On the want vs the need
When I was first trying to write a book, I encountered this question quite a lot from well-meaning mentors:
What does your character want, and what does she need?
This question stymied me for a long time, in part because my first book is written in a nonlinear fashion with identity amnesia – so what my character “wants” is very different depending on what she remembers about herself. It also means that what she wants is what she needs sometimes and not at other times. She’s in conflict with herself a lot and that was very challenging to write. (I think I got through it; more on that later.)
To understand why this question is asked so much, let’s take a more straightforward story that everyone knows, Hamlet The Lion King. After the inciting incident of Mufasa’s death (sorry for spoiling you), Simba wants to live a carefree life with Timone and Pumba, to avoid his fear and guilt. But what he (and everyone else) needs is for him to accept his rightful place as King, dethrone his uncle, and restore the Pride Lands.
The evils of monarchy notwithstanding, I think we can all agree that this change in motivation is compelling and enriching. Simba does not get what he wants; in returning to Pride Rock, he takes on responsibility and is forced to give up his carefree life. But he does get what he needs.
There are multiple ways you could frame this exact same set of motives, and I think they’re all valid:
He wants to forget his dad is dead but what he needs is to enact justice on his murderer
He wants to live in safety, but what he needs is to learn bravery (as thematically laid out by Simba saying, “I just wanted to be brave like you!” early in the movie)
He wants to be king as a child because he thinks being a king will give him freedom, but what he needs is to learn that being a king means serving others
Or, whatever. They all lead back to the same place: to grow, a character must (often) give up what they want in order to secure what they need.
Let’s take another example where the want is sacrificed for the need. In Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa wants to find the land of Green Mothers or whatever it’s called (sorry), a fabled oasis where she can live in safety. What she needs is to return to dethrone the evil guy.
Or Frodo, who really would have liked to stay home and eat cheese with his gardener bff but was forced to find the inner strength to carry the ring to the fires of mount doom…
Hang on, are Frodo, Furiosa and Simba all the same character? Woah. Someone should write a book about how all heroes undergo the same journey.
When I was learning about this paradigm, my mentor at the time said that traditionally “good” stories sacrifice the want for the need; comedies or more lighthearted fare sometimes allow the character to have both; and tragedies often give characters their want, but not their need.
Like all good writing advice, I have found that this is pretty true but just not always, and that made it confusing when trying to figure out what to do as a writer. It turns out that plenty of stories feature characters who want and need the same thing and who eventually get both, no inner conflict necessary, such as:
Harry Potter, who wants to defeat Voldy and who also needs to defeat Voldy.
Disney’s Ariel (the Little Mermaid), who wants to become human and needs to defeat Ursula, and does both. (This does not apply in the original story and therein lies the rub, I think)
Luke Skywalker, who wants to escape his boring desert hometown and needs to find the inner strength to defeat Daddy Darth Vader.
But Aya! I hear you saying, None of those stories are “good!” They’re cheesy and self-reinforcing, they’re for kids!
Hey, why would you say these things??
Okay, let’s talk about a movie that’s been lauded as Good, like Pig. Nic Cage’s character in Pig is desperate to get his truffle-hunting pig back from the thugs who stole her. It’s both what he wants and what he needs. You could argue that what he needs is to grieve and move on from his wife’s death, which he can’t really do, but even so — that need is not in conflict with wanting his pig back. They line up in the same direction.
However, the film works not because he changes (or gives up a want for a need) but because his commitment to non-violence changes everyone around him. (I loved this movie and recommend you watch it, especially if you want to dissect this exact question further.)
What about an example of a story where the want is achieved but not the need? Well, if we’re doing comparative fiction, both the original Little Mermaid and Hamlet are great examples of Disney switching things up to make it palatable to kids and a modern audience. You could argue that Hamlet wants vengeance, at the expense of everything else, and that’s what’s tragic about it. (I would argue that the original Little Mermaid gives the mermaid her need — a soul — but not her want — the prince — and that the two at first seem attainable together but become in conflict later in the original Andersen story.)
Back to getting the want but not the need — a wonderful, subtle, complex film I highly recommend is The Power of the Dog, for which I will analyze the character played by Benedict Cumberbatch. What he wants is to be respected, emulated, lauded in his masculinity (and to own a prosperous ranch). What he needs, in direct conflict with this, is sincere connection.
