“What Do You Long For?”

The Most Elusive of the 7 Character Emotional Drivers

Buried deep in your soul, you long for something. We all do. We long for stability. Community. Love. A true life. A way to honor our ancestors.

One reason we read fiction is to find a template for satisfying our deepest longings. We search the character’s actions and wonder whether we can emulate them. We track their emotional journey, riding shotgun to their ups and downs, marking when the succeed (and when they fail).

This is especially true for young readers. If you write for children of any age, you are writing for an audience with a steep and necessary learning curve, so you must reach them at all the emotional levels of character.

I’ve identified seven major emotional drivers in protagonists, and among them is the most elusive: longing.

What Separates Longing

There are three closely related emotional drivers for the protagonist of any story: external goal; internal desire; longing. What makes longing different from the first two?

The external goal is pretty easy. It’s what the protagonist must do to achieve the story goal. Whether that’s finding true love, throwing a ring in the fire, winning a battle-to-the-death, or taming a dragon, it’s what pins a story to the map. Without an external goal, you have no story. You can write it up in a single sentence, and that marks your story’s concept.

The internal desire is a little more fuzzy. It stems from something the protagonist wants emotionally. So, not just finding true love, but finding true love with that guy you can’t get out of your mind. Not just throwing a ring in the fire but saving the world and people you love. Not just winning a battle or taming a dragon but keeping your fragile young sister from dying or forcing your unforgiving father to “see” you.

So, what separates the longing from these two other drivers?

First, the protagonist can’t immediately verbalize the longing (but you, the writer, must be able to.)

Second, the longing lies deep inside, and has been there for a long time before your story begins. It’s a missing piece of the character’s soul.

And, like the other emotional drivers, it must be satisfied before the story’s end but often comes as an aha moment for the protagonist late in the story.

Some Examples of Longing

Bella falls in love with a vampire, Edward. Her external story goal is to avoid being killed by other vampires (in repeated fashion over the entire story arc). Her internal desire is to live a life with Edward, even if that means becoming a vampire. But her longing, which isn’t fully expressed until late in the series, is to become the person she is meant to be. Instead of “stumbling through life, literally”, she understands that she doesn’t fit in as a human; and that longing is only satisfied when, near the end of the series, she knows that becoming a vampire satisfies that deep longing both to belong to a community and to be her powerfully true self. Which makes her character arc rise above the central love story, as compelling as that is – the story becomes one of self-fulfillment.

In WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, Max’s external story goal is to behave as he wishes, which makes him a “wild thing”. His internal desire is to play wildly, and dance, and rule over the other “wild things”. But his longing, which he doesn’t realize until all that playing grows stale, is for an acknowledgement that his mother loves him even when he misbehaves. Fortunately for Max, he finds that acknowledgement of his mother’s love when he sees the supper in his room, still hot.

To write a story that resonates with the most complex of human emotions, regardless of that story’s genre or length, you must be able to define your protagonist’s longing.

Need Help with That?

I have a short and (really, really) inexpensive course just for you: Character Compass. I outline those seven emotional drivers, including the longing, with exercises designed to help you clarify each one.

You can check it out here, and all of my courses (including Idea Incubator, which will help you define that external goal among other things) here.

As always, keep writing!! The world - and kids - need your books!