Film 210: Week 8

In this lesson, you’ll learn:

• How inner wants and obstacles operate differently from external ones
• Why inner elements are often two sides of the same coin
• Specific examples of inner wants and obstacles that drive characters
• Multiple techniques for showing invisible elements in a visual medium
• How to add complexity without overcomplicating your story

Let’s begin!

Showing the Invisible

You’ve already learned about wants, obstacles, and outcomes and how they operate throughout your story.

However, characters also have inner wants and obstacles—things that aren’t as easy to visualize but drive behaviour just as powerfully.

In film, the challenge becomes: how do you show these invisible elements in a visual and audio medium?

Let’s begin by looking at each element and its properties:

Inner Want

Inner wants are the deep internal needs that drive us through life. They are less concrete and more abstract than external wants.

Think of your own life. We often go through stages as we grow up:

• As babies, we may want security and love
• As children, we may want independence
• As teenagers, we may want social connections
• As adults, we may want security
• As seniors, we may want a legacy

Inner wants can be either positive or negative. A desire for self-actualization may drive one character, while another may want chaos or violence.

Your character may be aware of their internal want, but it may also be something acting upon them unconsciously.

Either way, you should think about how to shape it as a writer.

Examples of Inner Wants

Control: The mission of the brain is control—whether it’s creating a mental model to make sense of the world around us or changing it to gain control. Learning to control and understand the world means we can function with it.

Happiness and pain: When asked what they want, people often say they want happiness or pleasure. However, people are loss-averse, meaning they are more likely to act to avert a loss than to achieve a gain. This means we are more likely to avoid pain than pursue happiness.

Status: We crave our position within the community’s pecking order. This drives much of human behaviour, from school hallways to workplace politics. We can take actions to claim status through how we talk, our body language, and how we occupy space, but we ultimately can’t control how others perceive us. This gap between our status efforts and others’ perceptions creates rich internal conflict.

Other examples of inner wants: purpose, hope, balance, appreciation, acceptance, approval, attention, belonging, connectedness, love, power, guilt, redemption, and identity.

Inner Obstacles

Inner obstacles can be anything internal that stands in the way of your character’s wants. For example, a fear of heights can prevent a detective from catching the criminal or achieving their desire to be respected by their peers.

Inner obstacles can also drive a story. For example, a character haunted by the memory of their friend’s death may embark on a journey for revenge.

Like inner wants, characters may not be conscious of their internal obstacles—they may only manifest through actions and responses.

Examples of Inner Obstacles

Flawed Mental Models: To comprehend and control the world, we create mental models of how we believe it works. However, the trouble is that many beliefs or mental models are wrong. They are flawed due to biases, errors, and prejudices, weakening our understanding of the world. So when we misperceive the world's reality, we struggle to operate within it.

Wounds, scars, and internal ghosts: Past mistakes, the death of significant figures, and miserable failures scar our characters' histories. It is often these moments that a character may spend a lifetime trying to repair and make themselves whole again.

Other inner obstacles: Fear, frustration, confusion, addiction, grief, longing, past wounds, anxiety, impulses and instincts, a lack of knowledge, helplessness, moral and mental weakness, conscience, emotions, mental health issues, identity, habit, belief, guilt, redemption, revenge.

When Inner Wants and Obstacles Flip

A trickiness of inner obstacles is that they sometimes can be confused for inner wants, or vice versa.

For example, seeking self-esteem can be a good thing. However, too much self-esteem can lead to overconfidence or arrogance.

Similarly, guilt can be a good thing. It can create a desire to seek redemption and push into action. Or it can be a bad thing and get in the way of our goals.

What one person feels is a negative obstacle may seem different to others.

This is why it’s essential to be clear and understand your character’s wants and obstacles, and whether they overcome them.

Your Character’s Spine

These elements—inner want and obstacle—are components of your character’s spine.

Your character’s spine is the underlying motivation that drives them.

These inner elements extend beyond the edges of your story—your characters may have dealt with them long before your story begins and possibly long after it ends.

