Episode At A Glance

Here’s the first question I ask every writer I work with early on:

What does your protagonist want?

Almost every time, what I get back is a circumstance.

She’s drowning in her mother’s alcoholism. He can’t connect with his estranged son. She’s been isolated since her divorce. He disappeared with everything they had.

Those are things happening to the character. They’re pressure. They’re pain. But they’re not want.

Want is active. It’s not static.

Want is what the character is moving toward, not what’s being done to them.

The writers who can answer that question — specifically, concretely, in one sentence — are the ones whose stories have forward motion from page one.

The ones who can’t are often the ones who feel like their story is stuck, or slow, or somehow not working, without being able to name why.

Every character comes into the story already wanting something.

Not hoping. Not suffering. Wanting. There’s a direction. There’s a pull. Something they’re moving toward with enough urgency to carry them into the main action of the story. 

And that want needs to be concrete enough to state in one sentence.

Ruth wants to reconcile with her estranged daughter before she dies.

Nora wants to hold her marriage together after her son’s suicide.

Jess wants to get sober before her daughter stops calling. 

Each of these is concrete enough to name. It gives the character a direction. And it’s enough to get a story moving.

If you can’t state your protagonist’s want in one sentence, that’s where the work starts.

Not with plot. Not with structure. With want. Because without it, nothing your character does will feel purposeful.

That concrete want you establish at the beginning of your story isn’t going to stay the same.

The want is alive. It moves with the character. It deepens under pressure. It shifts when the story forces the character to confront what they actually believe about themselves.

And by the end, if something real has happened to your protagonist, the want looks different than it did at the beginning.

Act One

Marnie comes into the story admitting to herself that she’s lonely. She’s isolated. She knows she has to get out of the house and start interacting with other humans.

She wants connection. Simple. No agenda. No plan. Just contact with other human beings.

And it’s enough to get her moving. She takes her friend Chloe up on her invitation to go on a walking tour. She shows up. That’s the want doing its job.

Your Act 1 want doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to be real enough and urgent enough to get your character into motion.

Act Two

The want meets the world. And the world pushes back.

Marnie mets Michael on that walking tour. And suddenly the want narrows. It’s not just connection anymore – it’s this person. This relationship.

The want has changed from getting out of the house to something far more specific. Marnie and Michael slowly fall in love.

And the moment the want gets specific, it gets complicated.

Act 2 exposes what’s underneath.

It brings fear into contact with desire and forces the character to choose between them – usually more than once, at higher and higher cost each time.

The Act 2 want is messier than the Act 1 want.

Your character is starting to understand what they’re really after. And that understanding is going to cost them something.

When Marnie finds out Michael contacted his ex-wife, the fear wins. She breaks up with him.

She walks away first — before he can leave her. The want she’s been pursuing collapses. And she has to decide what she’s going to do with that.

Act Three

Act 3 is where the want arrives at its truest form.

After the walking tour is over and the co-protagonists are back in their hometown, Marnie walks to the park to meet Michael. She’s carrying a gift she bought for him during that first excursion. She hands him the gift, they exchange conversation. Then she walks away.

Not because she doesn’t want him. But because she no longer needs him to prove she’s worth wanting.

The loneliness that drove her out of the house in Act 1 is still there. But it’s transformed. She can be alone without feeling lonely. 

Her original want when we met her in Act 1 was to alleviate her loneliness. By Act 3, she can be alone without being lonely.

That’s transformation. And it happened because the want itself was not static.

She didn’t get what she thought she wanted in Act 1. She got something truer. The want she ended with isn’t the want she started with. It’s the want she didn’t know she had.

In Act 3, the want isn’t always fulfilled. But it’s always more truthful than the Act 1 want.

Because the story has done its work on the character. And characters who go through something come out wanting different things.

Links Mentioned In This Episode

Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen

The House In The Pines by Ana Reyes

3-Act Worksheet

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