. * My father died when I was three… I grew to be angry about that. * I found the man in my life that I needed…I married him. Much later he got cancer. * I am an RN. I fought to help him heal. •When and what in your life has made you feel the most secure? Finding love. Supporting that love. • What’s the worst thing that can be done to someone? Taking that which they love.
Thus I wrote a novel about a kidnapping. I think I might be on the right pathway. The novel is done, but I can always rework aspects. I have written 2 other unpublished novels. This one has to get OUT THERE. Thanks, Don.
Kidnapping! Yes! That’s taking your lived experience, your fear, and heightening it to make a story. But it’s your notes that set up the impact. The death of your father. Your husband’s cancer. You didn’t use the word “helpless” in relating those things, but I felt that. And angry. And afraid.
Keep going!
Thanks, Don. In past workshops you have always responded in a positive way to this story. We’ve talked about Ethan Patz, his disappearance, a child never to be found. And I have queried…nothing. So after more editing, I’m going to go hybrid. This story has to have life, and your encouragement is part of that. Thanks so much, Beth Havey
Can I just offer a ((hug)) to anyone attempting to write through those questions for fear? Many of us have gone through trauma and need healing before we go there in our writing. My experience was trying to write the fear too soon, as a result of a writing prompt I found in a book. As a result I couldn’t write for a decade. Words are as powerful as a loaded gun. Please be careful.
But for those who are strong enough, and Don, I hope you see I’m not here to dilute the lesson, but to reinforce it. I think maybe my experience was an example of it.
I am drawn to stories of hope, no surprise. That’s what I’m working on. I do have a child in it that experiences fear, though, and her scenes I’ve been told are the most compelling. They were also the easiest to write and the biggest surprise to me. Maybe that shows I’ve healed, though her experiences aren’t mine. I do know fear.
And because of that, I know hope.
I really do appreciate this post. It brings it all together, the concepts and the practical applications. They just keep getting better and better, Don. Thank you.
I see what you’re saying about being strong enough, ready enough, to go to that place of fear. I also love this: “I do know fear. And because of that, I know hope.” Wow. I hadn’t connected those two states in that way. Hope is yearning for relief and dreaming of peace, yes, but it may also be first necessary to face one’s anger and fear. Maybe you can’t get to hope until you’ve been through fear.
That’s a great insight, not just for story but for life. Are you a psychotherapist?
No, I’m not a psychotherapist, although someone close to me is. They’re good company.
This is tremendously helpful, thank you. I thought it was interesting when, a week or two ago, the Pope called for “Hopetelling”. I had already been trying to write hope and made little headway, but I will print your list and get to work. After the election and seeing statistics on literacy, I asked someone at my local bookstore for what was popular among fifth graders. Not for the content, but to feel as a reader what that is like. Do you have any thoughts on writing substance for adults at a writing level for those with lower literacy? I know no one is clamoring for such stories, but I hope.
Loretta, there’s a type of book for young readers called “high-low”, which means high interest (exciting story) told with low vocabulary (easy to read). If you’re looking to write for kids for whom reading is a challenge, look into that?
Thank you, I took a look and that is a perfect place to start. I want to write stuff an adult with fifth grade literacy might read.
Yes, “High-low” books can be for adult learning readers too, and it’s been a problem for those publishers to find stories at that vocabulary level that are interesting to adults.
This post came at the perfect time (as I am just in the midst of plotting my next WIP). I did think “all of the above” at first, but then settled on “condemn what is wrong” as the guiding message/theme. Thank you for all the other questions/exercises to help me hone the story and protag. As always, there is a lot of work to do to bring my idea to life.
Harper, as you dig into your story–“condemn what is wrong”–dig into yourself. That’s where the fury is. And also the specifics which will make the purpose of your story not just an intention, but a visceral experience.
Thank you for asking, Donald. Looking back, the primary intent of all my novels was to find higher meaning in a world gone doolally that also evokes a sense of personal peace from exploring my deepest insights that you label: heartbreaks, hopes, humiliations, and laughter.
My latest story’s grand purpose was to use an absurd supernatural premise to reveal a gross literary crime. I hope the effect of my novel serves to inform readers that although lies abound all around us it’s never too late to put them right.
The raw material available to me was definitely close at hand through the ongoing Shakespeare authorship debate in which dedicated Oxfordians vow to posthumously restore a great writer’s literary legacy buried under the weight of corrupt 17th century Elizabethan politics.
After 400 years of lies, the ignoble perpetrators have finally been caught red handed in a changeling sleight-of-hand scandal that not only abused the pseudonym ‘William Shakespeare’ but erased the true author’s significant historical footprint by replacing the true author of the Shakespearean canon with an illiterate mercenary bit-part player in order to smooth the incoming Jacobean dynasty’s ersatz claim to the English throne.
That said, writing this manuscript for almost two years, also reignited my childhood delight of Winnie the Pooh’s ‘bear of little-brain philosophy’ delivered in true Forest Gump style that still and always cuts through the present guff that whitewashes the purpose of becoming conscious in a world beset by unconscious chaos.
I had fun writing it and grew because of it. I couldn’t recommend writing from one’s personal depths more.
Pooh and Shakespeare… who knew? Well, Eeyore knew; Piglet knew; and Owl definitely knew, so through their eyes I was able to tell the story I wanted to share in a tale of myth and whimsy interwoven with an authentic historical mystery.
Thank you, Donald, for your potent questionnaire that reminded me what I sometimes forget about the me of me… why I write in the first place.
