How to Create Charismatic Characters — Part 2: Objects of Desire

In Part 1 of this How to Create Charismatic Characters blog series, we discussed assigning physical attributes to the characters we create. (Read part 1 here.)

While a character’s physical appearance can be important, in literature what really defines characters are the actions they take and the decisions they make when faced with challenges and crisis during a story.

In the book, Fight Club, for example, what distinguishes the two protagonists (the narrator and the dynamic character Tyler Durden) is decidedly not their appearance, but rather the way they behave, the actions they take, and the choices they make.

When stage actors and screen actors are rehearsing a scene, one of the first things they ask themselves is, “What does my character want in this scene?”

Actors ask themselves or the director this question because their entire performance — their movement, tone of voice, and posture — is predicated on what their character wants to achieve or attain.

As a novelist, we become the actors, in a sense, in that we are the ones who choose how a character is going to behave in any given scene. As such, we need to know specifically what our characters want.

A character will have a specific goal within any given scene, but their overall actions in your novel will also be driven by a deep want for an external object of desire.

The object of desire can be a person, such as Daisy, Gatsby’s object of desire on The Great Gatsby. It can be a physical object, like a bomb or computer disc. It can be the completing an action or a mission, like blowing up a bridge as part of the Spanish Civil War in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Or it can be social recognition of some kind, such as a job promotion, an award, or parental approval, such as in the film Meet the Parents.

The object of desire is going to drive your character forward throughout the narrative, forcing them to make decisions and to take actions in hopes of moving them closer to attaining their goals.

The filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “MacGuffin” in the late 1930s. For Hitchcock, a MacGuffin was an object of desire that appears to be of great importance, and which drives the narrative of a story, but which isn’t necessarily what the story is really about.

For an example of a McGuffin, we can look to the original Star Wars film. Throughout the film, everyone is after the plans to the Death Star, which Princess Leia entrusts to the robot R2-D2 early in the story. Everything that happens in that film is a result of the various different character’s desires to attain the stolen plans. But, of course, if you were to ask someone what Star Wars is about, they probably wouldn’t immediately discuss the Death Star plans. More likely they would describe Luke Skywalker’s hero’s journey and the friendships he develops along the way.

For more cinematic examples of objects of desire, we can look to the titles of several Indiana Jones films, including Raiders of the Lost Arc, in which the arc of the covenant is the object of desire, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which the crystal skull is the MacGuffin.

For a literary example, the final Harry Potter book is filled with objects of desire, in the form of both the Horcruxes and the Deathly Hallows themselves, which both the heroes and the villains race to attain first.

Thus far we’ve been discussing character creation largely in the context of creating protagonists, but the creation of an antagonist or villainous character is a similar process in that it entails a process of developing characters who also want the same object of desire as the hero and who will thus create challenges and roadblocks along the protagonist’s quest to attain the object.

Which is to say, antagonistic forces do not need to be pure evil. They just need to have wants and goals that put them in opposition to the hero’s wants and goals.

In fact, there is often an intimacy between the antagonist and the protagonist. Luke Skywalker must face Darth Vader because Vader is his father. Harry Potter can’t just run away from Voldemort because they are psychically connected, existing within one another’s minds no matter how far the physical distance between them.

In his book, Plot and Structure, James Scott Bell calls this connection the adhesive. As Bell puts it, “If your Lead can simply walk away from the opponent and still be able to realize her objective, the reader will be asking, “Well, why doesn’t she?'” Hence the need for an adhesive that bonds the antagonist and the protagonist together.

In fact, the antagonist is often the shadow version of the protagonist. Batman is dark, controlled, and somber, so, of course, the Joker is colorful, chaotic and funny. The Joker is everything Batman represses within himself. Batman’s external object of desire is a stable safe Gotham city, while the Joker’s object of desire is a state of anarchy, and so these to great characters are in state of perpetual conflict due to their wants, desires, and goals.

In part 3 of this series, I’ll explain what I call “the Character Depth Spectrum” and the role is plays in creating dynamic characters.