What Your Character Wants

Have you ever tried to tell a friend about your whole day, in order, and watched their eyes start to wander around “then I had lunch”? A list of things that happened, even a true one, isn't automatically a story. “She woke up. She ate breakfast. She went to school.” is a schedule, not a plot.

So what turns a list of events into an actual story? It happens the moment a character wants something and something makes that thing hard to get. Take away the wanting, or take away the difficulty, and you're back to a schedule.

Want plus obstacle

The want itself can be tiny — finding a lost dog before dinner — or enormous — saving a kingdom. Size matters less than you'd think. What matters is the obstacle: whatever stands between the character and that want. It might be a locked door, a rival, bad weather, a rule they're not allowed to break, or even their own fear. The story is simply what the character does about it.

This gives you the single most useful question to ask before you start writing anything: what does my character want, and what's making it hard? If you can't answer both halves yet, it's worth figuring that out first — every other tool in this course, from showing instead of telling to dialogue to setting, is really just built on top of that one pair of answers.