The Mystery of Desire in Writing

And how to structure it

As I continue to writhe in the throes of my edit (YES, still editing the novel that won’t get done), I’ve been pondering desire. Desire to get this thing out of my mind and off to its next life on my wonderful agent’s TBR list, desire to make this the best book I’ve ever written (or at least the best I can do so far), desire for freakin’ potato chips as I toil in my recliner late into the wee hours. What, you DON’T write in your recliner in the wee hours?

But really, what I’ve been thinking about is my MC’s desire. And I realize that I have a habit of writing characters whose surface desire is simply to keep afloat. To remain in their life as is, even if their lives are not ideal, and, in fact, are kind of awful. And this made me think of how desire goes hand in hand with fear, and, then how as the author, it is our job to give our characters not what they desire, because what they want is often tainted by fear or ignorance or ineptitude. Our job is to give characters what they need.

The Structure of Desire

We are always told that to create a compelling narrative, we have to give our character something to want, and then withhold it from them, make them work for it, and, finally, let them have it, in a way. Structurally, it would be something like this:

Case Study: one of my all time favorite novels, Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice

• Act 1: Show the character’s desire: Lestat wants a friend/lover/bestie
• Act 2: Make them work for it: Lestat does everything in his power to make Louis happy and everything he does backfires. Because you can’t MAKE a person love you
• Act 3: Give them what they need: Lestat survives the heartbreak and becomes stronger. Decides he’ll be happier as a rock star ????

Case Study: one of my new favorite novels, Erasure by Percival Everett (and here’s a plug for the audiobook, it’s absolutely brilliant. Laugh out loud genius.)

• Act 1: Show the character’s desire: Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is an author who yearns for literary recognition and financial renumeration for his writing. I mean… don’t we all?
• Act 2: Make them work for it: Thelonious finds himself in desperate need of money to take care of his elderly mother and the family home. Frustrated with the world’s refusal to take his artistic output seriously, and the humiliating racism of the publishing world, he writes a deeply satirical parody of what he sees the publishing industry and the reading public want from a Black author. To his horror, the parody is bought and published.
• Act 3: Give them what they need: Thelonious gets a seven figure advance, a film deal worth millions, a heap of happy readers, and a major industry award. He got what he always wanted not by remaining the person he thought he had to be, nor by becoming someone completely different, but by merging the two extremes into someone new, forged out of the necessities of his life and his true nature.

The Why Behind Desire

In order to give your characters what they need, it’s important to understand why they want what they want. Almost always, what they say they want is not really what they want, and in order to dig in, it’s important to ask why.

Why does Lestat want a Soulmate, and why does he fixate on Louis? Well, in Lestat’s human past, he was quite friendless. The closest person to him was his mother, and he abandoned her to pursue a life in the arts with his best friend. Lestat was made a vampire against his will, and this naturally formed a rift with his friend. So, he made his friend a vampire, and, you know, not everyone can handle that. His friend dies. He makes his mother a vampire. His mother leaves him. Poor Lestat… When he sees Louis, he projects his love for his dead best friend onto him and decides that THIS time, he’ll do it right. He tries to repeat the relationships of his past, and it can’t work. One of the reasons it won’t work is because he keeps everything he knows about vampire life a secret from Louis because he’s afraid the truth will ruin him, and them. Like I said, fear goes hand in hand with desire.

Why does Thelonious Monk Ellison want success as an author? It turns out that he was his father’s favorite out of three children. His father always made him feel that he was special, smarter, unique, original, more interesting than his siblings. Though both his brother and sister became doctors, just like their father, it is Thelonious’s quirkiness and odd intelligence that their father values. Monk spends his whole life being the person he believed his father wanted him to be, only to realize that his father himself had lived a lie. Even after his father dies, he is afraid to be a disappointment. Understanding his father’s fallibility is what ultimately helps him be okay with the person he becomes.

In my own novel (that won’t get done), I do this exercise for each of my characters.

• I have a character who wants to be an influencer. Why? He wants to be loved. Why? His parents died when he was young, and he never had enough love. But why an influencer? Because he wants to emit happiness and good feels into the world. And why? Because his own world is pretty darn grim.

And so on and so forth.

Tell me what your characters want, and why! I want to know.