Your Characters’ Desires Drive Your Story

Whether you are writing a novel or a memoir, the most important question you must answer is, What do my characters want? You’ll begin with your primary characters–your protagonist and major antagonist–and work from there to other characters.

Little Big “Wants”

If “what they want” seems like an easy question to answer in your stories, think again. Sure, a detective in a crime story wants to catch the bad guy and close the case. The lonely widower wants to find love. The superhero wants to save the world or at least her corner of it. Those goals (aka desires aka wants) are abstract, vague, and way too big to stand alone! It’s not that they are wrong, they are just too vast for readers to get. They are also too immense for you as a writer to work with and truly understand your characters’ motivations and share that understanding with readers.

Drill Down & Make It Small & Personal

We writers must drill down and get to the nitty gritty: of our character’s personal, specific and uniquely individual, small (sometimes even mundane, sometimes teeny-tiny) desires. What if that detective, on the brink of retirement after an almost-unblemished career, wants to be able to collect his pension and sit in his barcalounger, feet up, recording the fall migration of the broad-winged hawk? But he’s always been a bit OCD (it served him well in his career) but now at the end, he cannot rest (put those feet up–and oh boy does he have painful bunions) until he finds the one missing piece of evidence that will prove the bad guy did it. And what if that bad guy is the surviving husband of the detective’s murdered niece? Now most readers are along for the ride because they understand the detective’s goal–it’s specific, it’s very personal (he’s got skin in the game), and it is small in the sense of measurable. We know what is at stake! If he succeeds, his sister’s murder will be avenged, he will finally rest easy, and justice will be served in an often-unjust world. Making goals personal is vital to grounding an arch good vs evil plot–and just as important when it comes to tightening and narrowing a character’s choices in a coming of age story or a psychological family drama.

Bundles of Wants

We humans are nothing if not a bundle of wants–whether we want to eat ice cream, get the job, save the world, we want! As readers, we may feel lukewarm about a character who only wants to save the world, crazy as that might seem. But we begin with an innate understanding of a character who wants to save her child from danger–a cyberbully, a career blunder, a breakdown.

Making Meaning

We set goals–to win our beloved’s love, to find the perfect publisher for our book, to fly to Australia and join a spiritual walkabout–and then it’s our nature to make meaning out of accomplishing our goals. When my love loves me, I will be complete. When my book is published I will prove my worth to my father, my family and the world. When I return from my walkabout in Australia I will finally know who I am! Of course it’s never that simple–not for us in our lives and not for our characters. Our protagonist’s lover returns her love but she still feels incomplete. Our hero’s book sells like hotcakes but his father still loves his older brother more! Our protagonist has to be rescued during her walkabout and she returns from Australia feeling even more lost than before.

The Lie We Want to Believe

In narrative your character never gets what she wants–not really. If she takes every action possible to make her beloved fall head over heels, she ends up jilted at the altar. Or, if she does win her beloved’s deepest affection–believing that love will complete her–she wakes up in bed with her lover beside her, and still she feels that empty space inside. She never gets what she wants because she’s invested in a false belief. If my lover loves me, I will be complete. If my lover doesn’t love me, I will despair and die. (Remember, in every story–even comedy–the stakes for the major characters are life and death.)

Just Might Get What You Need

In pursuing their goals, no holds barred, our characters race toward the result they desperately desire. They dash toward the result and the meaning they attach to that desire. When they hit the wall the story doesn’t end. Story is all about conflict–the fight to get what she/he wants. That fight is what energizes our characters, what makes them worthy of following–that fight is why we read the books we love. When stories are strong and well-told, we as readers experience the characters’ struggles and we glean their motivations by understanding the meaning they ascribe to achieving their goals. Put another way we understand the primal dilemma at the heart of their desire. (For more, read: How a Dilemma is Vital for Storytellers.) We root for them and against them, all the while glad that we don’t have to stand in their shoes. We experience them speeding toward the finish line but hitting a wall instead. That wall represents loss and the dark night of the soul and the last gasps of fight to failure. Again, the story doesn’t end at that wall. Instead the story turns from fight to surrender. To giving up. To realizing that what they wanted and believed they would gain by fighting is not to be. And this is turning point to the 3rd act.

Whatever Doesn’t Kill You…

In narrative, the death of a dream, the death of a passionately held desire, is the doorway to a new way of seeing the world. In mythic story terms the hero dies to an old way of believing only to awaken to a new way of seeing her world. She must prove to the gods that her transformation is real–and her proof is the action she takes. Only then can she receive the gift of new wisdom–she returns with the elixir. Think back to our protagonist who fought for love only to be left at the altar, which was the death of her dream that another’s love would make her worthy of love, make her whole. After the despair, the ‘death’, she awakens to the fact she is still alive and breathing. As the days pass she hauls herself out of bed, and just maybe she begins to recognize the pain in others who are lonely. As she focuses on helping others she experiences a healing of her own. She understands that she doesn’t need someone else to make her whole, to complete her, to make her worthy of love. She is already whole and she gives love to herself while she reaches out to others. That’s one way her story might end. And, hey, while she is doing good work, she just might find love in her life from a special someone. And if she does, that is icing on the cake. It’s not that she ever loses the longing for love–we humans want and want and want–but she understands her life and its meaning in a new way. Her desires have driven her from the story’s opening to its end. The same is true for a character driven to a dark and/or tragic end–although in that case, it is the reader who experiences the awakening and gains new insight.

Try This:

Relax with a pencil and pad and put your feet up and ask yourself, What do my characters want? Now make a list of everything your protagonist wants/yearns for/desires in her life–big goals, medium goals, and small goals. Write fast and don’t censor anything. Aim for specific, personal, skin-in-the-game goals. Now see which of her wants align with the story you are telling. Now make a new list for everything your primary antagonist desires–and break those desires down into the nitty gritty. And so on with all your major characters. (You may begin to notice that, at heart, all your characters share the same driving primal desire. This shared “want” is your way to thematic unity in your story. But more about that in another post.) The answers to this question–what does she/he want?–will drive your characters and they in turn will drive the story from inciting incident to midpoint to final climax!