that whole “make your characters want things” does so much work for you in a story, even if what your characters want is stupid and irrelevant, because how people go about pursuing their desires tells you about them as a person.
do they actually move toward what they desire? how far are they willing to go for it? do they pursue their desires directly or indirectly? do they acquire what they desire through force, trickery, or negotiation? do they tell themselves they aren’t supposed to feel desire and suppress it? does the suppressed desire wither away and die, or does it mutate and grow even stronger? is the initially expressed desire actually an inadequate and poorly translated different desire that they lack language for? does the desire change once the language has been updated, or when new experiences outline the desire more clearly? do they want something else once they have better words for it, or once they know that they definitely don’t want something they thought they wanted before?
how does the world accommodate those desires? what does the world present to your character and in what order to update and clarify their desires? how does your magic system or sci-fi device correspond to those desires and the pursuit of them?
there’s so much good story meat on those bones; you just have to be brave and decisive enough to let characters want specific things instead of letting them float in the current of the plot.
and I loved the responses of “Well, my character is very passive and doesn’t know how to want things, the story is about their process of learning to do that exactly”, because that’s fine, that’s all well and good, but passive people still want things. passive human beings who have been so thoroughly neglected that the articulation of a single desire is beyond them want what their internal sphere of control tells them they are allowed to want. they desire constancy and a lack of conflict. they desire nostalgic artifacts that remind them of prior constancy and lack of conflict. the desire to float is an engineered desire that runs in conflict with the development of a happy healthy human being. Who engineered it? How do you begin to chip away at something like that? How do small, passive desires lead up to that?
“Everyone has motive” needs to be at the forefront of your thoughts. If a passive character wants something and yet does not act to achieve it, the crux of the story is WHY they are inactive. Therein lies your conflict and complications.
It’s really important to remember that “things staying the same” is a thing that characters can want, and that it’s almost by necessity different than passivity. And so if you have a character who wants things to stay the same, is it that they don’t want to change things, or that they actively want to maintain the status quo.
And consider how that may conflict with the desire of other major characters. Stories are often about changing something–a relationship, a government, whatever–so how does that play against a character who very much doesn’t want things to change?
