Want and Need

Hey everyone! Some self-serving client promotion and updates first, before I jump into today’s blog:

Jeffe Kennedy

JEFFE KENNEDY has been with our agency throughout her career, and I’m thrilled to say that as of late June she is now my client. Jeffe writes scintillating erotica and gorgeously-wrought fantasy. Her romantic fantasy THE MARK OF THE TALA, first in the TWELVE KINGDOMS series for Kensington, was recently named RT’s book of the month for June. It’s fabulous, and you should read it! A sequel, THE TEARS OF THE ROSE, is forthcoming in December.

Jake Jaxson

My other big acquisition of late is JAKE JAXSON, filmmaker and owner of the COCKYBOYS adult film studio (link NSFW!). Jake and I are working on — among other projects — an M/M erotic romance proposal that I think is going to blow that market wide open. CockyBoys is an artistic, high-concept brand with a huge built-in fanbase of men and women alike, but up until now their forays into publishing have been limited to photo books. I’m excited to help Jake and his partners bring their vision from the screen to the page.

All right, enough bragging about my wonderful clients! On to the meat of today’s blog post.

In a Twitter conversation with one of my colleagues recently, I mentioned that I felt the best queries identify both the Want and the Need of the protagonist. This is an assertion that could be potentially confusing, so I wanted to tease out what exactly I meant by that.

On a basic level, in the real world, the difference between Want and Need is simple: one is a desire, and the other is essential to survival. I Need food to live. I Want Chinese food, specifically, because I think it’s tasty. But I could live on gruel if I had to. I don’t need Chinese food, even if it feels to me like I do.

When talking about narrative and fictional characters, though, the Want/Need divide becomes slightly more complicated:

A character’s Want is their heart’s desire.
A character’s Need is what they actually must have or do to achieve personal fulfillment.

For the most heightened conflict, the character’s Want and Need should be diametrically opposed.

Often, in a traditional coming-of-age story, this has to do with accepting or rejecting the call to heroism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Wants to be a normal person just like anyone else and leave the supernatural world well enough alone, but she Needs to accept her destiny as the chosen one and fight lots of guys with pointy teeth, because otherwise she’ll hate herself and her loved ones will suffer and die. Harry Potter is the same deal.

A happy, triumphant ending (like the endings of Buffy or Harry Potter, for the most part) generally transpires when the character gets what she Needs rather than what she Wants, and realizes that the Need was what she should have been trying to achieve all along.

Tragic endings, on the other hand, usually involve the character getting what they Wanted and not what they Needed. Greek tragedy is full of this premise, and you can see that sort of ending in stories all the way to the present: Walter White of Breaking Bad achieves his ultimate desire of making a mark in the world of science as the meth dealer Heisenberg, but in the process he destroys his family, who should have been his priority all along. It’s a bummer of an ending, at least for everyone but Walt.

Now let’s get really complicated!

Every character has one core Want and Need, but they have smaller Want/Need dichotomies within that narrative.

In A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen Wants to reclaim her family’s throne and conquer all of Westeros. She Needs to realize that Westeros isn’t hers by rights any more than it’s anyone else’s, and sheer power on the battlefield (in her case three fire-breathing dragons) does not make you the most fit ruler.

Within that larger arc, however, she also Wants to conquer the slaver cities of Ghiscar in Essos and forcibly free all the people enslaved within them. She Needs to understand that what she views as an obvious moral crusade is actually an imperialist project fraught with complication, and that people need to have sovereignty over themselves and their own land. (Probably. The arc isn’t done yet, but the latest book was pretty severely anti-Dany on this score.)

This Want/Need is a subplot in the larger story of Daenerys’s overarching Want/Need, and underlines that larger story — the Need is really the same in both cases: Daenerys must learn that she does not always know best, and is not a righteous queen by automatic fact of birthright.

Every character in your story should have a core Want and Need that you can identify. It’s what foments conflict and is probably the most important factor in making a character really pop.