Wants and Needs

What we want and what we need are so often very different. I’m reminded of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, often quoted at our house, in which Calvin laments that no one will pay for what they need, only what they want (what people need is often a good kick in the pants).

As I was playing with some characters in a romance novel in which a love triangle (yes, I know—I hate love triangles!), I realized that the key to figuring out who was the right guy was in the difference between the main character’s want and her need. She might want one guy, but she needed the other one. My job as a writer was to make sure that the plot demonstrates this clearly to her, and that she become a strong enough person that she doesn’t reach for what she wants, but comes to accept that what she needs matters more.

And it made me reflect on my own life. What I want is often the same, the familiar. I want ease. I want people to like me. I want good stuff to rain down on me. Because I work hard. I work really hard. So don’t I deserve some compensation.

Thinking about what I need instead makes me really uncomfortable. I don’t know what I need because I don’t know what I am going to be in the end. I am not sure I want to know. And I am intensely upset by people who go around saying that everything bad that happens to you is really what you “need” to have happen to you. I don’t believe that.

And yet, if I were to just keep doing what I want to do, I would never update any software on my computer. My kids would never do things that are unexpected and make me grow. I would never meet people who challenge my assumptions and make me realize that I have made mistakes that hurt others. I would never write stories that make me cry because I can’t write them the way that I want. I would never have conversations with the people I love in which they point out the ways in which I have failed them and am continuing to fail them by not stepping up.

What is it that Wesley says to Buttercup? Life is pain. We know we are alive because we are in pain. We know that we are alive because we are always growing and changing. We might not want that, but it is what we need. When we make our characters face what they need instead of what we want, we are affirming for our readers this truth of life. Life is pain, until we stretch and grow into the new thing that life has become. We don’t have to believe that this is what had to be, that it was destiny or that some greater being declared it thus (although we can). But life is change, and change is pain. What we need is what makes us face that change and grow to meet it. Even if we don’t want to.