Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 43

CHARACTER
CREATION

In addition to what my character
wants, what does my character
need? Desire and need are not the
same thing. Every day you suggest—the two terms are often synonymous, but in the writer’s vocabulary, desire and need are two
very different ideas.
So first, definitions: character desire. We’ve looked a good deal at
desire, but let’s take our understanding of desire even further.
A desire is an energetic intention aimed at something that exists outside the character’s private
self. In all stories, the protagonist
has at least one conscious desire.
In many complex characters, this
conscious desire conflicts with a
subconscious desire as well.
If, for example, you were to poll
aside Danny Archer, Leonardo DiCaprio’s protagonist from the film
Blood Diamond, and whisper in Archer’s ear, “Danny. You can tell me,
kid. What do you want?” Danny
would tell you his conscious desire.
Danny knows what Danny wants,
or at least he thinks he knows, and
he knows what he wants at this moment, next week, in his life. Danny
believes that in this lawless world,
it’s every man for himself. He wants
to steal an enormous diamond so
he can leave Africa and live somewhere else in style.
Consciously Danny wants riches,
but only for himself. Yet at the climax of this story, Danny is faced

with a dilemma: A choice between
himself and another man and that
poor man’s family. He chooses to
sacrifice himself and save the other man, because at heart, Danny is far more selfless than selfish.
His unconscious desire has always been to do the moral thing,
the right thing, and his moral desire struggling against his immoral
desire has been pulling him apart
throughout the adventure until
his subconscious desire finally triumphs.
Desire, however, conscious or subconscious, does not move through
the story in a straight line, of course.
Once the inciting incident has
thrown the protagonist’s life out of
balance, the major character desire for his object of desire comes
to life. The protagonist pursues his
object of desire, and to reach it, he
struggles against the forces of antagonism—what he wants versus
obstacle after obstacle that blocks
his pursuit. Each action he takes,
beat by beat, scene by scene, sequence by sequence, act by act,
demands a new conscious desire
of the moment, what he must do
at that moment to match each new
confrontation.
So it goes, turning point by turning point, as his story’s progressive
events zigzag from positive charge
to negative charge, ending at story
climax. Out of this final event, the
protagonist either gets his object
of desire or fails to get it. The end.

Story Magazine // Issue 005

That is desire in action: the pursuit
of something that exists outside
the conscious private self.
Next, let me define character need.
A major character need is something that does not exist within a
specific character. I define character need as a lacking inside of
the self—a missing part, in fact, a
critical but absent quality. In other
words, the character has a hole in
his humanity. The ideal human being would have this quality, but this
particular character lacks it. Again,
ideally, that emptiness should
be filled, but it may stay vacuous
throughout the character’s life, unless, as in so many wonderful stories, something comes along that
gives the character a chance to fill
the hole in his humanity, to complete his nature.
For example, a famous redemption
plot, Sylvester Stallone’s classic tale
of Rocky, 1976. At the beginning of
the film, Rocky wallows in self-disgust. He calls himself a bum and a
loser, and he is that, and worse in
fact. One of his part-time jobs is
breaking legs for a loan shark. So he
hates himself for the life he leads.
In other words, Rocky lacks a sense
of self-worth. He lacks self-love. He
has a gaping need for self-respect.
There is a hole in Rocky’s heart
where self-esteem should be, but
he fills it instead with self-hate.
Now, he could spend his whole
life in that state, but, by coinci-