What Does Your Character Want?

Every good story can be explained as a series of events that happens to someone who is in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how they are forced to change as a result. But oftentimes we as readers and writers are left wondering “What is this person's goal?” 
Goals are the protagonist’s driving desire to overcome and achieve. It is the yardstick that your readers will use to gauge everything your character goes through in the story. If you have filler and fluff that does nothing to push the character toward their goal, a reader will get bored and put the book down.
There are two questions you should ask about your characters, especially your main character:

1. What does my protagonist want? This is looking deeper into your character’s external needs. In Despicable Me, Gru wants to be a super villain, and plans to steal the moon. In Little Women, Jo wishes she were a boy, wants to do something great, and never wants to get married. In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins just wants to go home.
2. Why does my protagonist want it? This is fleshing out your character’s internal need, which is the thing that drives their external desires. Gru in Despicable Me wants to make his unpleasable mother proud, because no matter what he has done in life, his mother has left him wanting for love and acceptance. In Little Women, Jo is afraid of change, does not recognize her power as a woman, and believes she is what keeps her family together. In the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins worries about what other Hobbits think of him, and thus suppresses his desire for traveling and seeing the world.

Recommended Book (with Amazon Affiliate Links)

​If you want to explore a book that does a great job of getting you - the reader - invested in the characters, I recommend you check out this one.
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Just so you know, this is an Amazon Affiliate link, so if you purchase anything through it, I get a tiny commission that goes toward buying kids vitamins and cat food.

Little Women is one of my favorite books! It follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy— from childhood to womanhood and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters. The girls each have a marked personality of their own, and they quickly come to feel like your close friends. I laughed with them, cringed at them, and cried sometimes. I didn’t always agree with their choices, and didn’t like all the paths they took, but just like with good friends, I was okay with them becoming themselves. It is one of the best books to study for character development and drawing in reader investment, and I recommend it to everyone who asks.

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