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23 Intermediate Wn Want vs Need Character

Want vs Need

The goal they chase versus the growth they require.

What it is

Want vs need is the split between the goal a character chases and the truth the character has to face along the way. The want is a target out in the world, and it comes with a price and a deadline: the farm, the acquittal, the crown. The need lies underneath. Nobody asks for it. Most often the need is a truth about themselves that the character would rather not look at.

The want is something you can point at. A job, a verdict, a person, a throne, a cure. The want powers the plot, because it gives the character a reason to get up and do things. The need is unrequested and unwelcome. Usually the need is a truth about the character, about their situation, or about the harm they are doing to the people around them. A simple way to keep the two apart: the want is a goal, and the need is a correction.

On this table, the Story element breaks every story into three parts. Someone wants something, trouble gets in the way, and by the end things have changed. Want vs need takes the first of those parts and splits it in two.

Here's a quick test. A camera can film a want. The want has a cost, a due date, and a moment when the character either holds it or doesn't. A need has no moment like that, so you can't show it directly.

Take a simple pair. "She wants to buy back her father's farm" is a want. "She needs to stop measuring her worth by what she has managed to hold on to" is a need. You could film the day she signs for the farm. Nobody could film the second sentence. A need has no deadline, and nobody can hand it over. If it comes at all, it comes as a realization. A realization only shows up later, in the way the character behaves, and readers only believe an inner change once they see the behavior change.

The story almost never announces the need to the reader. The need appears through a decision, normally at the climax. There the character can keep the goal or keep the truth, and has to give up one of them. Everything before that scene is preparing the decision. So the want and the need are not two goals side by side. No character sets out hoping to become humble. The story sends them the bill for humility anyway. Think of the need as that bill, and of the climax as the moment the character chooses which one to keep: the prize or the truth.

You will meet this idea in a lot of craft books, under different names, and the names cause more confusion than the idea does. Four well-known teachers have described it, and between them they use five pairs of labels. John Truby, in The Anatomy of Story (2007), calls the outer goal desire and the inner obstacles weakness and need. He warns writers not to merge them into one step. Robert McKee, in Story (1997), talks about conscious desire and unconscious desire. In his view the most interesting protagonists have the two in contradiction. Michael Hauge talks about outer motivation and inner motivation. In later work he recast the pair as identity, the protective self a character builds around an old injury, against essence, the truth underneath it. K.M. Weiland calls the pair the Thing Your Character Wants and the Thing Your Character Needs, and she ties the want to the character's false belief.

All four are describing one mechanism. Translate it into whichever pair of words you like best. When you meet a new term, check whether it brings a new idea before you treat it as one. Hauge's own account of identity and essence is free on his site, and the third part of Weiland's series of articles on character arcs covers the want and the need. Both are listed below. So are three books: Hauge's Writing Screenplays That Sell, New Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Lisa Cron's Story Genius, and David Corbett's The Compass of Character, which works through the same split with a four-point model of lack, yearning, resistance and desire.

The need sits close to several other parts of a character, so neighboring elements often get blamed when this one fails. Four boundaries help keep it clear.

The need is not the motivation. Motivation is the believable cause behind the want: why this person chases this thing hard enough to act. Motivation answers a separate question. A want can be well motivated and still be the wrong thing to chase.

The need is not the flaw. The flaw is a weakness that makes things worse, scene after scene. The need is the truth that would disarm it. You can write a flaw as behavior. A need is a conclusion the character hasn't reached yet.

The need is not the lie. The lie is a mistaken belief, usually planted by a wound in the character's backstory. The need is the true statement that replaces it. The two are linked, but they are different things. A character whose lie is "I am only safe if nobody depends on me" needs to see that being relied on does not mean being caged. The lie also explains why the goal looks so good. Seen through the lie, the want looks like a cure, and often the want turns out to be the lie's errand list.

The need is not a second goal. Treating it as one is the most common mistake in drafts. Say a character wants revenge. Humility never goes on their list. Humility is the cost the book charges them, or the payment they refuse to make.