Once you discover the spine, every action, every response, every choice can connect back to this core drive.

How to Show Inner Elements

The biggest challenge with inner wants and obstacles is showing them in a visual and audio medium. Here are some key techniques:

Direct Methods

External Actions, Responses, and Dialogue: The most direct technique is having characters express their inner wants and obstacles through what they say and do. They can directly state what they want (“I want to be appreciated”), take specific actions to achieve their inner want or show responses that reveal it. A character who wants to be cared for will pursue that love through actions, and we know they achieve their goal when they receive an external outcome—a hug, a kind word—and respond positively. Characters can verbalize their fears (“I hate being alone”) or take specific actions to avoid or overcome them, like a character afraid of abandonment who becomes clingy or pushes people away first.

External Objects to Fulfill Inner Wants: Characters might pursue money for security or control, but achieving it will likely not satisfy their internal desires. Often, they seek something only to discover they want something else. Characters might pursue external objects to avoid their inner obstacles. A character afraid of intimacy might obsessively pursue work success or material possessions to avoid dealing with relationships. Someone haunted by guilt might pursue religious artifacts or charitable work, trying to find external absolution for their internal pain.

Indirect Methods

Through Subtext

Subtext is what characters really mean beneath what they say or do. It’s the unspoken thoughts, feelings, and motivations that drive behaviour.

Actions and Responses: Characters say one thing but do something else, revealing their true inner state. The contradiction between words and actions creates subtext that shows what’s really going on. A character says, “I’m fine,” while frantically cleaning or avoiding eye contact.

Dialogue: Write dialogue that doesn’t address the main issue directly. Use mundane conversations to mask deeper concerns. What they don’t say becomes as important as what they do say. A couple discusses dinner plans while avoiding the fundamental issue of their failing relationship.

Physical Environment and objects: The setting reflects or contrasts a character’s inner state. The environment becomes a mirror for their internal world. A character seeking control obsessively organizes their workspace, or someone avoiding intimacy creates physical barriers with furniture placement.

Through Character and Story Structure

Characters' responses to their inner elements can drive the entire narrative structure.

In Manchester by the Sea, the main character's grief makes him pick meaningless fights, push people away, drink too much, and hold himself back in relationships—all responses to his internal obstacle that shape every scene.

Through Other Characters: Other characters can represent or reveal internal elements. In The Shawshank Redemption, Red’s obstacle of lost hope is shown through Andy’s hopeful actions: working on the roof, building the library, and finding his wife’s killer. In Star Wars, Luke’s internal conflict about joining the Rebellion is voiced by his uncle (representing fear), while Obi-Wan echoes his desire to go (representing courage).

Pursuing External Wants That Act Counter to Internal Want: Characters can pursue an external want to protect themselves from their internal conflict. In Pretty Woman, the main character buys companies and then breaks them up to sell separately. This is his way of hurting his father, a man who never loved him, when, in fact, he wishes for the love and approval of the man. In Shrek, the title character wants to clear his swamp so he can be left alone, but it’s only because he’s scared that people won’t like him.

Shifting External Wants to Reveal Deeper Internal Want: A character may state that they want something, but their shifting pursuit of that want shows that perhaps the character is looking for something more internal. For example, in Carnal Knowledge, Jack Nicholson’s character never finds the “perfect relationship” because he’s misogynistic and weaponizes relationships.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Final Reminder

Adding inner wants and obstacles is one way to add complexity to your story. But don't over-complicate things. Always default to WOARO to organize your thoughts.

Key Takeaways

• Inner wants and obstacles operate in the mind, heart, and soul rather than the external world.
• They can flip—guilt can motivate or paralyze action, depending on the character and situation.
• The key challenge is showing invisible elements through external actions, dialogue, and responses.
• Inner want and obstacles serve as your character’s spine—the underlying motivations that drive everything else.
• Use inner elements to add complexity, but always return to WOARO to stay organized.
• Adding inner wants and obstacles is one way to add complexity to your story. But don't over-complicate things. Always default to WOARO to organize your thoughts.