Pooh and Shakespeare, eh? I’m not in the camp of de Vere, Nevelle, Marlow, Bacon or Emilia Lanier. (Tantalizing ideas but not enough evidence.) But who cares? You have a passion for a (to you) literary injustice, and a drive to correct received history. Excellent.
“400 years of lies.” “…a tale of myth and whimsy interwoven with an authentic historical mystery.” Sound like a wonderful story. Who knows? You might even win me over! That’s the power of, as you say, “writing from one’s personal depths.”
The possibility of wining you over is a fine challenge. I humbly accept. But someday, the accumulating academic evidence for the de Vere scandal just might, and after consulting with Winnie the Pooh as a muse, his opinion is very convincing.
Damn. Don, this is some sizzling stuff—I admire the “answer this, but toss it; you’re not going deep enough” counsel. Addressing those kinds of life layers and finding their kernel and managing to put it into your fiction: challenging but profound.
Keep your High Priest of Imagination robes spiffy. Thank you!
I have robes? Maybe a magic wand, too? Huh. While you look deep in yourself for your writing, I’ll look deep in my closet for those things!
Don, I really appreciate this post. It is in the specifics that we can touch on universal truths. As Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
My MG historical is about the abuse of power–at different levels, in the family, in school, in govt. Although children typically don’t have agency, even in their small sphere of influence, they can make a difference, whether it is to protect another weaker child, or fight back with what they do have, be it knives or pens. I’m really enjoying returning to my story. With each iteration I get to go deeper into my own memories and understand the motivations of my characters. As Ada said above, sometimes it’s hard to go to the hard places in your life, but it is also healing. Tears of sorrow turn into tears of joy.
Vijaya, the part of your comment that pleases me the most is, “…I get to go deeper into my own memories…” Yes. That’s where the purpose is found and the effect lies.
Hello, Good Sir:
I learned to explore moments of helplessness from Gill Dennes, a screenwriter (Walk the Line) who gave a “Finding the Story” workshop at the Squaw Valley writers conference. He had us do much the same exercise you’ve outlined, asking us to write out in detail our moment of greatest fear, moment of greatest shame, and then as a final prompt: “I love you …” (This made the pronouncement of love immediate and again put in the realm of helplessness–if we said it, we were helpless before the approval or rejection of the loved one; turn it around, our helplessness is in how to respond.)
I can’t overstate how valuable this exercise was. It rooted these effects in personal terms, making them felt, not just imagined or considered.
Since then I’ve expanded this into a technique using five “pain” prompts: fear, shame, guilt, betrayal, sorrow/loss/death. But also countering them with their “opposite” prompts of “promise:” courage, pride, forgiveness, trust, joy/love. The exercise is to flesh out in detail the character’s moment of greatest {fill in the prompt].
No one needs to explore all of these, choosing three often allows you to get a deep sense of the character and may point to a story arc (shme and loss to joy; pride and courage to death, etc. They also, if the resulting habits of behavior are explored, give you ways to show how the past has affected the character, rather than explain it.
My WIP focuses on empathy, specifically for inmates who are not in prison unjustifiably. So the question isn’t who can suffer unjustifiably, but who deserves a show of decency despite the justifiable nature of their suffering?
I’m hoping to show that even those guilty of terrible things remain human, and worthy of respect, forgiveness, even love. The difficulty lies in making the guilty recognizably human to the reader. And I’m pushing it so that one of the characters appears so irredeemably evil only the protagonist defends him–the road to that acceptance/defense is the trajectory of the book.
It is indeed rooted in some personal experiences, which I won’t go into (raw wound there). This post provides some excellent guiding lights for not getting lost in the muddle. Thank you.
Welcome. We have those raw wounds, don’t we. They’re valuable, the source of story power that you can’t get from plot templates, dialogues with characters, research or any other way. Love your ways of picking at the wounds, and all respect to Gill Dennes.
Great questions. If I’d been asked them before I started my wip, I’d have saved myself some rework. I started my wip almost immediately after a semi-amicable departure from a large corporation. As a consequence, my protagonist rode the same cycle of anger, frustration, feelings of betrayal, as I did. I made my peace in a year or so. I left my poor protagonist stewing for forty years before I kicked him off of top dead center and let him find his way home/make peace with himself.
Once again I’m grumpy about this because I don’t believe a story must “make a point,” nor do I write with “a point” in mind. It’s fine if you feel a need to save humanity from itself through fiction, but I write a story because the story and its characters compel my attention and want me to write about them (This is how I feel; not to be taken literally). Why should a writer always need to teach somebody something? OK, now, having groused about this, I must add that Donald’s list of questions, especially the last two lists, which seem (mostly) less philosophical and more emotional and personal, are wonderfully stimulating. These I will print up and refer to as I write and re-write my WIP. Uh, thanks, Don — I always look forward to your columns.
Perfect timing for this article, thank you, Don. After an intensive rewrite of my novel (while doing the Breakout Novel Intensive course with you, Lorin, Brenda and the others recently), I’m now in the position of needing to write a “why did I write this novel and what does it mean to me” for my editor as part of her pitch to her sales and marketing people. I was sitting here thinking and panicking a bit, but all of your questions resonate. I figure when I answer them (and thankfully I can now, strongly and clearly) I will have my piece to give her.
This has really helped to bed in what I deeply feel about the novel.
I know what I’m doing this weekend. With a strong French press of coffee at the ready, I’ll sit. Gather my strength. Dive into your questions. No toe-dipping. Straight dive.