I’m still publishing older prompts on the website, which Substack assures me is a waste of time. Would people like to get these prompts in their inboxes—on Sunday, say—or would that make Good Ideas feel like spam? Let me know in the comments or email writingisagoodidea@substack.com.
Greetings, writers—
Elsewhere on Good Ideas, I quoted Kurt Vonnegut’s famous line about the importance of making your character want something. Thousands of teachers, writers, and book critics have offered similar directives1, including yours truly. But taking this advice is something I sometimes struggle with, so I was gratified to see Aimee Bender talking about the problem in an essay on character motivation.
Books about writing, she says, “often tell you that you should know what your characters want… For many writers, it’s probably a very useful comment, but I find it trips me up, because I don’t always know what a character wants. I know some things about the character, but to know what he or she wants feels like the final answer, why I’m writing in the first place.”
Great! So it’s totally okay to not know a lot of stuff and to let your writing be an act of discovery, which was what I was saying in this very space two weeks ago… right before I said that you also probably needed an outline.
In other words, writing has many rules, most of which get broken at one point or another, and there are a million ways of doing it and not one of them will always work. Writing is an act of creativity and drudgery, an experience of self-aggrandizement and probably self-loathing, and a way of escaping yourself at the same time it is also a way of digging deeper in.
If you read the full Vonnegut quote, you’ll see that he’s actually encouraging writers to make their characters want something “right away,” even if it’s something really very small. This essentially insignificant desire—he suggests a character wanting a glass of water—creates a moment of narrative tension at the beginning, which is a fine way to open a story.
Once we’ve done that, we can bang on through the rest of our draft, trying to figure out what our character’s great existential desire is.
But Bender suggests that when you’re beginning a story, you ought to “trust what you don’t understand” by picking an action that you can’t actually explain:
Often writing about something that you don’t fully get – what it’s about or what’s in it — is actually very useful because it takes you away from talking about theme or talking about abstractions. If you don’t know what something is about, you’re probably going to be very concrete in your exploration about it.
Being concrete is pretty much always better than being abstract in storytelling, so again, you’re off to a good start.
Today, if it seems useful to you, write for five or ten minutes—so quickly that you’re almost not even thinking about it—what your character wants, whether it be big or small, tangible or intangible.
Then, with similar speed, take Bender’s suggestion and write a bunch of weird things your character might do.
Now stop and find something (or somethings) surprising and compelling in your lists, and build a scene around it/them.
What does your character want, and how do they try to get it/fail to get it/get it/decide they don’t want it after all?
and/or
What strange thing did they do, and why did they do it, and what were the consequences?
Again, this character can always be you. (Though what fictional character is not you in some way? As Flaubert says, in a quote possibly even more famous than Vonnegut’s, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”)
Happy writing—
Emily
P.S. This prompt complements Prompt #016, which didn’t go out via email. It asks not what your character wants, but what he/she already has.
A very, very small sampling:
“Make your main character want something. Writers tend to be introverted observers who equate reflection with insight and depth, yet a fictional character who does nothing but witness and contemplate is at best annoying and at worst, dull. There’s a reason why Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby while Gatsby himself is the protagonist. Desire is the engine that drives both life and narrative.” —Laura Miller, book critic
“Most stories these days lack structure. To avoid this, the protagonist must WANT SOMETHING. It’s easier if it’s tangible – the sparkling new office and promotion, the missing child, the golden chalice, but intangibles work too – a sense of worth, revenge, a sense of belonging. So work out what you protagonist wants! Once you’ve worked it out, you’re well on the way to writing a great story.” —Robert McKee, screenwriting guru
“Giving your hero a goal and having them proactively pursue that goal is the fastest way to get your reader to root for your hero and latch onto your story.” —Jessica Brody, novelist and writing educator
Edit: I took out the line about prompt #16 having a lovely poem. That's prompt #20. Sorry, folks!!