CRAFTING CHARACTERS: THE IMPORTANCE OF WANTS
Previously discussed strategies for strengthening our fiction: Audience I and II; Strategic Audience; Point of Telling; Time; Short Story Formula; Narrativa; Persona; Structures.
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Let’s return to our story formula—
a short, emplaced narrative in which a sympathetic character is forced by a disruptive conflict to make a consequential choice.
—in order to focus our attention on the Sympathetic Character component.
If our overriding goal as literary artists is to write better stories always, perhaps nothing is more fundamental to that aspiration than writing characters that fire up our reader’s limbic imagination—characters that haunt, bedevil, inspire, seduce, and that, at their best, entangle themselves in our reader’s nervous system, sometimes for years and sometimes for life.
This is what I mean by sympathetic characters — or, if you wish, compelling characters.
Please note: stories usually have a range of character types — from bit players that hand over the coffee or crowd the subway, to the Othello-esque protagonists around whose interiority and agency the entire drama orbits. I’ll mostly be talking about protagonist-level characters, but hopefully our interventions will be useful across the character spectrum.
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As any writer worth their verbs will tell you: creating sympathetic characters is hard fucking work. Not only because the form is challenging — you must summon a living breathing human-level presence from scratches on a page or flashes on a screen — but also because people, in general, are pretty damn good at sussing out the difference between compelling characters and lames. Your regular person might not be able to distinguish the notes in a Colchagua pour, but when it comes to characters we’re walking Turing Tests. We might not always know why certain characters are compelling, but know it we do and respond accordingly to their absence by closing books or shutting off screens.
Sympathetic characters create belief in readers, belief that the characters and their world are real — and that’s a resource that every true story must have.
For me the easiest way to make a character sympathetic — whether said character is protagonizing a short story, a novel, a movie, or a dozen-book series – is to give them Wants and/or Drives.
Let’s start with Wants first.
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Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders.
Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can go. The Character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story. The zest and gusto of his need, and there is zest in hate as well as in love, will fire the landscape and raise the temperature of your typewriter thirty degrees.--Ray Bradbury
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away – even if it’s only a glass of water.
--Kurt Vonnegut
If you’ve ever been in a creative writing workshop or read a creative writing craft book you’ll have heard this one, in one form or another: In order to build a good character, give them something they want. It’s one of the standards of character making, nigh axiomatic.
And for good reason. Wants, when done right, humanize characters quickly, efficiently, concretely. Wants are better than any 50-page backstory. All readers / watchers can identify with a good want because we’ve all fucking wanted — we know the genre better than almost any other — it’s our foundational genre, you might say (along with surviving). Plenty of things make us human, but desiring, wanting, is foundational. We are, if we are anything, aristocrats of want.
For the writer crafting a character, want is a many splendored thing, and multidimensionally useful: