Finding the Core Want

Your characters have to Want.

It’s why they do what they do. Most of the time. Fear could be a factor. Anger, jealousy, hate . . . etc., but over all of those things is The Want.

There’s a core Want that follows every character throughout the plot. Whether it metamorphizes into different types of the Want (i.e., a character wants a home, which looks one way in the beginning of the story and something completely different by the end), the Want is a core part of the character’s motivations.

Without a Want, characters can appear to be pushed around by the plot, wandering aimlessly, or continually reacting instead of being proactive.

Lately, I’ve been rereading the Star Wars Expanded Universe/Legends book series. The OG Trio, Luke, Leia, and Han, are so well-known, I thought they would be a good example, focusing on Luke.

Luke’s story in Legends was first introduced to the audience through the original trilogy, being raised on a moisture farm on Tatooine. Luke is the protagonist of the original movies, and functions as the Hero and the Chosen One. His main goal when he is introduced is to ‘get off the farm’. His Want is so strong, he is aiming to join the Imperial Flight Academy, which is where Imperial fighter-pilots are trained.

Why would 18-year-old Luke want to fly for the Empire? He doesn’t. It’s just that in his world, from his perspective at the beginning of A New Hope, that’s the only way he could conceivably get off of Tatooine.

What was happening out in the galaxy were rumors and gossip and second-hand tales from spacers that Luke probably heard third hand from friends who lived near the spaceports. Remember, Luke was on a moisture farm, out in the middle of nowhere.

We have a young Luke with a singular, overarching Want: leave Tatooine. But that simple Want hides a deeper Want: to protect people and to have adventures. These go hand in hand.

Then he gets his (simple) Want and is able to leave right into the graveyard of Alderaan, just destroyed by the Death Star. Immediately, his Want has led him to danger.

Does he change his Want? No. And that is what makes it a Core Want. Throughout the rest of the trilogy, and then (focusing on the Expanded Universe and not the newest trilogy) through the books, Luke’s Want does not change through war, danger, heartache, setbacks, or even betrayal.

But what does his Want lead to? For many, it led to the saving of their lives, as Luke defeated the Death Star. He was instrumental in winning the war against the Empire (which lasted much longer than it seems in the films). He became a symbol in the New Republic of stability and began the New Jedi Order and the Jedi Academy.

For himself, he grows into the roles of Jedi Master, then Grandmaster (again, Expanded Universe), meanwhile also fulfilling roles of brother, uncle, husband, and father.

He makes mistakes. Terrible ones, at times, but his Core Want can have both negative and positive consequences. Wanting to protect people can of course lead to good things. But taken to the extreme, wanting to protect people can lead to burn out, controlling behaviors, and living in fear (hello, Anakin Skywalker).

For Luke to be more than a one-note character, it makes sense that he has more than one Core Want, such as building up the Jedi Order and making sure that the Jedi have a firm foundation, not just as a new order, but also as individuals.

These Core Wants help temper his original Core Want, wanting to protect people and going on adventures. When Jedi live in fear, they can easily turn to the Dark Side, their fears becoming fuel and reason to commit atrocities in the name of their loved ones as Sith.

Luke’s Core Want of building up the Jedi Order and being a good Jedi helps him to guide his Core Want of protecting people, especially when it comes to those he loves (Leia, Han, Chewie, eventually the kids, Mara Jade, etc.) and those he feels responsible for.

Core Wants can also be a good source of conflict. Luke Wanting to protect people, on bad days, makes him feel responsible for things that were always beyond his control, which is a pitfall that many Jedi can fall into. This struggle is both unique to the character and universal.

Both the despair and arrogance of false responsibility, tied with the fear of loss. It can turn positive when false responsibility is set aside, and duty and perseverance replace despair and arrogance.

In this way, Core Wants can have a dual purpose of providing both character motivation and conflict when perverted.

