Free Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors by Brandilyn Collins Page B

positive outcome for the protagonist. The next day Kino and Juana walk back into town, carrying their dead infant. Their eyes are glazed. They speak to no one. They drag themselves through town and to the ocean. There Kino pulls the pearl from his pocket and throws it back into the sea.
     
     
    Using The Four Ds
     
    Once you’ve determined the Four Ds of your novel (or perhaps Three Ds, if you don’t include a Devastation), you’ll know your story’s key events, and creating individual scenes from one D to the next will be far easier. Your character will have a clear super-objective or Desire that pulls him through the story toward its answering end. Each scene, then, will be a logical step as he pursues that Desire and meets opposition that pushes him off course.
    If you’re a plotter you’re likely to figure out the Four Ds before you start writing, plus many of the scenes that connect them. If you’re a pantser you won’t. Still, as I’ve noted, you should definitely know your protagonist’s Desire. Once you know that, you’ll be better positioned to allow your character to take you into unknown territory, for you’ll have a clear sense of the character’s driving motivation.
    With the Four Ds as guidelines there’s room for all pantsers and plotters and those in the middle (where I tend to sit). You might plot just enough to discover the Four Ds as a basic outline, then allow free-form methods to work as individual scenes unfold. With this approach there is still much room for last-minute creativity, for the possible paths that lead from one D to the next are infinite.
     
     
    Action Objectives for individual scenes
     
    Once you understand the process of the Four Ds, particularly the first—determining your character’s super-objective or Desire—you can use its mini-version in writing scenes. The same basic principle applies: you must know what your character wants to accomplish. Just as your character approaches the novel in its entirety with a Desire, so she will approach each scene with an initial Action Objective—what she wants to accomplish in that scene. As the scene unfolds, conflicts will occur that make the obtaining of that objective difficult.
    Picture again the path from point A to B. The character enters the scene on a path to reach a certain goal. But obstacles—conflicts—appear in her way that she must deal with. These conflicts may come from other characters, whose own initial Action Objectives for the scene are at odds with hers. Or they may come from within herself or from nature. A new, smaller Action Objective will then arise within her as she seeks to overcome each conflict. In turn, each of these smaller objectives will prompt her to make a specific response in order to stay on the course of obtaining the initial Action Objective.
     
Action Objectives set the course for
conflict, dialogue, and choices within a scene.
     
    As the term implies, Action Objectives must be stated in the form of action rather than state-of-being verbs, for the same reasons that a character’s Desire must be. However, as Stanislavsky notes, it’s important to remember that action does not necessarily imply activity . An Action Objective can range from purely mechanical in nature—”to climb over this fence without hurting myself”—to purely psychological—”to make a decision between the two opportunities that beckon me.”
    In the same way that a character’s overall Desire sets in place the answering end to your novel, so does your character’s initial Action Objective for a scene set up the scene’s answering end. At the scene’s conclusion, your character will either achieve her initial Action Objective, draw closer to it, or be pushed further from it.
    Sometimes a scene will be so powerful that it will contain a mini-version of all Four Ds. In other words, the character will approach the scene with his Action Objective, the series of Distancing conflicts will lead him to a