Newsflash: What Your Character Wants Doesn’t Matter

Writers hear a lot of talk about how characters have to want something. If they don’t want something and want it desperately, then aren’t they just going to lie there on the page? Aren’t they going to be passive and boring?

Totally. Absolutely. Categorically.

A character who wants for nothing has either:

a) already gotten everything he wants

or

b) given up on life.

Neither makes for a very dynamic character. But here’s the thing. Desire alone does not make for either a great story or a great character. Desire is itself passive.

Think about it. We all want things. I want to be able to sing like Jackie Evancho. I want to have climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. I want a fennec fox. But do you see me signing up for singing lessons, booking a ticket to Tanzania, or figuring out where on God’s green earth you even buy a fennec? These are all passive desires. I want them. But I don’t want them badly enough to actually do something about them.

In short, they are desires. But they’re not goals. In order to drive a story, your character must move beyond desire to an active goal.

I’m in the midst of reading a fantasy about a character who really, really, really wants to kill another character. But it’s a passive desire. He never does anything about it. All he does is sit around and moon about the awful things this other character did to him. And the result? It’s doing nothing to move the plot forward. The other result? When the plot’s not moving, it doesn’t take long for a desire to grow repetitious very quickly.

Take a look at your character’s desires. Is he forming them into concrete goals? Is he moving forward in pursuit of those goals? If he is, then you know your plot is moving right along with him!