The idea is usually taught as a conflict, because the pressure sits there. In commercial fiction, though, the want and the need often point the same way, and that is no flaw in the craft. In a survival story, getting out alive and learning to trust a companion can be one and the same act. In a romance, the lead chases the relationship and also has to grow into someone who can keep one. Those are two different things, but they aren't enemies, and the love interest presses on both. When want and need line up, you still get change and a full character arc, and the arc is easier to keep consistent across a series. What you give up is one particular kind of pain: a character who ends the book holding the thing they chased, with the truth they refused left behind them. If you want that effect, pull the two apart.

At the end of a book, want and need can combine in four ways. Picking one on purpose is most of what "deciding what kind of book this is" means.

In the first ending, the character gets both. Commercially, the safe bet is this one, and it is the norm in romance, most fantasy, adventure and crime. The sloppy version feels like a prize handed out for good behavior. The strong version makes the truth the only road to the goal: the character takes the throne only after admitting why they wanted it.

In the second, the character gets the want and loses the need. Success becomes the tragedy, and winning makes the character smaller. The model case is Citizen Kane (RKO, 1941), which Orson Welles directed and wrote together with Herman J. Mankiewicz. Kane gets everything he goes after and dies surrounded by it. The Godfather (Paramount, 1972) does the same through Michael Corleone's arc, inside a genre made to entertain. Francis Ford Coppola directed it from the novel, and he adapted the screenplay with Mario Puzo.

In the third, the character loses the want and gains the need. Literary fiction usually takes this shape, and so do most coming-of-age stories. The thing the character chased turns out to be a mistake. Of the four endings, this one is the hardest to make satisfying. A reader who spent 90,000 words hoping she'd get the farm has to accept a substitute they never knew they wanted.

In the fourth, the character loses both. Losing both is outright tragedy, and it is rarer in commercial fiction than authors tend to think. The character fails and learns nothing, or learns the lesson too late to use it. Done well, this ending can shatter a reader. Readers who came for the reader promise of closure will find it a hard sell, though.

No ending is right in itself. Writing toward one on purpose keeps your ending from happening by accident. Dan Harmon's Story Circle builds the same bill into its shape. Described in plain terms, an early stage of its loop is that "they desire something", and a late stage is that "they pay a heavy price for it". That price is usually when the bill for the need comes due.

Why it matters

Knowing the split helps you in two ways. First, it tells you how to build your final scene: as a setup where the character can't keep both. Second, it explains the two complaints that come up most often about drafts, the ending that is right but doesn't land and the middle that sags.

An ending can be correct and still fall flat. In developmental editing, the big-picture edit that looks at a whole draft's structure, the most common diagnosis is an ending that does everything right and still doesn't land. The usual cause is a plot that settled the want while nothing settled, refused or charged for the need. She gets the deed to the farm. The reason she gave up everything else for it is never touched.

A middle sags when nothing presses on the need. The chase goes on, but the need is under no pressure. The try-fail cycle keeps turning and readers drift off, because failure only holds attention when it might teach the character something. The need commonly comes into view at the midpoint, and again at the all is lost beat.

Your climax nearly designs itself. Once you know the want and the need, the closing scene becomes an arrangement that forces the character to give one of them up. Of everything outlining gives you, nothing helps more.

Theme turns into something the reader watches happen. Put the theme in a character's mouth and it reads like a slogan. Let the character choose the truth over the prize, or the prize over the truth, and the theme becomes a claim the reader has seen put to the test.

The blurb sells the want, and the reviews remember the need. A blurb offers the farm, the verdict or the throne. Blurbs almost never promise an inner realization. Yet the reviews that make a new reader trust a book tend to come from people still thinking about it a week later, and what they describe is nearly always the need.

Real-world examples

Great Expectations (1861): the want falls apart and the need arrives

Charles Dickens published Great Expectations in weekly installments in his own magazine, All the Year Round, starting December 1, 1860 and running until August 1861. Chapman & Hall brought it out as a book in three volumes in 1861. The full text is free at Project Gutenberg (ebook 1400), listed below.

Pip's want is stated more plainly than is usual in Victorian fiction. He wants to be a gentleman, because he believes a gentleman could win Estella. The whole plot hangs on that want. He takes the money, leaves the forge, learns manners and runs up debts. Along the way he treats Joe Gargery, the blacksmith who is the one person always decent to him, with an embarrassment he can't admit to.