Luke’s Wants drive his proactive actions and his reactions, which often drive the plot towards one climactic scenario or another. When Luke makes a mistake, his Core Wants are also instrumental in activating his emotions in response to his own decisions. When he is less compassionate than he could have been or when he makes an impulsive decision, his Want of being a good Jedi Master does not let him move forward too far without some self-doubt or self-recrimination. In reverse, his Wants can also prevent him from making bad decisions, even though it seems painful at the time.

Leia and Han also have their Core Wants. Whether Han admits it to himself (at first) or not, he also Wants to protect people, which is one of the Wants that allows him to make that initial connection with both Luke and Leia.

Leia and Luke share the same intensity in their Core Want of protecting people, but they go about it in different ways. Leia, from more of a leadership position, though she is active in the Rebellion. When the New Republic is established, she takes a political approach more than a Jedi approach, working alongside her brother many times, but focused more from a diplomatic perspective.

This being Star Wars, that doesn’t preclude her from being in the midst of the action, especially when she often goes to investigate mysteries or solve problems herself. In this way, the twins are, so to speak, twinning.

Another way to work with Core Wants in a novel is for the events in the plot to become obstacles to a Core Want. Luke Wanted to build a Jedi Order and Jedi Academy and came up against time being taken away from him on fighting those pesky Imperials, trying to find Force-sensitives who would train under him, and even just establishing the academy in a safe, well-guarded place.

Within his character arc he struggled with feeling worthy of the position he was in, to be the Master Jedi of the New Order, and philosophical quandaries, like how future Jedi should be trained and taught to use the Force.

He’s seen both the Light and the Dark side of the Force, while also having to become a Jedi with very little information available to him. In this way, lore and setting also play a part in being an obstacle to his Want. We are first introduced to Luke Skywalker, future Grandmaster of the New Jedi Order, in a galaxy where the Jedi were purged the day he was born and all Force-sensitives are hunted by a fascist Empire.

This ensures that he is ignorant of his abilities at first, but once he discovers that he is in fact Force-sensitive (at a Skywalker level, too, which is another thing entirely) his simple Want of wanting to leave Tatooine reveals itself as his Core Wants of saving people, having adventures, building the New Jedi Order, etc.

Throughout his story, Luke interacts with his Core Wants in different ways. In the Expanded Universe, we follow Luke from the age of 18 to the age of 60-something, and over time he grows in maturity, wisdom, and knowledge. This fundamentally changes the way he interacts with his Wants, while also keeping to the same boy that was full of hope on his uncle’s moisture farm in Tatooine.

You may notice that my discussion of Wants was deeply tied with the character of Luke Skywalker. In the same way, when you are discovering the Wants for your character, they should be woven throughout their character arc and the plot of the story. A character that does not Want is a character without motivation.

I am currently working on a story where I have a vague idea what my character’s Want is but not enough to logically or believably drive her actions. I need to define it, specifically, to her, where her actions and her drives both make the plot and react proactively to it. It also makes sense to redefine the Want as you go through the story or series. The Want doesn’t have to change to something completely different, but can morph with new information, much like Luke went from simply wanting to leave Tatooine for adventure to fighting with the Rebellion to save the galaxy.

With both Wants, it reveals that he felt intrinsically that he was meant for other things, without really knowing what that meant. He just knew that the ‘other things’ were not on the farm.

Wants do not complete a character. They are not the sum total of any character or character arc. They can’t be. A character that only wants . . . well, that would probably end up being kind of creepy? They also have their Fears, Desires (a tricky difference between Wants and Desires, but it’s there, more on that later in another post) Beliefs, Physical Traits that effect their daily lives, and a host of other things. No one is actually simple. That word when used about humans was always meant as an insult. No one is simple, though they can be unburdened, unskilled, and uncomplicated.

When creating your character, look for their Wants and define them to yourself so that you can weave them through the story in a way that dance along your narrative and flit between your character arcs, bringing cohesion and life to your story.

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