Excavating Your Character’s Core Desire
Here’s a writing exercise that will help you enrich your main character's core desire in your novel or memoir. You may know what your character wants in general, but if you know why they want it, why it is their all-compassing desire in life, it will help you set up your book's driving force that will keep your future reader turning pages.
Take out a piece of paper or open up a new document on your laptop and start brainstorming. Don't stay on the surface; dig deep!
What does your character want, in general? You likely already know this. Let's say she wants to find true love. (Your character's desire will probably be different! Maybe he wants to earn his father's approval, maybe she wants to save her son from a rare disease, maybe she wants to get a better paying job.)
Why does she want the thing she wants? This is where it starts to get interesting. Maybe it's based on a past experience—maybe she had true love and lost it, maybe she's only experienced a lack of love, maybe her favorite films are about true love and she wants that for herself.
What does this core desire look like to your character? What does true love mean to her? Has she seen examples of it in real life or is she basing her desire on something else?
Related, what beliefs does she have about this desire and are they true, false, or a mix of both? (Note, I'm not saying you should judge your character on the page, but you, her architect, should understand the blueprint of her desire.)
What are the external forces keeping her from obtaining her desire? Maybe she's a homebody and never meets new people. Maybe she lives on a deserted island.
What are the internal forces preventing her from her desire? She might be afraid to be her true self. She might judge people too quickly, or she might not use her judgment at all.
What's at stake if your character doesn't get what she wants? Think in terms of both emotional and physical stakes. Remember: to the character, these stakes are real and serious. And your reader needs to feel that they are real and serious, too.
Finally, what is the real truth behind your character's desire? In other words what does your character need to learn in order to get what she wants? (Note, just because she learns it doesn't mean she gets what she wants.) Is she looking for love outside herself when it's actually herself she needs to learn to love? (This is pat, but you get the idea.) Is the kind of love she really wants very different from what she thought it was?
With your character striving towards the thing they want most in the world, you'll be ready to craft the pivotal moments in their journey towards getting what they want—or losing it all.
