Character Wants and Needs

Characters should have both wants and needs, but it's sometimes hard to tell which is which.

Let's suppose your character is an aspiring politician. They want to be elected as a Member of Parliament. The reasons behind that want are the need - they need to have power over others to hide their own self doubt, they need to win to gain the approval of a never satisfied parent, they need to show the bullies at their secondary school that they can succeed.

Your character, in the telling of the story, might gain their want, but not satisfy their need - for example, they become an MP but realise they don't have any power, or the parent still isn't satisfied or the bullies don't care.

They might lose their want, but gain their need - for example, they lose the election but realise that they'll have more power outside formal politics/they don't need to have power over others, their parent says they're proud of them, the bullies are humbled.

In An Officer and A Gentleman (oh yes, I go for the most high brow examples) the Richard Gere character, Zach, wants to become an officer to gain the respect of others, but what he needs is to learn to become a team player and not to just look after himself. He wants to get the fastest time on the assault course because he wants to win. Towards the end of the film he tackles the assault course but when the finishing line is in sight and it is certain he's going to get the record, he stops to help a struggling team mate and they cross the finishing line together. He loses his want - the record - but gains his need (friendship, he's no longer alone), and in turn gains his other want that of truly deserving to be an officer and a gentleman. Oh, and he gets the girl...

Cue music, the factory, the hat, the uniform...

More Talking

Thinking about yesterday's post, how dialogue is fuelled by emotion, I thought you might like to try this exercise.

A: Hello. Come in.

B: Thanks. It's been a long time.

A: Would you like a cup of tea?

B: Please.

A: Milk and sugar?

B: Neither, thanks. I like it black.

Tea drinking scenes! They should really be banned, not encouraged. How dull. How mundane. How static. That said, now have a go at writing up this scene, adding all the description and emotions, but without removing or adding any other dialogue. The dialogue may not be changed at all.

Write it with this scenario in mind...A and B are twins, but they fell out some time ago. Now, B has made contact with A and asked to meet up. What A doesn't know is that B is ill and needs a new kidney. A should be the perfect match. Remember, all through this rather banal dialogue exchange there is just one thought burning through B's mind: will A donate a kidney? Write it out, and see the difference knowing the emotional situation makes.

Getting the Stakes Right

Before Madeleine Wickham became Sophie Kinsella she wrote 6 novels, one of which was A Desirable Residence. It came out in 1996, a time when people were still dealing with the property price collapse of the early 1990s, there were many redundancies and interest rates shot went to 15%.

I can remember two things about the book; firstly reading a review which went along the lines of "woman wants big house: so what?" And secondly, one of the main characters being obsessed with getting her child into a particular fee-paying school with a scholarship. Not because they needed the scholarship to afford the school, but because the woman wanted the prestige. I've never forgotten it because it seemed a seriously daft thing to want. I mean, I can see why you might want to send your child to a private school, but to obsess over getting a scholarship when you had the money?

Compare with Joanna Trollope's The Rector's Wife of about the same time. Here the main character wants her child to go to a private school because she's being bullied at the local school. The mother works in a supermarket stacking shelves to achieve her aims, despite the disapproval of the local community - and her husband. It was a huge bestseller, the one that established Joanna Trollope, and was made into a very successful television series.

Two characters wanting roughly the same thing, but the reasons why they want it couldn't be more different. One yearns to help her bullied child, the other wants the snob appeal.

Reading the book again I realise Wickham's character, Anthea, was probably given such an unattractive obsession by the writer because she was married to the hero, who was going to have an affair. I don't know this was the case, but I can see the logic: make the wife unsympathetic as justification for the straying husband. The trouble is, the stakes are so wrong and out of tune, it makes him appear a twit for putting up with her. And he's going to have the affair with the woman who wants the big house.

It's hard to feel sympathetic for the Wickham characters, but they show us writers an important lesson. The stakes have to be right - a mother's desire to help her child is fairly universal, and we approve of it. Snobbery, which if we're honest is probably equally universal, is a darn sight less sympathetic. I know which I'd rather read about.

Gladiator Rules

Rules for Heroes: 4: Want what we want

I'm very fond of the film Gladiator, both to watch and as an example of scripting. Apparently they were floundering with the script and at the last minute William Nicholson was brought in to be the script doctor. He realised that a film about a bloke chopping and hacking his way through swathes of other gladiators lacked a certain something. The character wanted to survive his ordeal, which we could understand and sympathise with, but it wasn't going to put enough bums on the seats to recover the investment in reconstructing the Colosseum in CineCitta outside Rome.

What he needed was a character want we could all really buy into. So, he added to the script the horrible murder of Maximus' wife and child. Now, while the character was still fighting for survival, he was also a father and husband after revenge.

Gladiatorial fights were specific to that culture in that period of history. A parent wanting revenge for the death of a child is universal throughout history everywhere. Hence Gladiator's amazing success across the world. We may know nothing of the Roman Empire, but we can buy into what Maximus wants.

When we're writing it's a good idea to check that what your main character wants is something that is going to chime in with what readers want. The more people can identify with the character's wants, the more people will want to read the book.

If a character wants a beautiful pair of shoes, then that's limited. But if they want a beautiful pair of shoes because they believe it will make them fit in with the in-crowd, or make the man of their dreams fall in love with them, or transform them from an ugly duckling to a swan, then these are all things that have a wider appeal. Make sure your characters want what lots of people want.

Objects of Desire

Writing about Jilly Cooper and my longing for a dog made me think about an exercise I used to do with my students from the Bristol Uni Diploma class, so here it is for the weekend.

Write about an object of desire you had as a child. It could be something tangible - in my case, a dog - it could be something more abstract, but write about something you really, really wanted. Why did you want it? Did you ever get it? What happened?

These were some of my favourite pieces when it came to reading them out and I noticed the rest of the students listened attentively. There was something so simple, so effective, so specific when we wrote about what we wanted and the frustrations or successes that came with those desires.

Shakespeare wrote: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" so when we're writing about imaginary characters, we need to be clear about what it is they want and be as specific as we can. If it's good enough for Shakespeare....