What does your protagonist WANT?
Everyone wants something.
👉To fall in love.
👉To get the promotion.
👉To own a house.
👉To get revenge.
A story follows the protagonist in their quest to get this thing that they want, but really, what we read stories for is not to see whether the protagonist gets the coveted item, but to see if they grow and change along the way. We want to see how striving for this time changes them.
Recently, Mean Girls the musical was in town. I didn’t get to see it, but when my daughter asked what the story was about, what was my answer?
A new girl who wants to be accepted by the cool kids. So much so that she rejects the friendship she is offered by two people who aren’t “cool”.
The story that has us glued to the television is seeing whether she is going to learn from her behavior and apologize to those nice (albeit weird) kids or if she will choose to be a mean girl.
What your protagonist wants doesn’t have to be sophisticated or philosophical. It doesn’t have to be a grand, lofty idea. It can be ordinary, lowly or even vain. The reader, or the viewer, doesn’t really care that much. Because what they’re coming to the book to find out is how and why the protagonist changes to get that thing.
Do you know what your character(s) want?
Even if you’re a panster, you should have an inkling of what they want. And if you don’t want to be miserable in the middle of the book, you should be pretty clear about what they want from the beginning.
This is the want they have from even before the moment the story begins. It’s possible that they, the character, don’t know exactly what they want. Or that they think they do, but they’re mistaken. But it’s much easier to write a good story if you, as the writer, know.
Take a few minutes
So, what does your character want? Right from page one? Since we start our books in the middle of a protagonist’s “life” (maybe not the middle, but certainly we don’t start from the moment they are born), they already have wants and desires and needs.
If you know what they want from the very beginning of the story, the next step will be easy. The next step involves finding what your protagonist is going to have to overcome or change in order to achieve their item or goal (and they might not walk in knowing what they have to do, but, again, you should know) and what belief inside of them has been KEEPING them from making this change and ultimately getting that thing they so desperately want.