WHAT DOES YOUR HERO WANT? #6: Revealing Your Hero’s Desires
Let’s finish this series by going through all the types of desires we’ve discussed, making certain that they don’t get confusing.
I want to present them in the logical sequence you might reveal them in your stories, giving you suggestions for how to employ them and where they overlap.
THE ULTIMATE OUTCOME
What is your hero’s BIG WANT? What is the overarching goal that she wants someday, that will determine the individual goals that are steppingstones to that final state of success and happiness? What are the Ultimate Outcomes your hero is striving for (or plans to strive for) when we first meet her?
Eventually, your hero will begin pursuing a specific, visible Outer Motivation that will determine the climax of your story. But that visible desire is one the hero hopes will move her closer to this ultimate outcome.
I mention the Ultimate Outcome first because your hero usually carries this big desire into the story from the beginning. It’s probably existed since before your story begins.
Often, storytellers I work with mistakenly identify this desire as their hero’s defining outer motivation. But it can’t be, because it’s too broad, too vague, or too far into the future.
Your audiences can understand a character wanting to reach a life goal. But it’s hard to formulate sharp, vivid images of wealth, power, happy families, legacies, or a better world for all mankind.
These larger goals can motivate your hero toward their actions in your story. But it’s possible your hero is simply paying lip service to them rather than taking any real action to achieve them. If so these ultimate outcomes also fall into the category of…
LONGINGS AND NEEDS
In the setup of your story, when you first introduce your hero, give us a sense of what’s missing from his life – what needs to change for him to lead a fulfilled life.
If your hero longs for something, give him dialogue that announces that, or have another character say something that alludes to it. Then show us how the hero is avoiding pursuing this desire, or how his plan for obtaining it is a conscious or subconscious, misguided attempt.
Perhaps he is wishing or hoping for it, or insisting he’ll dive in and get busy just as soon as something else in his life is fully resolved.
Or perhaps he claims – or actually believes – that his life is just fine, or at least as good as he’ll ever be able to make it. Instead of declaring a longing, he hides an unacknowledged need. “Things are fine,” or, “This is about as much as I can hope for,” are statements indicating that your hero’s need has been completely ignored or suppressed.
SAMENESS
Revealing your hero’s longing or need allows you to explore her inner journey – her transformation from living in fear to living courageously. These missing pieces in her life are the first sign that what she deeply wants or needs is overpowered by her desire for sameness.
Because of some wound in the past – some traumatic event, some painful situation, or some belief instilled by parents or groups or society in general – your hero has created a protective identity to avoid the pain she is certain will befall her if she risks letting her guard down. This emotional armor is her comfort zone – the boundary she can’t allow herself to cross.
Sadly, a life of real fulfillment, connection and individuation lies on the other side of that wall – out of reach as long as your hero is controlled by her fear. Her desire to keep things the same as they are – even if her circumstances are intolerable – keeps her safe, but stuck.
A character stuck in a desire for sameness will never be truly happy – at least not until she starts pursuing her outer motivation. When she does that, she’ll begin a journey that will force her to let go of her protective identity and find her courage.
THE PRELIMINARY GOAL
Once you’ve introduced your hero and established his longing or need, introduce some opportunity or crisis into his life. He will have to respond, giving him a Preliminary Goal – a desire to figure out, “What should I do about this?” and then act on that desire.
Your hero must decide what this event means, what problem it creates, what solutions are open to him, what the consequences of any new action might be, and who might help him out of this new situation.
The pursuit of this preliminary goal may take your hero down some wrong paths, and will likely lead him to an ally who will help him define the right goal, formulate his plan, and eventually guide him to victory. (In creating a case study/success story for business, this guide should be you, your service or your product.)
This preliminary goal will result in your hero defining and declaring his…
OUTER MOTIVATION
This is the clearly defined outcome your hero wants to achieve, the desire that your readers and viewers are rooting for your hero to accomplish.
Your hero wants to achieve his outer motivation because he believes it will satisfy his…
INNER MOTIVATION
This is the invisible desire for self worth that your hero thinks will be his if he can achieve that visible goal he’s striving for.
If he believes winning this battle or stopping this threat or marrying the woman of his dreams will lead to a sense of acceptance or belonging or love or retribution or success or power, then one of those constitutes his inner motivation.
When your hero takes his first step toward achieving his outer motivation, his preliminary goal is in the past, and now he is on the singular path to achieving what he wants. Now you must force your hero to face and overcome the obstacles in his way – both external conflicts that come from enemies and forces of nature, and the inner conflict that grows out of his dueling desires for achievement and sameness.
And when he wins – when all of these desires have been resolved — his journey, and that of your readers and viewers and listeners, is over.
[Click below to read the previous articles in this series.]
WHAT DOES YOUR HERO WANT? #1: The Outer Motivation
WHAT DOES YOUR HERO WANT? #2: Inner Motivations
WHAT DOES YOUR HERO WANT #3: Longings & Needs
WHAT DOES YOUR HERO WANT? #4: Preliminary Goals and Ultimate Objectives
WHAT DOES YOUR HERO WANT? #5: Sameness
It was a very enlightening series..especially when u r in the middle of an outline..also, an interesting observation is that you mention Hero as a she..any specific reason for that?
“YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT”
This classic Rolling Stone’s song was just running through my head and when I stopped to consider the words…it funnily enough reminded me of the IDENTITY vs. ESSENCE concept used in storytelling. : )
No, you can’t always get what you WANT;
You can’t always get what you want;
You can’t always get what you want;
But if you try sometime; you just might find;
You get what you NEED.
Michael, great post. I think you’re distinction between IDENTITY (character’s want) vs. ESSENCE (character’s need) helps clear up for me what the visible outer motivation needs to be–it’s the hero’s tangible goal (vs. a nebulous goal driven by wounds) and the reason we’re on this story journey.
It serves as a barometer for the audience to gauge whether or not the hero is making progress or backsliding. When the hero hits an obstacle, we worry that he won’t reach his goal…and when the hero overcomes an obstacle, we cheer him on to keep going.
The visible outer motivation is really the most important starting point for any story as every scene is designed as an indicator of progress along the journey.
To summarize what I learned from you: The visible outer motivation is WHAT the hero wants: the inner motivation is WHY they want it; and the love interest is the REWARD for having achieved the goal. By story’s end, the hero is living in their essence and identity becomes less important.
Having discovered Mr. Hauge only yesterday via the Film Courage videos on YouTube, I am obviously a newcomer to this site, but am enjoying immensely his remarks there and on this site. I am struck with the depth of his human understanding, so well reflected in the Identity/Essence concept, which I think gives his Plot Structure chart its effectiveness. We see many other screenwriters talk about the inner need versus outer goal issue in storytelling – indeed, I listened to Syd Field talk about it when I attended his great class in screenwriting in Los Angeles in the 1980’s, which at the time was the only screenwriting instruction I could find, outside of college classes which I couldn’t afford. But Mr. Hauge discusses it in a way that is especially helpful. I am thrilled that insightful, knowledgeable, consummate professionals like Mr. Hauge have made themselves available to those of us in the hinterlands who aspire to literary careers.
Having said that, I do find that many of my favorite films, mostly black comedies and foreign adventure yarns, delve slightly, if at all, into the inner lives of the characters. Offhand I can’t recall instances of Hawkeye Pierce or Yossarian or Gene Ryack and Billy Covington (Air America) bemoaning their lowly estate. We didn’t see Dr. Strangelove/Merkin Muffley/Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, or Col. Bat Guano, Gen. Buck Turgidson, or Brig. Gen. Jack Ripper doing any navel-contemplating. Or Mitch Robbins or Curly Washburn in City Slickers pursuing anything much beyond the gold. Foreign adventure tales don’t show us Jack Ryan or Indiana Jones struggling much with existential dilemmas. You get the idea. And yet everyone adores these movies. I’d really like to hear Mr. Hauge talk about black comedy (the classic term, not African American) and adventure characters, with respect to this.
As a writer, I am struggling with two or three unfinished novels, all of which seemed to stall out. Or maybe I just got bored with them. Either way, I have found his talks and Plot Structure Chart to be invaluable in terms of understanding why they bogged down and in getting them either unstuck or just letting them die of their own boringness.
Of course, I write novels imagining them as movies. As a writer I find the screenplay format very limiting and prefer the literary possibilities afforded by fiction-writing. Besides, who wants to battle the Hollywood mentality that turns out little but a plethora of ear-splitting, special effects-dependent, shoot-’em-up, blow-’em-up, super hero versus evil doer out to destroy the world idiot films that Hollywood turns out today, except perhaps14-year-old boys.
But I digress. As to novel vs. screenplay, If John Grisham can get his books made into films, so can I. Or Margaret Mitchell or Harper Lee or James Jones (that’s Gone With The Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird and From Here to Eternity, for those of you too young to know). Or Richard Hooker (M*A*S*H) or Joseph Heller (Catch 22) or John Steinbeck (both Grapes of Wrath AND East of Eden) or Peter Benchley (Jaws) plus dozens of recent terrific films from authors like Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code), Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada), Joanne Harris (Chocolat), Chris Gardner (The Pursuit of Happyness), Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s List), Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) or a few hundred others.
I’d so appreciate Mr. Hauge discussing this two-pronged attack, for those of us who want to write a book AND a movie, at the same time. It seems obvious that we’d want to follow the filmic format and plot structure in the novel, but I suspect he would have some pointers beyond that.
I’d also like to see Mr. Hauge use more well-known films in his examples, and fewer of latest-out but little known films he seems to favor. I rarely see movies until they come out on TV. Too, there’s a continental divide between movies men like and movies women like, but that’s another story.
Goodness, how I do run on. Sorry!
Thanks for being out there.
Thanks for the great post. I’m going to check out your books. Have you written anything on short film writing? I have too good of a job, and I’m too old, to make a run on a Hollywood career, but I’ve written some short films. I plan on shooting them, but I want to up my game. I think most are decent, but I’ve had one that’s been a bit like a rock in my shoe. I just can’t seem to make it work. Thanks for any input.
