What do you want?

It’s a simple question, right?  What do you want?  One of the first words many children learn is “want”.  It’s almost an instinct.

The first major question in character development is “What does the character want?”  Good characters are active characters and they can’t be active without a desire.  It is this first imbalance that starts the action of the story.  This can’t just be any desire, either.  It has to be a desire so strong, that the character is willing to risk something to get it. 

In Gladiator (a favorite in my screenwriting classes), Maximus, more than anything else, wants to be with his family.  It is what motivates his wanting to win the battle in the beginning.  It is what stops him from returning to Rome with Caesar.  After their murder, it is what keeps him moving in an almost suicidal direction toward saving Rome.  And when he dies in the end, he not only dies as a hero (a very powerful way to end a story), he also finally gets the single thing that he’s been working toward for an entire movie.  He has risked everything, including the one thing he feared most, leadership of Rome, in order to be with his family again.

Even video game stories follow this rule of character development, often putting the player in the shoes of the character who wants the most.  Take the original Donkey Kong, for example.  There really isn’t much of a story.  We know that Jumpman’s girlfriend, Pauline, has been captured by Donkey Kong.  Obviously, Jumpman wants her back.  He wants her back so badly, that he’s willing to risk his life to climb up this building after Donkey Kong to get her back.  This single action, this single desire, is enough to drive an entire game’s action.

I have found that in the story that is our lives, this question is actually pretty difficult to answer.  Ask any college freshman what they want to major in, and 60% of the time, they’ll have no clue – at least, no strong desire.  (The cruel thing is that I know many students who don’t really figure that out until their senior year…)  I learned to start asking this question many years ago.

I moved from New Mexico when I was a junior in high school.  Obviously, that sort of thing is sort of disruptive to your social life, so, as a graduation gift a year and a half later, my parents sent me to New Mexico for a week to spend some time with my old friends.  I got to catch up with people, see graduation, play video games, and go to several graduation parties.  At one of these parties, I got into a conversation with one of my friends’ dad.  He had had a bit to drink and started giving us advice. 

He said some wise things to some other friends before turning to me, “You know what your problem is, Kemp?  You don’t know what you want.  You keep going out with these girls and breaking their hearts.  But it’s just because you don’t know what you want.  Before you go out with another girl, you better be sure you know what you want.”

He was right.  I spent most of high school going in and out of relationships with girls and hurting them every time.  All because I didn’t know what I want.  I didn’t know the kind of girl I was interested in.  I didn’t know who I was.  I didn’t know what I was doing or what I wanted to do.

What do you want?  What do you want so badly that you’re willing to risk to get it?  It may not be much.  Maybe you want that girl’s number.  Do you want it badly enough to risk the embarrassment of finding out that she’s got a boyfriend?  Maybe you want to get a master’s degree.  Do you want it badly enough to spend a few years after undergrad doing work you don’t like in order to save enough money for that master’s?  Maybe you want to be your own boss, work from home, and start your own business.  Do you want that so badly you’re willing to risk your livelihood, the embarrassment of failure, and a whole lot more?  Maybe you want something even bigger than that.

Actually achieving that desire is sort of irrelevant.  Many stories end with the characters never getting what they want.  Sometimes, they find out that they never really wanted that thing in the first place.  Or maybe it just wasn’t worth wanting.  Or maybe they just weren’t meant to get it.  Either way, their lives have been a story worth telling.  As Christians, we can trust that, for a time, God wanted us going after that thing.  Through that story, through that journey, he has shaped us into who we are.  Hopefully that’s more like him.

What about you?  What do you want?  Really.  Ask yourself that question.  What are you willing to risk to get?  How much does that desire factor into your daily life?  What are you doing today to get it?  If you’re not doing anything, how can you expect to really live a life worth telling?