The reader sees the need almost at once. Pip doesn't see it for about two-thirds of the book. He has to let go of the idea that a gentleman ranks above a blacksmith. Under that idea sits his lie: that you can escape shame by climbing socially. His want is that lie's errand list.

Here is why the novel teaches this element so well. Dickens neither grants the want nor denies it. He takes it apart. Pip's secret benefactor turns out to be Magwitch, the convict Pip fed out on the marshes as a boy, and not Miss Havisham, as Pip had assumed. The gentleman was made by the thing that shamed him most. After that discovery the want isn't settled. The want is just pointless. Pip spends his remaining chapters secretly nursing a dying convict. Nursing him is the first thing Pip does in the book that would have offended his own earlier idea of a gentleman.

The ending shows how much the last scene steers the meaning. Dickens first wrote a harsh ending, where Pip and Estella meet briefly and part. Edward Bulwer-Lytton told him it was too grim, and Dickens replaced it with the version printed in most editions. They meet among the ruins of Satis House, and the future is left open. Pip loses the want in both versions. Only the amount of comfort changes.

Dune (1965): the want won, the need refused

Frank Herbert's Dune first ran as two serials in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. The first, "Dune World", began in December 1963. The second, "The Prophet of Dune", ended in May 1965. Many publishers turned the novel down before Chilton Books published it in hardcover in August 1965.

Paul Atreides wants to survive, to avenge his father, and to take back the planet Arrakis from the Harkonnens and the Emperor who backed them. A hundred revenge stories run on that same want. Here it drives every chapter.

His need is stranger, and it is one reason the book has outlasted its imitators. Paul can see the future, and he sees what his victory will set loose: a holy war across the stars in his name. The truth he has to accept is that becoming what the Fremen need him to be would be a disaster, so the honest answer is to refuse.

Spoiler warning: the next paragraph gives away the ending.

Paul doesn't refuse. He forces the Emperor to step down by threatening the spice. He kills Feyd-Rautha. He demands marriage to Princess Irulan as part of a political settlement, and he takes the throne. He knows he can't stop what comes next, because belief in him has grown beyond his control. He gets the want in full and turns down the need with his eyes open. In the language of the four endings, he gets the want and "loses the need".

The lesson for writers: losing the need doesn't require a stupid or unlikable character. Paul sees more clearly than anyone else in the book, which is why his choice lands, as it has since 1965. A refused need also makes the strongest setup for a sequel, because the bill is still unpaid. Herbert went on to collect it.

Jane Eyre (1847): the need shown by a choice instead of a speech

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was published by Smith, Elder & Co. on October 19, 1847, under the name Currer Bell. The novel has the leanest want-versus-need climax of any nineteenth-century novel, and the climax doesn't come at the end. It falls at roughly the two-thirds mark.

Jane wants Rochester, and through him she wants belonging, which is what marriage means to a woman who has never had any. Her need is to keep her self-respect. She has to stay her own person, never someone's dependent, however much she is loved.

The wedding falls apart when it comes out that Rochester's wife, Bertha Mason, is alive and confined upstairs at Thornfield. Rochester asks Jane to live with him, unmarried, in the south of France. Brontë gives Jane no speech and no statement of principle. Jane leaves at daybreak with almost nothing and nearly dies of cold and hunger on the road.

Here you can see the mechanism at the heart of want vs need. Instead of a statement, the need gets a price tag. The reader measures Jane's self-respect by what she is willing to pay for it, and what she pays is everything she wants.

After that, Brontë lets her have both, without making her give up the need. Her uncle, John Eyre, leaves her twenty thousand pounds, which makes her independent. She turns down St. John Rivers, who proposes a marriage that would be a duty with no love in it. The same test comes back in a new form, and she passes it again. She goes back to the burnt house and to a disabled Rochester, and they marry as equals. She wins both, paid for in the right order.

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982): want and need pointing the same way

Stephen King's novella "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" appears in his collection Different Seasons (Viking, 1982), in the part headed "Hope Springs Eternal". Frank Darabont made it into a film in 1994.

Andy Dufresne wants freedom. His need, which the story itself calls hope, doesn't fight that want at all. Keeping hope alive and digging his way out are the same job, and he works at it for decades with one rock hammer. So no climax forces him to pick between the truth and the prize.

Keep this story in mind if you ever start to believe a book only works when want fights need. The novella has been one of the best-loved stories since 1982.

King does put the split in the story, though. He puts it in the narrator, Red. Red's want, once it finally comes within reach, is parole. His need is to drop the belief that a man who has been inside so long can't manage outside, and he has to face that need before he can make use of what he wanted. So one story gives you two characters, one with each setup. In a novel with a large cast, that is normal, and it needs no gimmick.

Harry Bosch (1992 onward): the long-running lead with no unmet need

Here is the best objection to everything above, and it deserves a fair hearing. Want vs need is a useful device, and nothing makes it a rule. A great deal of long-running, profitable, skillful fiction rests on a lead who has no unresolved inner need at all.

Little, Brown published Michael Connelly's The Black Echo in January 1992. The novel won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America in 1993 and launched the Bosch series, which had more than twenty novels at the time of writing. The count keeps growing, so check Connelly's own website for the current list.

In every book, Bosch's want is the case in front of him. His creed, that everybody counts or nobody counts, is already his when the first book opens, so he has nothing to learn. Since 1992 readers have enjoyed watching institutions try to stop him from living by it. He does change in small ways. He has a daughter, he retires, his body ages. But no false belief gets torn down, and no truth gets refused.

Several profitable kinds of fiction treat this kind of lead as standard. Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot appears in thirty-three novels, from The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) to Curtain (1975), and needs nothing in any of them. Most long crime series work this way, as do a large share of thrillers and nearly all comedy. The lead stays fixed, the world around them shifts, and a reader can start at book fourteen. Series fiction has its own reason, too: a lead who has already been transformed is hard to start up again.

Books like these still have opposition, cost and a dramatic question. What they lack is an inner arc, and bolting one on just because a theory says every book needs one can damage a series that works. If your lead has no unmet need, don't invent one. Make the want hard and the price real, and give the inner story to someone else: a victim, a partner, a suspect or the antagonist.

An everyday scenario: the ending readers called neat but hollow

Imagine you've just finished the second volume of a three-book fantasy series. The want is clean. Maren has to get her brother out of a mountain prison before the thaw. Your beta readers like the pacing and find the prison frightening. About the last three chapters, though, they all say the same thing: "satisfying but somehow flat". One of them cried at the wrong part.

Nobody, including you, ever asked about the need. So you ask two questions. What is the rescue supposed to prove, in Maren's own mind? And what is her plan costing the people close to her?

The answers come fast, because they are already in your 100,000 words. You just hadn't noticed them. Freeing her brother would mean she is no longer the sister who survived the raid when everyone else died. The plan has cost a lot. She lied to her partner, Ilse. She traded away a village's grain. She made a smuggler a promise she can't keep. Her lie is "I am only forgiven if I am the one who fixes this." Her need is to accept that she didn't cause the raid and doesn't owe anyone proof that she deserved to survive.

Now the weakness of your climax is clear. She unlocks the cell, they run, the thaw comes and the wall falls. Neither the lie nor the need is touched. Everything works and nothing resonates.

The fix takes one scene and leaves the word count where it was. At the cell door, Maren has to choose. She can carry her brother out, or she can use the same twenty minutes to get Ilse to safety. Whichever she picks, the reader learns what she thinks her own survival is worth. Her brother still gets out, because a guard she was kind to back in chapter nine opens the door. A throwaway beat becomes a payoff. The events stay the same and so does the length, and now readers have an ending worth arguing about.

Try it yourself

The whole exercise takes about forty minutes. You can use it on a book you're planning, a book that's stuck, or a draft you've finished. If you have a want but no need yet, steps 2 and 3 will find one for you.

