“Start with what your main character desperately wants. If they don’t want something, they have no motivation.”
I really dislike that advice, mainly because most of the time I either have no idea what my protagonist’s deepest, most desperate wants are, or else I do know and those wants have nothing to do with the story I’m trying to tell. It’s really difficult to get an adventure story moving if the main character’s deepest desire is to spend a nice, peaceful, quiet time at home.
(It can be done, but if the main character’s deepest want is truly just for peace and quiet, all the usual goals of an adventure story – finding the black bird, putting the true king on the throne, stopping the spy ring, saving the castaways – are nothing but annoying obstacles. The character doesn’t care about achieving any of them, and if given the slightest opportunity, they’ll pawn those responsibilities off on someone else and head home for that peace and quiet. Characters who are really good at delegation can be a pain in the neck.)
What that “what does the character want” stuff is really about is “why does the character care about this?” Presumably, people care about the things they want or need, and will do what it takes to get them or make them happen.
Which is fine if the sort of story you want to write is driven by the character’s pre-existing life purpose. But characters care about a lot of different things…and most of the time, people’s actions come from motivations that are a lot simpler and more immediate than their deepest secret needs. I don’t go to the grocery store to fulfill my deep need for companionship or my drive to write stories. I go because, halfway through making dinner, I suddenly realized there was only one tortilla left in the package I thought was half full.
Sure, most stories are about things that are more interesting than a need for enough ingredients to finish making the enchiladas, but in most cases, it’s still the immediate needs of the situation that drive the action and motivate the character in the short term. The character needs someone to get information from, so he goes out to capture the head thug. The thug won’t cooperate, so the character threatens him till he talks. The character discovers the bomb is located on the far side of the city, he has 15 minutes to get there and stop it, and he has no transportation, so he steals a car.
Somewhere along the line, back at the beginning of the story, the character got involved – something got him/her to start caring about the events of the story. What got the whole thing started, though, may not have anything to do with what the character wants except on the most mundane level. “I am an FBI agent and this is my job” is a perfectly good reason for the character to care about stopping a mad bomber. So is “I am a journalist and this is a huge story.” So is “I own the business that nutcase is trying to blow up and I will lose millions of dollars if he succeeds.”
But it’s equally possible to get the character involved through a series of small things. The protagonist finds what looks like a lost handbag and turns it in at the coffee shop; seconds after she leaves, the bag explodes, and she’s tapped by security footage as the person who left the bomb. Now she has a brand new thing to care about: clearing her name so she won’t go to jail. It wasn’t her deepest desire before the story started, but it sure is by the end of Chapter Two.
Or there’s the protagonist who was just fine at the start of Chapter One, until the dragon or the invading army or the Black Plague swept in and destroyed his family, village, and livelihood. What that character wants changed drastically as a result of outside circumstances.
The truth is, you don’t have to start with what the character wants. It’s perfectly possible to start with where you, the writer, want them to end up. How many characters, at the start of the story, want desperately to become the king because they are secretly the True Heir to the throne? Aragorn might qualify, but most of the time, the True Heir’s royal status is a late-book revelation to everyone, including the Heir him/herself.
“Know what they want from the start” is also lousy advice for those of us who often/always write our way into our characters. I rarely know enough about my characters at the start of the manuscript to have any idea what they really want. I figure that part out as I write about them and get to know them – which makes it impossible for me to start with what they want. I tend to start from the “reasonable person” standard – namely, I put the character into the opening situation and then ask “What would a reasonable person do in this situation? Does this character do that? Huh – why not? Oh! Okay, so they do this, and now that happens…what would a reasonable person do now? Is that what they do this time? Why/why not?” and so on. It’s not as tidy or as carefully-planned sounding as “What do they want?” but so far, it’s worked pretty well for me.
You know, the classic fantasy protagonist (now a cliche) was a teenage stableboy or kitchen lackey who turned out to be The Chosen One, or the Lost Prince, etc.
If you go with the “what does he really want,” with a lot of teenage boys, the answer is, “to get laid.” Having once been a teenage boy, I sympathize, but as a writer, that really is not where I want my story to go, thank you very much. The couple of times I’ve let my teenage protagonist have that as *part* of his motivation, I promptly tormented him for most of the story, because priorities.
(Laughing, because “finding someone attractive who’s also interested in me” is fairly high on at least one of my current adolescent protagonists’ priority lists. Unfortunately for him, that will only be plot-relevant if he’s willing to prioritize that above “food” and “easily survivable temperatures” and “more food; I haven’t eaten in several hours!” and “less risk of imminent painful death”…and if he does decide to organize his priorities that way, the author will use that as an excuse to increase the plot-helpful risk of imminent death. (“Well, you *do* want to impress her, right? This won’t necessarily impress her, but it will get her attention. …yes, maybe because she’ll have to detour around your partially crushed corpse. No, that won’t be helpful to you, or to her, but I need *someone* to go do this risky task and all of the other ambulatory characters in the vicinity were too smart and cautious…”)
More generally – thank you for this post! Most of my characters are definitely not in their current messy situations due to their own desires, and solving the main problems in the story won’t get most of them closer to what they’d really like at this point (e.g., food security, warmth, and an absence of hostile/homicidal family members).
As I mentioned in my last comment, my short suit is motivation. The question I need answered is, How does one impart a strong motivation to a character who hasn’t revealed much of one?
I dislike artificially imposing needs/desires on a character; it always comes out feeling false and flat. But if my protagonist doesn’t give me what I need to tell a compelling story, what can I do?
Hmmm — when I was a new writer, I found that once I wrote a story, I could look back and figure out why the character had done everything.
Fortunately for me, my metier is the short story, and I picked up skills in the arena.
You start with whatever you start with. I’ve started with a title, an incident in the plot, a log line, a piece of magic, a desire to experiment with a writing technique, the villain’s evil plot, an observation about piracy. . . .
Though when I get to motives, negative motivations — the desire of a character to NOT do something — can be a real pain.
Brilliant. I always knew there was something wrong with the “find out what the MC wants most” approach — you’ve laid out exactly why, and unveiled the kernel of truth in that advice.
I’m also enthusiastic about the “reasonable person” standard. Too often I roll my eyes at why characters don’t take the obvious course of action, and instead do whatever is needed for the story to move along. It feels contrived, because it is contrived. I’m positively delighted when a character does the sensible thing — even if it turns out to land them in greater trouble than when they started. If they’re *not* going to do the obviously reasonable thing, it’s the writer’s responsibility to make clear why.
Rick
This, I once observed, is a big difference between writing a novel and DMing a RPG. In a novel railroading the main character so he can’t take any more reasonable choice is a good thing.
And if you remember that a hobbit’s main desires are to live a quiet life and eat big dinners …
Mad magazine (about 60 years ago) did a satire of suspense movies where the man wanted to go out and mail a letter. One line was (IIRC) “Why don’t you go to Mount Rushmore? Lots of characters in Alfred Hatchplot movies mail their letters there.”
“Characters who are really good at delegation can be a pain in the neck.”
Heh. Yeah.
The big annoying question that I keep needing answered is “Why does the protagonist feel that he has to deal with The Problem himself, rather than turning it over to the Authorities and/or Experts?”
Well… my current plot gets moving when one of the characters says to the other, “These are the disguises we can use when we go rescue [Name].”
“We?”
“I don’t see anyone else offering.”
So they do that.
I’m currently having some fun with a plot that starts with, “What does the main character think she wants?” and having her find out that no, no, that really wasn’t what she wanted at all and please somebody get her out of this!