He’s also the antagonist of the film in many ways, and the end of the film is neither entirely celebratory nor completely tragic. To my mind this ambiguity makes the film all the stronger.
Okay, now I’m going to talk for a minute about why this framing was so hard for me, even though I wound up thinking it’s very useful.
Usually, in the traditional “hero’s journey” narrative, there is a moment when the hero “refuses the call.” In this moment, the hero is aware of what he wants but denies what he needs. (Think of Frodo hesitating to be the one to bear the ring to mount doom). Eventually the character must accept the call, and then the need becomes present around the time the character enters a “no turning back” moment — ie, the need begins to be something the character perhaps acknowledges once they begin the journey, but which does not yet become their primary motivation. They still mistakenly believe they can do this task and remain as they have been. I was told that the need should take over from the want at the midpoint, but that’s not always true! Let’s go back to Simba:
Simba spends the early part of the film being a carefree child. The inciting incident — the thing that forces him out of this life and into a new one — is Mufasa’s death. At that moment, the need — to be a righteous king — comes into existence, but is far from Simba’s consciousness. He refuses the call and runs away. He meets Timone and Pumba, loves his carefree life, and only when Nala finds him does that internal conflict re-emerge. Mufasa’s infamous “remember who you are” throws us into the third act of the film (ie, this moment is much later than the midpoint for Simba.)
Now, this could just be my opinion, man, but I think the timing is even less clear for Frodo. Of course, Lord of the Rings is such a far-reaching story that it would be simplistic to expect it to follow the pacing of a single-character story, but this is perhaps my point exactly: you cannot prescribe exactly when a character should learn which bit as the story progresses. It’s unique to each story and that’s fine! Learning this, as a writer, was both freeing and challenging.
But let’s take as a given, just for a moment, that the change from want to need should occur somewhere between the midpoint and the third act of the story. Given this assumption, what does that mean for a nonlinear story? If the character’s experience of time is different than the reader’s, should the want give way to the need halfway through the character’s experience, or the reader’s?
I know that this seems like a very specific problem to have, unique perhaps to my book — but over and over again I’ve found myself discussing a similar problem with other writers. Lots of writers want to write nonlinear stories where what is presented is not exactly what happened, at least not in that order. Nonlinearity is a tool to withhold or give information at just the right time, sometimes to both the reader and the character and sometimes just to the reader (ie, sometimes the character withholds information from the reader a la Where The Crawdads Sing, Ninth House, Gone Girl, etc).
So, the answer I came up with (and your mileage may vary with this answer!) is that the change should come about halfway through the reader’s experience of the story.
The reason why is simple. The reader’s experience dictates whether they will keep reading, and the reader needs to spend enough time in the “want”-dominated world for the eventual sacrifice of that want to be meaningful to them!
Okay, so, eventually I figured this out — which meant that I had to structure my character’s remembrance of her own past around that fact. Here is how I did this in To Name the Fire, in broad brushstrokes:
Nell begins the story wanting to live out the life Fate gave her. She wants her dragon to come home to her.
Nell remembers the beginning of her past, when past-Nell also wanted that — longed for it, even.
Nell is able to reunite with her dragon and their relationship is much more complicated than she anticipated (the “need” arrives as an idea: that they should be able to choose their destinies rather than have them decided for them.) She rejects this idea.
Nell learns that before she lost her past, her past self had come to reject the want (accepting fate) for the need (choosing her own fate). But Nell cannot believe this is right, convinced she knows better than her past self. As more past is revealed this becomes harder and harder. (This just before the midpoint.)
Finally, something happens in the present to convince Nell that the need is more important than the want — just as she learns how and why her past self actually came to this same conclusion.
In the final act of the book, Nell has learned everything that past-Nell knew, and they are in agreement that the need is more important than the want. The want is sacrificed for the need in a way that (I hope) is heart-rending.
Now, this is just one way to do it. There may have been other ways, but I couldn’t figure out any that worked for both my character and for the reader.
One major and very hard lesson I had to learn in order to do this was that the presentation of the need had to be introduced before Nell accepted it. I don’t know why this was hard for me — I think because I saw it as a “reveal” that past-Nell ever came to that point on her own, and I wanted to “save” the interesting reveals. If I could give past-me some advice it would be: don’t “save” your reveals! Let your reader learn them and let your characters react to them! Seeing characters react to world-altering information is good!
I will be very curious to hear from other nonlinear story tellers how they’ve managed this problem. If you have thoughts, please leave them below!