Michael,
Thank you very sincerely for your engagement with my question! I know you also strive to help people achieve commercial success, but granting me the privilege of discussing art was very thought-provoking.
Working within an established framework was obviously used in other disciplines in the past, with the results that match your very interesting definition of a work of art, e.g. Bach’s use of the rules of polyphony, or Shakespeare’s use of the rules for sonnets, etc. and on… And master painters, well, let’s not get started.
I think we lost something when those helpful frameworks in painting and poetry were declared outdated, and maybe now the golden age of the relatively new discipline of screenwriting is upon us!
Very best to you,
Simone
Thank you, Michael.
This has been very helpful for simply analyzing my scripts and knowing how to clean up any uncertainties in my arcs. I have 2 scripts in the works right now and the ideas keep coming so several others are simply treatments on index cards. I need a focused approach like this to work my way through them in an efficient way. My imagination and life experiences are constantly germinating ideas and characters.
I hope to be able to work with you personally at some future time. I’ll dig into my drafts and get them moving. Now that I have a financial partner and funding, its time to roll these out!
Michael,
I enjoyed these articles and the final formula. I will put it to use quickly.
Thanks
Sue
Thank you so much for making this advice accessible. I’m printing it out and will review my novel to see how many of these elements are missing.
Hopefully, I’ll figure out the missing link!
Hi Michael:
Good points. All 6 essays were great, and your books and audio books are superb — I have learned a lot from all of them.
BUT
Baby Driver strikes me as an anomalously odd choice to illustrate “tying it all together.”
AND
I think you neglected to mention that if the “obstacles” in the hero’s way aren’t integral to the hero’s personal failings and inner journey to overcome said failings (which they are in, say, Shrek (cf. your own excellent analysis), and most soporifically are *not* in Baby Driver), the story will seem rote, and the audience’s connection to the movie, if there is one, will have to come from somewhere else (for example, from the director’s brilliant use of deep tracks over mad chase scenes (cf. Baby Driver)).
Question: Were you really moved by Baby and Deborah’s “relationship”? Did you really care (or believe it mattered) if he succeeded in completing “one last job and then I’m out”? And if not, was that because Baby’s attitude, perspective, and sense of himself are all exactly the same in the beginning of the movie as at the end?
Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that–if there is something else at stake. But this wasn’t an article about flat characters (cf. your analysis of Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours).
I think Baby Driver was supposed to be like “Breathless” in the beginning and “Die Hard” in the end, but Ansel Elgort is no Jean-Paul Delmondo, and he’s no Bruce Willis. And even if he were, the script would still need tweaking to make the character vibrantly cool or vibrantly sassy/relentless.
The “formula” (as another reader put it) does work, but you can’t cut corners with character and still have a story that feels deep (or cool, or adventurous…) unless you have something else going on. I agree with you that Baby Driver killed it with the chase scene over Hocus Pocus by Focus, and a few of the other music videos. It’s a tour de force in directing.
But the writing, not so much.
🙂
Ben – thanks for these well thought out comments. It’s very gratifying that you’ve enjoyed the series and my other articles, and that you were inspired to go this deeply into the story for BABY DRIVER – even though we don’t completely agree on that movie.
Here’s the thing. When I first see a movie, I don’t ponder any of these things (unless it’s so bad the only thing that keeps me awake it to analyze the structure and characters). I just get lost in the story experience the emotion it creates. If I really like the film, THEN I’ll see it again and try to analyze why I was so involved, and if it illustrates principles I think will prove helpful to other writers. Since I loved BABY DRIVER both times I saw it, and since I recognized the presence of the various levels of desire I wanted to discuss, I used it. When I saw it, I definitely thought – and felt – that Baby had a clear transformation, and that having the courage to take his punishment as a sign of his commitment to Deborah. Perhaps I was swayed by how much I enjoyed the other elements of the story, and perhaps you’re right that the arc was not as strong or deep as other examples. But as long as readers are clearer about the forms of desire they can employ with their hero, and with the way character arc CAN strengthen a movie if done well, I’ve done what I set out to do.
I hope that helps – and thanks again for your input.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for tying it all together in this last post. I was indeed feeling confused about using your definitions.
You have laid out a formula so nicely, but of course it is still a formula. I would love a series on movies (or TV, now that it has a seasonal arc, thanks to Netflix) that show their creators have enough mastery of these ‘rules’ that they are qualified to break them. In other words, to have moved into creating real art.
Thanks again,
Simone
Simone – glad you enjoyed this article, and that it cleared up any confusion I had created. But I take issue with your contention that only movies that break the rules can become “real” art. The measure of success for any art form is whether it stirs our emotions, entertains us, allows us to escape from our ordinary lives in order to have a greater sense of what it means to be human, and gives us the courage to live better. If it achieves those goals by following a formula, so what? It’s only the power and uniqueness of the end result that matters.
Thanks for expanding my articles with your comments. They are much appreciated.
– Michael