  1. Write the want as one sentence with a price and a deadline. Fill in this line: "[Name] wants ______, by ______, or else ______." The deadline can be a story event, like the thaw, rather than a date on a calendar. The "or else" is what happens if the deadline passes. If you can't fill in all three blanks, the want itself is the problem, so fix it before you go on.
  2. Ask what the want is supposed to prove. Fill in: "If she gets it, it will finally prove that she is ______." The blank usually holds the lie. Nobody chases anything for 90,000 words just for its own sake. They are after a verdict on themselves.
  3. Write the true version of that sentence. Take your answer from step 2 and write what is actually true. If the lie is "if I get it, it proves I was never the weak one", the true version is "she was weak and it was not a crime". That true version is the need. On paper it sounds painfully simple, and every need does. Treat it as something you're aiming at, and keep it out of the dialogue.
  4. List who is paying for the chase. Write down the allies deceived, the promises broken and the supporting cast worn out by the pursuit. If your need from step 3 doesn't account for this damage, you have the wrong need. The right one usually explains the damage too.
  5. Choose your ending on purpose. Pick one of the four: gets both, gets the want only, gets the need only, or loses both. Write down your pick and one sentence on why readers of your genre will accept it.
  6. Build the choice the character can't avoid. Design a climax where the character can't take both the want and the need: the deed or her sister, the informant's name or her job. If you can't build one, then either the want and the need point the same way, which is fine, so go to step 7, or one of them is fake.
  7. If they line up, say so on purpose. Write one line: "In this book the want and the need point the same way, because ______." Then make sure someone still pays the price somewhere: a second point-of-view character, the antagonist, or the people around the lead who feel the effects of the chase.
  8. Cut every line that names the need. Hunt for any speech or narration that spells out the need, whoever says it (a mentor, a friend, the narrator) and whoever it is aimed at, the character or the reader. Cut it, and let the choice from step 6 carry the point. Subtext and show, don't tell cover the same skill from other sides.
  9. For a series, decide how much of the need each book spends. Skip this step for a standalone book. Write down which part of the need book one settles and which part you're holding back. Keep it in your character bible, so the answer is still there when you come back to it in two years. Series or not, the template below collects all your answers for your project notes.

Want (with price and deadline): If she gets it, it proves she is __________ (the lie) Need (the true version): Who the pursuit is costing: Ending chosen: gets both / want not need / need not want / neither The choice at the climax: ______ or ______ Reserved for later books:

Common mistakes and misunderstandings

Saying the need out loud. No mistake is more common, and none does more damage. A mentor sits the lead down and explains the lesson. Now readers have the answer and nothing left to follow. The need should show through choices, costs and refusals. A character who can put their own need into words by act two never really had one.

Giving the need its own track. The need doesn't get a subplot, its own beats, or scenes where the character "works on herself". The scenes the want already creates carry it.

Thinking every book needs one. Crime series, thrillers and a lot of comedy depend on a lead who doesn't need to grow from page one, and they are no worse for it. Bolting an arc onto a fixed lead because a theory demands it can wreck a series that works. Decide which one your readers are buying: change or reliability.

Assuming alignment means a shallow book. Survival stories, romance and quest fantasy depend on the want and the need pointing the same way. The split suits one kind of ending. The split says nothing about quality.

Shrinking the want to make the need look deeper. If the outer goal doesn't matter, readers leave before the inner one is resolved. A weak want with a deep need is the typical literary novel that never sold.

Mixing up the need with the flaw, the lie or the wound. The wound is the event. The lie is the belief the character formed because of it. The flaw is the behavior that comes out of the lie. The need is the truth that replaces the lie. Those are four separate slots, and each one has its own page.

Mixing up the need with motivation. Motivation explains why the character wants the thing. Ideally, the motivation for chasing the wrong thing is watertight.

Settling the need at the midpoint. If the character accepts the need halfway through, nothing is at risk anymore, and the second half turns into a victory lap. The midpoint is where the need first comes into view. Accepting it or refusing it belongs at the climax.

Putting the need in the wrong person. When the final emotional weight lands on the best friend, the mentor or the love interest, the need has moved. Readers will say the book is about someone other than the lead named on the cover. The protagonist element has the test for this.

Punishing the character for wanting. Endings where the character "loses the want" can read as the author scolding ambition. Wanting wasn't a moral failure. The want was only the one thing the character could see. Let the loss land as a price the character pays, and keep the author's judgment out of it.

Using up the whole need in book one of a series. If the inner arc finishes in book one, by book four the lead has nothing to learn and much less appeal. The character arc element covers how to spread change across many books.

Related elements