We need classic stories to remind us how good characters live. When it comes to a good story, the deeper the complexity of a character’s desire, the more dynamic they become.
All good characters want something. Name some of your favorite books and movies. Who are the characters who stir your heart? As they come to mind, ask yourself what desires pushed them through their story.
A story loses our interest when characters want too little.
Speaking on narrative, Donald Miller says, “The character has to want something. If the main character in the story doesn’t want something or if what they want is muddled, the story lacks direction and purpose.”
Any memorable story contains at least one great character who discovers, wrestles, and follows after their desires. This is the process.
As I write, the soundtrack for The Polar Express plays in the background. In the story, a young boy battles internally with the belief in the magic of Christmas. With curiosity and much doubt, he boards a train destined for the North Pole and repeatedly confronts his doubt. He wants to believe.
J.K. Rowling invited the world into a variety of characters whose competing desires create seven books of epic story. Ask a passionate Harry Potter fan for an analysis on Harry, Ron, Hermione, Dumbledore, Snape, and Voldemort and prepare for a in-depth lecture.
In one of my personal favorites, Band of Brothers, we meet Dick Winters, a man who longs to return to a simple life in America but who feels compelled to serve and lead his men as they jump out of planes and forge into Nazi occupied fields behind and beyond Normandy.
Any author who starts with a character who wants something worth wanting has the main ingredient for a great story. It is the same for our own journey. God made us to want; he made us to desire. It’s not just that we are made to desire. We are desire. To abandon or neglect desire only paves the way for us to become the Tin Man, functional yet without heart.
Our story becomes more and more worth living as we unearth healthy desire. Desire then births the road ahead: We then enter a seemingly eternal phase of wrestling within ourselves around our God-given desires and that which confronts them. In this process, and without knowing it, we start living a good story.
If you want to be a great character, start here: What do you want?
Asking once will not suffice. Try asking every day for the rest of your life.
