Character: Desire and the Human Complex

Episode 014

Welcome back to The Writing Apothecary podcast and to our next lesson centred around the desire and human complex when it comes to characters.

I want to ask you, first, a few questions:

Who is your favourite character? Or characters?

What do you think makes them your favourite character?

The major points of today’s podcast are:

• All characters have a living, breathing desire if they are a fully formed and dimensional character.
• Desire is a driving force of human nature and when it’s applied to characters it creates momentum to drive a story further, which is what we all want our stories to do as we write them.
• Your characters can have huge intoxicating desires, or they can have small and simple desires, but regardless of the size, your characters need to want it so badly that they will move heaven and earth to get there.
• They need to have contrasting traits, and these can be subtle, or they can be really conflicting.
• Just like with desire a main character’s ability to change moves the story forward but sometimes doesn’t get resolved at the end of it all.

Tell me what did you take away from this week’s lesson?

I’d love to know.

Also, I would really appreciate it if you took the time to rate and review the podcast it helps people find our community and gets the podcast out into the world a little more.