CRAFTING CHARACTERS: HOW TO ACTIVATE YOUR CHARACTERS’ WANTS
Let’s say we decide to go the Want route with our protagonist. Please remember that it’s not enough to describe a character’s Want or to have said character (or some other) articulate the Want. Description and articulations rarely have much impact on a reader no matter how artfully done or how often you repeat it, and when rendered in these registers Wants tend to be almost instantly forgettable.
What you need to do is activate your Wants.
Some successful examples:
Luke Skywalker in Star Wars wants to attend the Academy and even though he agreed to stay another year on the farm, Luke tries to leave early (“There’s more than enough droids”), but his Uncle Owen immediately pleads, “Harvest is when I need you the most.”
Luke, in the end, gives in -- but resentfully, leaving the meal, saying he’s going to do some chores, and taking a parting shot at his uncle.
Please notice: the brief dialogue reveals that this is a conversation they’ve had before: “...thinking about our agreement, about me staying on another season” – which gives Luke’s Want historical depth in the diegesis. You’re always trying to make all elements in your story feel real, and this is an efficient way to do so.
Dana in Kindred wants to be a writer. When her future white husband asks if she’s a writer she denies it at first with no small bitterness, but when Kevin reveals that he too is a writer and has just sold his latest book, Dana stares at him "with a terrible mixture of envy and frustration."
Dana’s struggle to write, in the aftermath of her plantation visitations, despite her lack of success, runs through the book -- but what sells it is this moment when Kevin surprises her with a proposal:
“How would you feel about getting married?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. “You want to marry me?”
“Yeah, don’t you want to marry me?” He grinned. “I’d let you type all my manuscripts.”
I was drying our dinner dishes just then, and I threw the dish towel at him. He really had asked me to do some typing for him three times. I’d done it the first time, grudgingly, not telling him how much I hated typing, how I did all but the final drafts of my stories in longhand. That was why I was with a blue-collar agency instead of a white-collar agency. The second time he asked, though, I told him, and I refused. He was annoyed. The third time when I refused again, he was angry. He said if I couldn’t do him a little favor when he asked, I could leave. So I went home.
When I rang his doorbell the next day after work, he looked surprised. “You came back.”
“Didn’t you want me to?”
“Well … sure. Will you type those pages for me now?”
“No.”
“Damnit, Dana …!”
I stood waiting for him to either shut the door or let me in. He let me in.
Bilbo Baggins has his Tookish Destiny-Legacy pulsing through his blood, which he follows out the door to adventure, but not before first having to defend his Destiny-Legacy to the skeptical Dwarves who hold that Bilbo “looks more like a grocer than a burglar!”
"Pardon me," (Bilbo) said, "if I have overheard words that you were saying. I don't pretend to understand what you are talking about, or your reference to burglars, but I think I am right in believing" (this is what he called being on his dignity) "that you think I am no good. I will show you. I have no signs on my door -- it was painted a week ago -- and I am quite sure you have come to the wrong house. As soon as I saw your funny faces on the door-step, I had my doubts. But treat it as the right one. Tell me what you want done, and I will try it, if I have to walk from here to the East of East and fight the wild Were-worms in the Last Desert. I had a great-great-great-grand-uncle once, Bullroarer Took, and—"
And then there’s Harry Potter who spends the entire opening chapters of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone being owl-blocked by the Dursleys.
What these examples should make patent is that one best activates Wants by dramatizing them — which is to say by writing scenes where the Want is challenged or resisted — by meaningful characters.
If Dana’s writing Want was only being challenged by Buz, a nothing character who’s only in the novel to be the mocking voice of unreason, it would not hit the same way as it does with Kevin, her husband. And Luke cares enough about his aunt and uncle to put aside his Want temporarily. (One might argue over whether the Dursleys are important characters in the Harry Potter epic, but few would deny that they are meaningful ones.)
Finally: The Want conflict with the meaningful characters should reveal something vital about our protagonist.
Dana’s writing Want is resisted by white Kevin who would prefer to see her as a typist adjunct to his own ambitions, and her willingness to stand up for herself and her art despite the dangers it poses to her relationship will be essential to her survival in the time-travel plantation scenes where writing while Black could get you killed or, on the rare occasion, get you set free (if you can forge a credible enough pass).
Luke’s Academy Want is resisted actively by his Uncle Owen (and passively by his say-nothing aunt) and while Luke would rather have it his way, he defers his Want reluctantly in order to prioritize his family. The reluctance highlights his youth, but the fact that he values family the way he does reveals a whole lot about Luke and foreshadows how the conflict that drives the entire first trilogy will end.
To break it down to a formula: Dramatize your protagonist’s Want by having them challenged by meaningful characters in a way that reveals something vital about the protagonist.
At least, that’s how it works best for me.
That’s it for now. We’ll have a lot more to say about Dramatization in future posts.
Yep, I started noticing right away in films or books when a new plot development is pending, because there's something that's being thwarted. At first, that is. The funny thing is, I've started to see that in real life happening, too, or at least to make me think: is this proposal I'm refusing now meant to come back further down the road? But then, I'll know -- as we do, as readers, too -- if that refusal was simply because the time wasn't ripe yet, or if the idea was just nonsense to begin with. But a book being a deliberate story, unlike life, you got to trust the author that they're not bringing up dead-end little twists just to pass the time...