: 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.

@Caterina108

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Maybe one way to think about it is like thinking about your resume & cover letter: you are a vastly more complex person than what can fit on a few pieces of paper, but you re-arrange the order of things (education or work first? which duties/achievements to stress in the bullet points?).

Your past is still the same no matter how it's presented. But you are targeting the presentation of that experience to fulfill the needs of the potential employer.

Inigo Montoya may have also wanted to taste a really good curry and to find the love of his life and become a father himself, but in The Princess Bride - he wants revenge on the 6-fingered man, and as a subgoal of that, he wanted to become the best swordsman ever. That's the main thing we know about him, and that's ok. (In the book, there's more room for the love he had of his father and his friendship with Fezzik, but still no space for other wants.) Vizzini didn't care about Inigo's revenge-desire, just saw how it led him to become the swordsman HE wanted for his own quest.

My employer doesn't care that I want to do several podcasts, what my favorite ongoing webserial is, my love of my husband and cats, my cooking goals: they want someone who can learn new tech and write about it in the way this specific set of end-users needs it. So for THEM, I also want to learn how to use our agency's specific applications while using a keyboard&screenreader, and also write up that process. In my cover letter, I called that desire something like "refine my technical writing skills with the challenges of AT, so my work truly benefit a user community." (something like that, anyway.)

So your characters may have a bundle of needs and wants, some of which may conflict with one another, but for now, for the story, only certain ones really matter.

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