One Hero, One Desire, One Sentence

Let’s walk through a story idea.

I talk about the hero and desire first because that’s how you start developing your story.

You need a hero with a desire.

A ______ wants to _______.

Keep it simple.

A young boy wants to run track.

There. Good start. What trait about the boy can complicate his desire?

A young boy with a prosthetic leg wants to run track.

He’ll need a strong will to do this, right? And how old is he anyway?

A determined high-school sophomore with a prosthetic leg wants to run track.

“Determined” is a bit redundant because it’s implied by the object of his desire.

A shy high-school sophomore with a prosthetic leg wants to run track at his new school.

I’m starting to visualize the story now. 

I can see this. He’s new. He arrives mid-year to a new high school. There’s some situation with his parents we’ll get to later. People are nice to him, maybe even too nice. He wants to prove himself. He wants to earn people’s respect, not their pity. He wants to do something for himself. Team sports aren’t his thing. 

Maybe he can do something in track and field. There are so many events. There has to be one for him.

I might change shy to some other trait now that I’m visualizing the story. If he were overcoming shyness, he’d be better off working toward giving a speech to the whole school. He’d join the Debate Club, Theater Club, or Model UN, not track. 

But his journey is really about earning self-respect. He’s running track because he wants to prove to himself that he can follow his dreams.

Ooh, I need a life dream for him now. 

What’s his life dream?

An introverted high-school sophomore with a prosthetic leg wants to run track at his new school because he wants to get a college scholarship.

I was thinking he could be withdrawn and unsociable to protect himself. He doesn’t make friends easily. Maybe he’s changed schools a couple times, and he’s holding back to protect himself emotionally. He’s polite and kind but a bit aloof and cold. He hides his dreams because he’s afraid he has no chance of achieving them. He could be introverted, self-doubting, wary, even sad. 

We’re still working on that trait. It’s important, so we’ll leave it open for now.

Okay, so maybe we up the stakes a bit. 

Let’s make him a senior. That gives him less time in high school. Having one year left of high school is a built-in deadline. 

Deadlines are good for stories. A deadline defines a time period for the events of the story, which helps us squeeze our hero into tense dramatic moments. 

This is his last year to make something happen.

But wait. 

I know that juniors focus on taking standardized tests and visiting colleges. Seniors apply to college. By the spring, which is track season, most seniors know where they’re going to college. It’s the time of senioritis. 

So the stakes feel lower at the end of high school because all the big decisions are made. 

By track season, our hero would’ve already taken the tests, applied to colleges, and been accepted.

And if he’s already been accepted to college, he’s going to feel a good amount of self-respect from that accomplishment already. He wouldn’t feel the need to compete in school sports as much. 

You can feel the dramatic pressure dropping, and that’s bad for stories.

Okay, so back to sophomore year. 

I know, from teaching sophomores, that this is a pivotal year because students start to feel pressure to give up their youthful dreams and get practical. They’re already worrying about taking standardized tests junior year and applying to colleges senior year. They’re feeling the burden of societal pressures. In the spring of sophomore year, students feel the most weight on them to perform and conform. 

Adulthood looms like a storm cloud of death.

It’s almost like sophomore year is the last year of being a kid. All of that ends junior year. So this is it. Your last shot.

An introverted high-school sophomore with a prosthetic leg wants to run track at his new school because he wants to prove to himself that he can follow his dreams.

I don’t know what his life dream is yet. I still have to think. I should also mention that I knew a student in this situation, and he’s now in college. So I could write this story as fiction inspired by my experience being this student’s teacher. 

This connection gives me a way to project myself into the story. I know high school, its students, its sports. If I did not have this connection, I might start veering the story elsewhere. But I do, and I’m inspired to keep going. 

My student competed in shot put during the track season. So I’d probably switch my hero’s event to shot put.

An introverted high-school sophomore with a prosthetic leg wants to compete in shot put at his new school because he wants to prove to himself that he can follow his dreams.

Okay, I can see the montage of pumping iron and spinning in the shot-put circle, the impact of the shot kicking up turf. 

And I can see bleachers of students and faculty cheering. I can also see our hero stumbling and hurting himself, pulling a shoulder, tripping, and feeling like maybe he should just quit because dreams are not for him.

You know it’s a decent start if you can begin to see the story and feel something.

One thing to notice about our hero’s setup desire: it’s achieved too easily.

If he wants to compete in the shot put, he can achieve that goal in the very first track meet. Then what? 

So maybe he wants to place in the top five or top three in some state meet? Or maybe he just wants to go the distance, to compete in every meet he can for the entire season? If he can compete in every meet of the season, no matter where he places, he will have proven the strength of his will.

If I were really amping up the stakes here, I might just go for it: the Olympics! Our hero wants to throw shot put in the Olympics. Whew. Exciting.

However, that goal might throw off the proportions of our high-school drama.

If the story of our hero is one about his search for self-respect, then we don’t really need the Olympics. That expands the world beyond high school, and for dramatic purposes, we need to tighten the story around our hero’s world. We need to squeeze our hero into pressurized emotional moments.

Ah, so maybe our hero’s setup desire is this: he wants to set the school record for shot put.

And it’s a fancy, private prep school with rich kids. 

And there’s another shot-put competitor who’s fighting to keep his name in the high-school record books. 

That means the hero and the antagonist are competing for the same thing.

Bingo. The story’s coming into focus.

And now we’re back to making him a senior in high school, because if he’s a sophomore, he’ll have two more years to compete. He’ll be able to try for the record as a junior and as a senior. Shoot. 

Okay, so he’s a senior, it’s his last year, but maybe he hasn’t applied to college yet? So he doesn’t have that boost of self-esteem? We’re still thinking about this.

Stories are tricky! But it’s fun. There’s always a way. It’s like a puzzle. And sometimes the solution to the puzzle is to keep it simple.

As you visualize your story, watch out for other shows and movies creeping into your mind. 

We’re tempted to write from the life we’ve seen dramatized on screen, not the life we’re dramatizing in our own imaginations. It’s easy to write from the screen. It’s harder to imagine our own stories.

Thinking about this sports story, I can’t help but see images from other sports stories popping up in my mind. You want to write a story about high-school football, but all you see in your mind is Friday Night Lights. That’s a problem. You have to fight against that world in order to visualize your world.

That’s another reason to move our hero from running track to throwing shot put. I don’t have nearly as many stock images in my head about shot put.

So this is one example, very rough, of starting with a simple fill-in-the-blank sentence (“A hero wants to do something”) and working away at it (asking questions . . . trying things out . . . thinking them over . . . imagining the world of the story . . . changing things quickly . . . keeping the world of the drama tight around the hero) until “A young boy wants to run track” develops into something like this:

An introverted high-school senior with a prosthetic leg wants to set the shot-put record at an elite prep school in North Carolina, but he has to compete against a merciless rival whose grandfather has held the shot-put record at the school for seventy years.

This is a bit bulky, though, and I don’t know what happens if our hero fails to set the record. 

What’s at stake? 

Will the rival’s family kick our hero out of the school if he continues to compete, thereby endangering his college acceptance? Ooh, that’s devious. 

It also puts the issue of the hero’s self-respect squarely at the center of the conflict.

Does our hero face a terrible choice: set the record and fail to graduate, or quit the team and graduate?

A high-school senior with a prosthetic leg wants to set the shot-put record, but he has to compete against a merciless rival threatening to get him kicked out of school.

I like the simplicity of this. It’s like The Karate Kid with a shot put. There’s more story development to go. It’s a work in progress.

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PHOTO: The stadium of the Washington Commanders, the NFL team my son works for as a pro scout