(It’s important to know what your evil character wants, too.) Even more likely, reading through the list may give you new perspective on the character goals and character motivation in your story. Of course, I can’t create a complete list of possible desires…it would go on forever! But one of these character goal examples may spark a whole story or a help you flesh out a secondary character or a villain. Each goal has two or three possible character motivations attached to it. That’s why I thought I’d do this “wants list” for characters. And when you have a team of characters working toward the same goal, they may each have a different motivation, which can lead to interesting clashes along the way. When characters have conflicting goals-or if they both want the same thing, maybe for different but very understandable reasons, and only one of them can get it-that makes things exciting. We’re more likely to root for her and to want to find out what happens next. In contrast, if she’s running a struggling bakery, and she’s a single mom with two kids to feed…well, then she has a clear goal (make the business work) and strong motivation. Will she get want she wants-or, in some cases, will she figure out that it’s not such a great goal, after all? If a heroine is running a very successful bakery, well, good for her, but there’s not much inherent drama there. When a character has a goal and motivation, there is built-in tension and conflict. I wanted to create it because at work when we look at novel proposals at work, we’re always asking, “What’s the character goal? What’s the character motivation?” We want characters who aren’t just wandering through their lives…characters with wants and desires. This post is basically a character goal generator.
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