: Re: Does it really serve a main character to give them one driving want? I often feel that we fall into a trap of believing that we must provide a driving goal for a main character at the outset.

@Holmes449

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For me, my main characters want a dozen things; but the story is about them pursuing one thing that is important to them for one reason or another. Often this is a semi-existential reason.

By "semi-" I mean she likely won't be risking her life (but maybe), but what is at risk is her normal life, at least as she thinks of it.

Just making this up on the fly, let's say one of her best friends is her brother, and he gets arrested for something and may go to jail. She has a quest, to find a way to keep her brother out of jail.

In the story, this is not the only thing she wants forever. She wants to finish her PhD in chemistry, become a medical research scientist, cure diseases. She wants to fall in love and have children.

She hopes that keeping her brother out of jail is something she can do and forget. For her, the ideal outcome is only to return her to her normal world.

But in this story for this moment in her life, keeping her brother out of jail is the only thing she really wants to do, while juggling her other somewhat demanding responsibilities.

The mechanical necessity is to give the reader a novel-length thread for the story, so the novel doesn't dissolve into just a series of short stories that themselves are not quite complete stories. In any story, there is a beginning, middle, and end, and these are defined by the introduction of a problem: It starts, it evolves, and it is solved.

I think you are taking the "wants more than anything else" too literally, as if the MC wants something more than anything else for all time. I would say the MC needs something she "wants more than anything else at this moment". My girl above is not going to intentionally risk her life, or her university position, to keep her brother out of jail. But she is going to put aside her idle entertainments, school friends, and spend all the time she can possibly afford saving her brother. She may alienate a boyfriend, or piss off her advisor by missing a paper submission deadline, etc.

The quest to free her brother may actually change her life, so she lands in a "new normal". Maybe she abandons her quest, because her brother is revealed to be guilty as hell, and not somebody she thinks should be free after all. Maybe on this quest she meets the love of her life.

She doesn't want just one thing for all time. But a story is about a singular crisis, that (for her) has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

You should certainly be showing, in the opening chapters of the book where we get to see her normal world, all the other things she wants, before the crisis rears its ugly head.

Because her normal world defines the stakes for her: If her "normal" is good, fun, and fulfilling, the crisis threatens to take that all away from her. If her "normal" is miserable and heart-breaking, then the crisis (even if it seems like it will make it even worse) is likely going to trigger an escape from that miserable normal that lets her find a new one.

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