Characters Need an Obsession

How do you drive a narrative forward?
The answer is easy. You don't. Your characters do. 
A writer once said his role is to torture his characters. This is essentially true in many cases. A character sitting in a room eating chocolates and watching television is not a very interesting character.
Make the roof fall in and everything changes. 
For the better.
Characters in fiction need to be obsessed. This is not the same as someone sitting in the corner and giggling to themselves in a maniacal fashion. Characters need to have an overriding goal and the closer to home the goal, the more it will mean to the character. 
If you've ever watched 24, you know what I mean. The adventures of Jack Bauer are now part of television folklore, but he spent seven seasons saving the world from one crises or another. Sometimes it was nuclear weapons. Other times the weapons were biological. 
But when did viewers feel the most tension?
It was when the crisis lay closer to home. It may have been his wife who was threatened or his daughter or Chloe O'Brien, but that's when the viewers really sat on the edge of their seat. 
Jack Bauer was an obsessed character. Most characters need to be.
Does that mean every character needs to be an action hero? Absolutely not. Would you say that Scarlet O'Hara in Gone With The Wind is obsessed? Certainly. She is consumed with her love for Rhett Butler. What about Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird? He's obsessed as well. In his case it's justice. And what about The da Vinci Code? Robert Langdon is obsessed too, but he's an obsessive seeker of the truth. 
And while your protagonist is obsessively trying to achieve their goal, the writer is repeatedly throwing obstacles in their way, making life difficult for them and generally making it impossible to achieve their obsession. 
Until the end when everything is resolved. Then the character can put their fictional feet up on their fictional table and enjoy a glass of ice cold fictional beer. 
Of course, that happens after the reader had finished the book.
That's all for today.
Keep writing!
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