Give Desire Competition

A protagonist can want something, meet obstacle after obstacle, and still read like a vector, steerable and easy to forget. Every obstacle only slows her down, and nothing she does costs her anything we were shown she cared about. A common first lesson is that characters need goals. That gives her direction. It doesn’t yet give you a person.

Tolstoy gives Anna Karenina two wants and won’t let her keep them together. She has been in Petersburg for days without seeing her son. She has written to Countess Lidia Ivanovna, a close friend of her husband, and the answer has been that there is no answer. So on Seryozha’s birthday she goes to her husband’s house at eight in the morning, presses a three-rouble note into a porter’s assistant’s hand, names a false sender, and is let up to the nursery. The boy wakes, says he knew she would come, and will not let go of her. Then the nurse whispers that the master always comes at nine. Anna cannot say goodbye, manages a few broken words, and leaves with the parcel of toys she bought the day before; Tolstoy tells us she had not had time to undo it (Part Five, chapters 29 and 30, in Constance Garnett’s translation).

The other want is Vronsky, for whom she left the house she now has to sneak into, and neither is named in the nursery. In the days before, Tolstoy says, she had hidden everything about her son from Vronsky, because his cool tone would make her begin to hate him, which she dreaded more than anything in the world. In the nursery her mind narrows to one thought, that she must go, and the bribe, the false name and the unopened parcel carry the conflict for her.

Competing desires are two specific wants, each legitimate to the character, that cannot both be satisfied here, so that every act toward one damages the other. Indecision doesn’t qualify, and neither does the sigh (“part of her wanted to stay”). The wants needn’t be grand: wanting to be left alone and wanting to be asked. A choice between a want and nothing is an errand. When two wants collide, the reader keeps track of both and can’t tell which will lose, and we learn how much Anna wants her son by what she risks to see him.

If you plan, you can choose two wants the plot will force into conflict. If you draft first, look afterward for the places where a character hesitates, lies, changes the subject or hides something from someone; a second want may well be leaking out there.

A lean want is sometimes simply correct, in a fable, a farce, a thriller’s pursuer, a minor character (35), or a narrator whose job is to guide.

Practice. Take the protagonist of the scene or chapter you are working on, or the narrator of the essay. Write down, in ten minutes, two things she wants here that cannot both be had, each specific enough that an observer could see it (“to be alone in the house when the call comes,” not “freedom”). Then write half a page, in twenty minutes, in which she takes one small action that serves the first want and quietly damages the second. Ask what she paid. If the answer is nothing, the second want is decoration, and your job is to make it cost.