Inner Wants

Until now, we've focused on external wants—the visible goals that drive the plot and form the core of WOARO (Want, Obstacle, Action, Response, Outcome). These are the objectives audiences can easily identify and follow throughout the story.

However, characters are more than just their external pursuits. Beneath the surface lie inner wants, which are less visible but equally crucial to creating compelling narratives. These internal drives shape characters' decisions and growth in ways that may not be immediately apparent.

Let's explore these inner wants and how they can add depth to your storytelling.

Defining internal wants

Inner wants are the deep internal needs that drive us through life. They are less concrete and more abstract—like security or independence.

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

1. As babies, we may want security and love.
2. As children, we may wish for independence.
3. As teenagers, we may want social connections.
4. As adults, we may wish for security.
5. As seniors, we may want a legacy.

Or consider something like Erikson’s psychosocial stages:

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is problematic in its methodology and ideas of universal needs, but it is a way to visualize the layers of external and internal wants.

Perhaps the best way to consider inner wants is to evaluate the deep internal needs that drive us through our lives. Often, they are a reaction or response to something, like a desire for independence or love.

Similar to our discussion about protagonist and antagonist characters, inner wants can be positive or negative. A desire for self-actualization may drive one character, while another may want chaos or violence.

Finally, your character may be aware of their internal want, but it may also be something acting upon them unconsciously (which could make it a possible obstacle).

Truby’s Perspective: Desire or Need

To further understand the concept of inner wants, it's helpful to explore John Truby's distinction between desire and need in The Anatomy of Story. This framework provides another perspective on how external and internal motivations interact within a character.

In Truby's model, a character has both desires and needs:

• Desire drives the story. Truby defines it as "what your hero wants in the story, his particular goal." This aligns with our concept of external want.
• Need, on the other hand, is "what the hero must fulfill within himself in order to have a better life. It usually involves overcoming his weaknesses and changing, or growing, in some way." This closely relates to our discussion of inner wants.

Truby further explains that this need arises because "something is missing within him that is so profound, it is ruining his life."

Terminology in Writing Literature

It's worth noting that many writing books use different terms to describe these concepts of want. You might encounter pairs such as:

• Desire vs. need (as we've seen with Truby)
• Wants vs. needs
• Motivations vs. quest
• Objective vs. intention

Don't stress about the specific terminology. The important thing is to understand the underlying concept: characters have both external goals and deeper, internal motivations that shape their actions and growth throughout the story.

💡Key Points of Defining Inner Wants

• Inner wants are deep, abstract needs driving human behavior
• They evolve throughout life stages
• Can be positive or negative
• May be conscious or unconscious
• Internal want always occurs, so being aware of it allows you to shape it.

Internal Want is your Character's Spine

Actors often seek their character's spine, the underlying motivation that drives their character. Once they discover it, they can hang the rest of the actions, wants, and obstacles on that spine.

In essence, internal want is that spine.

Understanding your character's internal want as their spine isn't just for actors. It has practical implications for writers too:

• It helps develop complex, believable characters
• It can significantly impact your storytelling structure
• It eliminates the need for extensive story setup

When you know your character's spine, you can jump right into the action while still conveying essential character information.

Internal want is why we don’t need to set up our story

We should never be “setting up” stories. Instead, we get to the conflict as soon as possible. Internal want is how we do that.

Before the external want (the main focus of your story) appears, you’ll show us the conflict of the internal want of your character.

Internal want is a first step toward the theme

We'll discuss theme later, but when approaching it, the number one rule is not to make your character talk about the theme. Talking about the theme is lazy writing.

So how do we do it? By showing it through the character’s internal wants.

Examples of inner wants

Reward and Threats

At the most fundamental level, two simple principles drive our survival:

• attain rewards
• avoid threats

These primal motivators form the bedrock of all inner wants. Every more complex desire or fear can be traced back to one of these basic drives.

For example:

• A character's desire for wealth (reward) might stem from a deeper need for security (avoiding the threat of poverty).
• The pursuit of love (reward) could be driven by a fear of loneliness (threat).
• Ambition for power (reward) might be rooted in a desire to avoid feeling helpless or controlled by others (threat).

As you consider all wants—and the subsequent actions and responses that your characters take, always ask yourself what are they seeking or avoiding?

Happiness and pain

Similar to attaining rewards and avoiding threats, the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain are key inner wants. However research suggests a more complex picture.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that people are loss-averse, meaning they are more likely to act to avert a loss than to achieve a gain. This finding suggests that avoiding pain might be an even stronger inner want than pursuing happiness.

As Nir Eyal says in Indistractable:

Simply put, the drive to relieve discomfort is the root cause of all our behavior, while everything else is a proximate cause.

These core desires can significantly influence a character's motivations and actions.

