Wants and Needs

Characters are the most important aspect of any story.

Without characters, a story is just plot. Interesting things happening to uninteresting people. Why would we care about these strangers who stumbled upon an abandoned military base only to discover that it's been locked from the outside to keep something inside? We wouldn't. We would only care about the things that are happening. And that's a plot-driven narrative, which isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't endear readers to the people in the story.

Each story needs characters that the reader will care about. They need to feel relatable, on some level, and the reader needs to become invested in their success or failure.

A good way to endear a character to the readers is to give each major character a Want and a Need.

Here's an example:

Sarah wants to go to Harvard University.

Simple enough, right?

However, Sarah needs to realize the importance of family and how loved she is even when she fails to get into Harvard.

In this example, Sarah wants to go to Harvard which is a noble enough goal, but what she needs doesn't include Harvard at all. That's the magic of Wants and Needs in fiction. It simulates life. You might want to marry this person and spend your entire life with them, but what you really need is to find out how to love yourself without the interference of a partner.

Wants and Needs make a character relatable. They don't always have to be polar opposites, but they need to be different enough to force the character through a transformative experience.

In the example above, if Sarah's want was simply: Go to Harvard; and her need was simply: Go to Yale; that's not incredibly impactful, is it? She still gets to attend an Ivy League school just not the one she wanted.

The character has to transform from who they were into who they need to be. This is called a "character arc" and, without diving into it completely, the character has to fundamentally change in some way from the person they were when the story began into the person who will carry on after the story ends.

There are exceptions to the rule, but generally this is considered the most appropriate way to tell a decent story. If you are writing literature, and the whole point of the story is to show how this one character remains unchanged by the events in their life (one example that comes to mind is Jerzy Kosinski's main character Chance in Being There) then that's okay. There are always exceptions to the rule, but the exceptions do not make the rule. Especially in genre fiction, you want to write characters that are relatable and change in some way throughout the course of the story. For better or worse. It doesn't matter. The point is transformation.

Wants and Needs are a great way to get an idea of how your main character(s) should change throughout the story.

Since Sarah wants to attend Harvard, we have to place various obstacles in her way that prevent her from getting there and that guide her more directly toward her realization of the importance of family and how loved she is when she fails to get into an Ivy League school. Sounds simple, and it can be, but you don't want the obstacles to feel contrived and you certainly don't want them to be trite.

Let's imagine that Sarah is an honor roll student. She makes straight A's in all her classes and never missed a day of high school. Model student. Excellent. Why does she matter?

Well, Sarah comes from a low-income family. The importance of higher education had been hammered into her brain from the moment she started school by both her parents and her teachers. But without becoming an exceptional student, Sarah had no hopes of going to college. She worked harder than anybody else. Studied longer than anybody else. Attended all the extracurricular functions and developed a professional rapport with her teachers. She thought she did everything possible to secure her place at Harvard. But one thing that Sarah didn't quite understand was how scholarships work. She thought her guidance counselor at the high school had taken care of all this for her. She assumed that the adults in the school had her best interest at heart. What she didn't realize was that nobody really cared as much as she did about her future success.

Things happen in life that are inexplicable. You meet the perfect person at the wrong time. You don't get the dream job. You don't take chances like you should. You're scared more often than you're courageous. Most of these are in your control. Some of them are outside of your control. Life is absurd and random.

In order for your fiction to feel as real as it can (a term called "verisimilitude"), you have to inject some of the randomness of life into it. You can give it a cause or not. Entirely up to you. It could be God. It could be nothing. Whatever the case, the randomness has to occur. This might break a bit of the logic, but in life sometimes you can do everything right and still lose.

Sarah did everything right. She prioritized her education yet still fell through the cracks. It happens every day. But you can't leave her in the crack. Somehow, some way, you have to lower a ladder. In this case, her support system catches her. The same people who raised her up to the sunlit opening of the fissure are the same people who hold the net when she falls. She discovers more about her parents as they help her navigate this uncertain time. She discovers more about herself as she moves through and beyond the grief. Throughout the course of the story, she gets back out of the crack, but she doesn't come out the same person who went back in. When she stands at the top, admiring the view, she remembers who helped her out and turns around to lower her hand into the darkness.

THAT is the gist of great stories. The character has to transform throughout the narrative. The character never gets what they want, but they always get what they need and acquiring this necessary thing fundamentally changes who they are.

If it happens to us without cause and without warning, the same must occur to our characters. And once you get a well-rounded character, all you really need to do after that is make interesting things happen to them in interesting settings.