When I’m first putting my sense of a story together, there’s one question that can turn the different pieces into a whole, sometimes faster than any other choice I make. And that is: what does a character want?
(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)
I don’t mean the deep study of how the world looks through his eyes, not yet. (And not the “What’s my motivation?” acting jokes—although any cliché like that was usually washed downstream from a good idea up somewhere.) No, I mean a simple decision about what part of the story keeps that person in the action, in terms of his own history.
Think about how you come up with a concept, and what ideas come to you first. You might start with a protagonist and build the world as you start to understand her; “What kind of person would try to hide her psychic powers to live an ordinary life?” Or you might begin with a sense of the conflict (“wizards at war!”) or the cause at the root of it, or just a setting you want to draw a story out of. So many ways we can go.
But to keep those pieces from pulling apart, we want at least a basic sense of which of them got our people involved. In some stories this may be less important than how the plot escalates (such as trying to stay alive), but even as a starting point it’s a good one. So I like to look for whether the character’s here for:
Family: The earliest, maybe deepest motive we all have. When Inigo Montoya says “You killed my father, prepare to die!” or a troubled teenager tries to keep her sister from following in her footsteps, we all know how much is going on. It’s especially good for bringing in the weight of the character’s past; half the story’s subtext may be her fighting for these few people to not see her as who she used to be.
Love and Friends: If family’s bound up with the past, these can start as casual and in-the-moment as Watson’s initial curiosity about Holmes—or as life-changing as Romeo catching a glimpse of his enemies’ daughter. It might be the most versatile motive of all because that other person could be anyone, with whatever bond to the character you want to build up, and they have all their own ways of changing and pulling people in deeper.
Work: The classic, if you want the story tied to how police work or ranching operates, or at least how Certain Events are complicating those. Harry Potter starts his adventure wanting to earn his place as a wizard, and the sheer weirdness of Hogwarts fills half the pages of the books. And like Harry shows, this choice can be all about the structure that job brings, but it can also be an easy string for pulling in characters you don’t want to give a separate supporting cast to—or to show off how someone like Harry doesn’t have any good people in his life, at first.
Accident and Entropy: Sometimes a killer just thinks your hairstyle is more fascinating than the others on the street—or you win a lottery, or wake up with a disease. The other stakes usually come with their own baggage, but here we can say “It had to happen to someone”… and then build the story from how that plays off the rest of the character. That random target becomes all about whether her ordinariness (and all the unique bits it came from) will help her survive; the lottery winner finds out what he really wants in life. If you want this kind of setup, you’ll usually know it.
Whatever else the story does, the better I know a character wants the right thing, the more the whole story hangs together. The High Road starts with a family secret, but making my viewpoint character Mark a friend of the Dennards keeps him a step back from their legacy to appreciate it a bit more. It spotlights his relationship to them but told me I had to show how specific his reasons for being there were, from his suspicion of the magic he’d glimpsed to his lack of a stable family himself.
Besides choosing a type of stake, here are three other things that choice can lead to:
Often the way the character sees that goal can be as distinctive as the thing itself. If you look at the Marvel movies, Thor and Iron Man both start their arcs as superstars who think they know everything about changing the world, while the future Captain America is a weakling who dreams of making a difference any way he can. One person might have lost someone and be driven by revenge or just stumbling around with a grudge against the world, but a different spin on the same concept can give you a character trying to make amends—either to the people he’s failed or to the different ones that are all he has left.
Or, the most impressive thing about stakes may be the combination of them, and how many you cover or contrast. Harry Potter comes to Hogwarts to train, but he also has his lost family to discover, and the friends he soon makes… and even touching all those bases makes any character more complete. Or look at the symmetry between Harry and the picture we form of young Voldemort: both Hogwarts students, both from nightmarish homes, but Harry’s honest friendships (and how easily he makes them) make it easy to see how different their lives will be. Just think of a classic mystery: half the story might come out of “the real killer did it for simple greed, while the red herrings have these flashy love and cover-up-the-accident motives.” Or how many stories are about changing a character from career-chasing to love or family.
Most of all, choosing someone’s goal ought to be a signpost to what to flesh out next. “For his father” is pure cliché if it just lies there pretending to be a complete answer, without detailing what that father’s like. Other characters may never mention their parents at all, but that only works for the ones that have whole different forces driving them. And the better you are at picking which of those basics each character depends on, the sooner you can fill in what they’ll mean for the story.
Besides, the heroine’s father might turn out to be the hero’s too, if you find you’re creating the next Darth Vader…
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