Control

In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr states that the mission of the brain is control—whether it is creating a mental model that makes sense of the world around us or changing it to gain control.

Learning to control and understand the world means we can function within it. This desire for control can manifest in various ways:

• Seeking knowledge or power to influence their environment
• Struggling against authority or restrictions
• Attempting to manipulate others or situations
• Striving for self-improvement or mastery of skills

Characters might pursue external goals as a means to satisfy this inner need for control, even if they're not consciously aware of this underlying motivation. The tension between a character's desire for control and their actual level of control can create compelling internal conflicts.

Status

As Keith Johnstone notes in Impro, status is something we actively do in every interaction, often unconsciously. This pervasive desire to establish, maintain, or change our relative position to others makes status a fundamental motivator of human behaviour.

We organize ourselves into a pecking order within our community. Every action expresses our status:

• How we talk and look
• Our body language
• How we occupy space

Status is always relative. Even if we think we are high or low status—and play to that status—others may not perceive us this way. It is all in the eyes of the beholder.

For example, we may believe that we have a low status, but the world may see us as a high status, and these two opposing ideas can be correct simultaneously.

To achieve status, we:

1. dominate others
2. earn prestige by being impressive or admired by others
3. be submissive
4. form coalitions with others to change our status

Importantly, status transactions continue all the time, even among friends. There is no way to be neutral. Every interaction involves some form of status play, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

As an inner want, the desire for status constantly influences character behaviour. Even in seemingly neutral interactions, characters subtly adjust their status.

This persistent drive can create compelling internal conflicts as characters struggle with the status they perceive themselves to have, the status others assign to them, and the status they desire.

Other Examples of Internal Wants

• purpose
• hope
• balance
• appreciation
• acceptance
• approval
• attention
• belonging
• connectedness
• love
• power
• guilt
• redemption
• identity

Or revisits Erikson's psychosocial stages or Maslow's hierarchy of needs for ideas.

Ways to show inner wants

Since we can’t easily show inner wants—and we don’t want characters to simply state it all the time—we need to find tools that help communicate it in a dramatic or visual way.

Some approaches could be:

1. Use external actions, responses, and dialogue
2. They find an external object to fulfill their inner want
3. Subtext
4. A shifting external want can reveal a deeper internal want
5. They pursue an external want that acts counter to their internal want

Let’s review each one.

Use external actions, responses, and dialogue

The easiest way to show internal wants is to be direct—which works whether characters are self-aware or not.

They can express what they want (“I want to be appreciated.”), take actions to achieve their inner want (taking different tactics to be appreciated), or show responses that express it.

For example, a character who wants to be cared for will pursue that love through actions (either verbally or physically). We know they achieve their goal when they receive an external outcome, like a hug, a kind word, or some other expression, and they respond positively.

They find an external object to fulfill their inner want

An example might be the pursuit of money for security or control. But even then, achieving it will likely not end the internal want. Often, characters pursue something only to discover that they want something else.

You’ll see this in films where characters achieve their goals but are left unsatisfied and searching (e.g., Hurt Locker ).

Remember that since internal want extends beyond the edges of your story, your characters may have sought it long before your story begins—and possibly long after it ends.

Therefore, they don't need to receive a lot in the outcome. A smile from another character may be all it takes for someone to move closer toward their goal.

Subtext

Characters can pursue internal wants through external means yet not speak about what they seek. The internal want is never suggested, but we know the character wants a particular thing through their actions.

Unfortunately, this can be easily—and is often—misunderstood.

A shifting external want can reveal a 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.

They pursue an external want that acts counter to their internal want

A final tactic for revealing internal wants is to have a character pursue an external desire to protect themselves from internal conflict.

• In Pretty Woman, the main character buys companies and then breaks them up to sell separately. This tactic 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. Ultimately, he finds reconciliation by not destroying an older man's company.
• In Shrek, the title character wants to clear his swamp so he can be left alone because he fears people won’t like him.

Conclusion

Inner wants are the invisible forces that drive your characters' actions and decisions. They add depth to your characters and stories by creating internal conflicts and motivations that go beyond surface-level goals. As you write, remember:

• Always ask: What does your character want internally? How does this align or conflict with their external wants?
• Nothing should come easily. Inner struggles, stemming from these wants, are essential to compelling narratives.
• Wants and obstacles are two sides of the same coin. Be clear about both, especially when they arise from internal conflicts.
• Inner wants and obstacles add complexity but don't overcomplicate. Use WOARO to organize your thoughts and ensure a balance between internal and external motivations.

By skillfully incorporating inner wants, you'll create more engaging characters whose internal journeys resonate with your audience, even as they pursue their external goals.

This interplay between inner and outer wants is what transforms good stories into great ones, allowing readers to connect with your characters on a deeper, more human level.