FtQ chapter on the role of desire in storytelling

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Here, from the Storytelling section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is “An engine named desire.”

During a Winter Olympics race, an American speed skater was knocked down by a competitor who fell. The American slid blades-first into the side barrier, on her back, clearly out of the race.

But even before she’d stopped slamming into the barrier she was scrambling to regain her feet. The instant she was upright, her entire focus went down the ice. The intensity in her eyes and the set of her mouth were almost palpable, even on a television screen. She took off, her desire still powerful, her determination everything, and my heart and admiration went out to her. I was rooting for her. And respecting her. And liking her.

If you can get a reader feeling that way about your character, you’re on your way to compelling storytelling. So how do you do that?

With desire.

Screenwriting guru Robert McKee says that a story’s inciting incident is an event that radically upsets the balance of forces in the character’s life. But to what end?

He goes on to say that the character must react to the event, otherwise there would be no story. But react with what?

A desire. A goal to be achieved. The high-octane fuel that gives your story power.

In McKee’s approach, the desire is for the character to put his/her life back into balance. Let’s say a character’s children have been kidnapped. Of course the character doesn’t think, “Dang, my life is out of balance. My desire is to regain my balance.” No, the desire would be a specific goal, to get his children back from the kidnappers.

Is this right, then? A desire? Another craft instruction book tells us that fiction is about trouble. And we’ve all heard the cliché: get your character up a tree and throw rocks at him until he figures out how to get down.

But the “trouble” model is a passive one. Oh, there should be trouble, but it needs to come as a result of what characters do. Because they have a desire. Because they take risks in striving to achieve their desire.

It’s this pursuit of a desire that creates the “rooting factor” that draws readers into a story, that gives them something to identify and empathize with. Just as I did that Olympic skater.

The “strive” is the thing. Without it, your sleek vehicle of a novel has no gas in its tank. One of my editing clients was a good writer. He’d done his research well, the language was good. He’d created a pleasant, likeable character. Smart. Pretty. Decent.

But the character just drifted through her life, reacting to things, never initiating much, not striving. There was no tension. Nothing compelling me to turn the page. My recommendation was to create a strong inciting incident at the front of the story, to knock the character far out of her happy life.

Why isn’t a happy story good enough? Why is it a good idea to trouble our characters, knock them down, and then keep knocking them down as they struggle? Why does that make them more compelling, more watchable?

Because, as human beings, we struggle too. In our ordinary lives, we may struggle with things small or large, but struggle we must. We understand how a character feels who has been knocked down. And here’s the thing that a novel can do that lifts it from being mere entertainment: show us something about how to be a human being.

Learning to be a human being has a lifelong learning curve, and we can use all the help we can get because there aren’t many good instruction books. Although novels are fiction, they can instruct us on the truths of being human.

Fiction models behavior for us, teaches us what (in the writer’s imagination) works, and what doesn’t work. We like to see characters desire and yearn and attempt because it helps us understand, maybe, what we can do in our own lives.

In thinking about my first novel after coming across McKee’s idea of creating a desire in a character, I thought I’d failed to do that in my main protagonist: it seemed to me that he mostly reacted to events.

But then I realized that, unwittingly, I’d done one of the things McKee talks about: created an unconscious desire. My character’s inciting event really pulled the rug out from under his life, but on the surface he seemed satisfied with the way things were. He just wanted, it seemed, to keep on doing his work. But unconsciously, it was the opposite.

My job as a writer is to learn to do it wittingly.

McKee says that a story is more powerful if a character has an unconscious desire that works in opposition to the conscious desire.

This is heady stuff for a simple guy like me, but I think I see how it can work. For example, let’s say a man’s wife is kidnapped and a ransom is demanded. His surface desire is to rescue her. That’s what society, his friends, his peers, and he himself expects. Standard thriller stuff, you’ve seen it a thousand times.

But what if he hates his wife? Then his unconscious desire, the one that can’t be admitted out loud, is to somehow lose her. This may remind you of the plot of the film Ruthless People, only Danny DeVito’s desire to get rid of Bette Midler, his wife, is far from unconscious.

In my novel, darned if my protagonist’s unconscious desire didn’t affect what happened when he pursued conscious goals. Eventually his conscious goal came to be the same as the unconscious one, and he grew.

Checklist for your narrative:

• Does it contain an inciting incident that throws your protagonist’s life severely out of balance? (By the way, your antagonist might need an inciting incident, too, such as the opposition of the protagonist.)
• Does the event create a conscious desire in your character?
• Does your reader know about it?
• Does your character immediately take action, take a risk to achieve a goal that springs from the inciting event?
• Optional: Does it create an unconscious, contrary desire?

These are the elements that not only create the engine that will drive your story, they create the fuel. The horsepower of that engine, and its power to affect the reader, depend on:

• How severely your character’s life is thrown for a loop, i.e., how damaging are the consequences, how high the stakes?
• The difficulty of achieving the desire that is aroused
• The size of the risks she must take to recover

For what it’s worth

RR

© 2010 Ray Rhamey

Comments

[Jami Gold]

Oh, I like that idea of a conscious desire conflicting with an unconscious desire. I think that's happening with my protagonist. I had a lot of subtext there along those lines, but it's only with this last revision, where I'm connecting the dots within the subtext, that I see this really come into its own. Thanks!

[Doug]

Kurt Vonnegut famously put it as, "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water."

I think that *desire* is better than *want*. We all want something that we know is beyond our reach, or is out of bounds, or doesn't seem worth the trouble to pursue, so we don't do anything about it. Desire takes wanting to a higher level, one in which we're more driven to action and less concerned with the obstacles and consequences.