There’s a certain amount of terminology encountered in the world of screenwriting, some of it useful and some of it like the jargon of other fields seemingly meant more to determine who’s an insider and who’d like to be. One of the more useful term bandied about is ‘character arc’. And what that does, as it suggests, is describe the transition of a character from the start of a story to its climax.

You’d think that the genre of the film is one of the bigger factors in determining the nature of the particular arc, and to some extent you’d be right. But perhaps the most useful way of plotting the arc of whatever character you’re wanting to write is to think through what they want and what they need.

Want vs need sets up a dynamic that propels the character through the story. And it can be resolved in one of several ways. A character can have what they want, but not what they need, and be ignorant of this. Or, they can have what they want, not what they need, and realise that they’ve fallen short - you can milk a lot of tragedy out of this one. Alternatively, they can get what they need, but not what they want, which is a classic way of showing maturation. Or if they’re lucky fucks, they get what they want and a side-order of what they need.

Those are the ways it breaks down, but it helps to log it in with some specifics. Let’s say your heroine wants to be a lawyer, but needs to have a better relationship with her sister. If she got what she was after, we’re headed for some kind of tragedy - it’s the curse that afflicts the protagonist of There Will Be Blood, who gets to be a big oil tycoon but loses everyone around him in the process. And that can happen one of two ways: with or without self-knowledge. Realising you’ve got what you wanted but sensing there’s something more can make life awful hollow.

Or, lets say she gets what she needs: one way is for her to make a go of being a lawyer, and realising she was only doing it to compete with her high-flying sister, maybe, and that their relationship matters more than the ulcers she’d get pursuing a job where she gets her name in gold letters on the door. Alternatively, she gets to be a lawyer and by acting as her sister’s legal representative, the two become tight once more.

Get it? From the simple dynamic inherent in wants vs needs, you can do all sorts of useful speculation about the story you’re interested in, and follow the route that’s got the most dramatic potential. And why not get fancy with it? This heuristic (rule of thumb) can be applied not just to overall character arcs, but to what happens in specific scenes, helping to give them some richness they might otherwise lack if you’re thinking purely in terms of getting from A to B.

Anyway, off to contemplate my own wants and needs, since I want breakfast and need to lose weight, and I’ve been told that today is not a day for dieting by the friend I’m visiting for lunch…decisions, decisions…