Two Things You May Be Missing in Your Writing? You Need an Object of Desire
Easy to Understand and Even Easier to Screw Up
Two Main Objects of Desire
Whether you’ve lost your mind (and a leg) hunting for the white whale in Moby Dick or trying to defeat Voldemort, there are always objects of desire that must be decided in making a great story.
You should always be asking:
- What does my character want?
- What does my character need?
If you are writing a story and your characters don’t want anything, you don’t have a story. A bunch of words on pages, sure, but not a story.
Every main character has to have an object of desire. This is foundational to what makes readers commit to the story you are writing. The reader needs to clearly understand what that object of desire is and become committed to following your character’s pursuit of their object of desire.
We are all striving to get what we want. We all connect to that deeply human urge to pursue something we need or want. If you make this pursuit clear to your audience, the reader will most likely become invested in that story. People want to see if they get the object of desire in the end. We all connect with this feeling.
“Focusing on the struggle to get objects of desire will make up for almost every other kind of Story misstep.” (Shawn Coyne, Story Grid, 2015)
At the beginning of every story, some event must throw the protagonist’s life off balance. This event should give rise to the objects of desire that your character will struggle with for the remainder of the story. Objects of desire generally come in two main groups:
- Tangible objects ( destroy the ring of power)
- Intangible objects (temptation, fear)
These objects of desire conflict, which is essential to making a story work. This simple foundational principle gets overlooked easily. Writers can get lost in world-building, character-building, or whatever. If you don’t have the basic principles, the rest doesn’t matter, and the story will feel like it never works.
A Foundational principle to why The Lord of the Rings works as a story is because it has a very focused and apparent conflict of desires throughout the book. Frodo’s tangible object of desire is the mission to destroy the ring, which wars against his intangible objects of desire (temptation and fear). This is made clear from the beginning and carries throughout the book's ups and downs.
This allows the reader to understand the dynamics at play and become attached to the story. You must be clear about the objects of desire.
The Conflicts
Throughout a story, you must constantly swing your character back and forth like a pendulum from their tangible object of desire to their intangible object of desire and then back again.
You must repeat this pattern over and over throughout the story. This is what makes it exciting for your readers. There are three primary conflict devices to use as you essentially torture your poor main character:
- Inner Conflict: This is the inner battle that we all struggle with. Will I be good enough for the task at hand? Will I reach my object of desire or fail?
- Personal Conflict: The villain, the antagonist of the story. You need a villain; all great stories do. Who is the nemesis that stands in the way of the protagonist getting what he wants? Don’t neglect this character!
- Extra Personal Conflict: Is there a volcano about to explode? Is it one of the worst droughts in years? Is time running out? These are all acts of God, conflicts that are just part of the background that help build the subconscious tension of the story. It is easy to forget about but makes a tremendous difference in the quality of the story.
The more you push the limits of your creativity with these conflicts and vary their intensity throughout the story, the better it will become.
This is the secret sauce that either will grip your reader or not.
Make sure to pick one that is your main focus of conflict, but you can use more than one depending on the genre of your story.
Look at your story.
Do you have these foundational principles?
If you do, how can you make them more transparent to your audience, and how can you vary them in a new and creative way?
This will improve your story drastically. It’s the fundamentals that matter for good storytelling.
Now, let’s go write! ✍️
