If you don’t provide your protagonist with a driving deep-seated need that he believes his quest will fulfill, the things that happen will feel random; they won’t add up to anything. Without knowing what he wants, or what his issue is, “There is no there, there,” as Gertrude Stein so famously said (okay, she was talking about Oakland, California, but still). Without it, there’s no yardstick by which to measure your pilgrim’s progress, no context to give it meaning.
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