Tell Me What You Want: Uncovering Your Character’s Driving Motivation

As we dive into NaNo Prep months, many of your Wrimos may be thinking about what what will drive your plot to 50,000 words. Author Dinty W. Moore has an answer: find what your character wants, then dig even deeper. Discovering your character’s deepest desires can propel the plot of your whole novel.

There is not much time to reflect when you are trying to write an entire novel in one month, but, unless I’m mistaken, you’re allowed to think about your novel before NaNoWriMo officially launches on November 1st.

So what should you be thinking about during NaNo Prep season?

You would do well to heed the guidance of novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who once advised, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”

As simple as that seems, the urgent desire of your main character, and how that desire either corresponds or conflicts with what other characters want, is what drives every successful plot, from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Stephen King’s Misery.

So, what does your main character want?

On page one, it may just be a glass of water. Or maybe a gin and tonic, if it’s been a bad day.

But the thirst has to go deeper quickly, and the glass of water must come to represent a basic human aspiration, fear, or desire within the first few pages.

Maybe your character wants a lot of things—new shoes, a clean suit, a ride into Cedar Rapids, a job interview, a paycheck. That’s fine, but what do those desires represent? What journey is he about to take, and what obstacles are going to slow him down? I can imagine a number of plot currents that might flow underneath the story of the young man who wants new shoes and a ride into Cedar Rapids. It might be the need to battle self-doubt brought on by childhood trauma, a reaction to his father’s harsh and constant criticism, a secret dream to live a life far different than the one for which he seems destined on the family farm. Something universal. Something others have felt as well.

“If you can’t define what it is your character wants, then you likely have no real story.”

Or perhaps your novel will be fantasy-based, and what your character wants most is to kill that dragon—the big, smelly green one who shoots flames out of his mouth and scares the bejeebers out of everyone in the village. Maybe your character wants that dragon dead because her parents, grandparents, nieces, and nephews live in that village, and she hopes someday to raise her own family there. Maybe what your character really wants is a life not dictated by fear.  We all want safety, for ourselves and for our loved ones, and we all battle fears large and small, so your reader—even if she lives in a world where dragons don’t roam free—will feel the primal connection.

Big or small, frightening or inspiring, you need to identify some primal concern or desire in your book, or else the hundreds of pages you write run the risk of being just a series of events, and readers will quickly lose track of why they are reading.

If you can’t define what it is your character wants, then you likely have no real story.

So, start thinking now:

Who is at the center of your book?  What does he or she want on page one? What does he or she want that represents some deeper, more universal desire shared by human beings (and readers) everywhere?

Knowing this last element—where the character’s story and struggles will connect directly with other readers, other human beings—will allow you to write a book where every scene, every line of dialogue, each turn in every chapter, makes sense, moves the story forward, and gives the reader an emotional connection to your words and descriptions.

And that is what makes readers turn the page.

Dinty W. Moore is author of The Story Cure: A Book Doctor’s Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir and many other books. He has his work in The Georgia Review, Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Normal School, and elsewhere, and has won numerous awards for his writing, including fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. You can find Dinty at www.dintywmoore.com and on Twitter as @brevitymag.

Top image licensed under Creative Commons from Eigirdas on Flickr.