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I’m always fascinated when a story continues to linger with me, especially when it’s one that doesn’t seem all that exceptional while I’m reading or watching it.
We recently finished the limited series Vladimir on Netflix, an eight-episode adaptation of Julia May Jonas’s bestselling novel by the same name—and I haven’t fully stopped thinking about it since.
[Light spoilers coming up in this post, in case you’re planning to watch the show, but I’ll try to keep back specific revealing details.]
Rachel Weisz plays a middle-aged university English professor who spends the entire series fixated on a younger colleague she desires so fervidly, so all-consumingly that he governs her every thought and drives her to more and more extreme actions.
I liked it well enough while we watched—I’d give it a solid 6 or 7—but it wasn’t until the final episode that the show made the deeper impact that’s kept it percolating in my head.
The series doesn’t end the way most viewers may expect, when a few unexpected developments lead the protagonist (who is never named in either the series or the book) to realize what her actual truest desires are.
And that’s the part I can’t stop thinking about: how desire itself can be a motivating force, not necessarily the object of it. Yet so often we—and our characters—think it’s the object that we really want.
The desire beneath the desire
In Vladimir, despite her obsession with her colleague, Weisz’s character realizes her true desires at the end, when faced with the attainment of what she had so thoroughly convinced herself she wanted.
Blocked in her own writing, feeling as if encroaching age has stolen her desirability and vitality, facing deteriorating dynamics in her relationships with her daughter, her husband, and even her career, she finds that pursuing the object of her fixation makes her feel alive again, desirable again, creatively fertile again—and free.
And that’s what the character really wanted all along—the desire she put into the sexily wrapped package of Vladimir himself, rather than the fact that he represented or sparked all those things.
Characters’ desires frequently change and evolve over the course of a story and often, as Weisz’s character does, the protagonist may initially mistake what they actually want, or fail to realize the more foundational driving desire beneath their ostensible desire.
That shift in what truly drives a protagonist is a common story and character arc structure, and harks back to a concept I talk about in my editing and teaching: that mining down deeper than your characters’ top-level motivations and goals is the key to creating layered, complex, compelling stories that engage your readers not only as they’re reading, but long after they put your book down.
Read more: “Beyond Goal and Motivation: The Longing and the Lack”
The path to your character’s true desires
It’s important for you as the author to understand what the character’s real core driving desires are. But the story itself can be built on the fact that the character themselves doesn’t. The events of the plot are what push the character’s evolution along their arc to eventually understanding what they genuinely wanted all along. It’s only through chasing the wrong dream that they realize what the right one is.
Throughout Vladimir, Weisz’s character, who has been facing years of frustrating “writer’s block” after her first novel was a critically acclaimed bestseller, is finally inspired to write again as her fixation on Vladimir feeds her creative fire. In fact it blazes to life, the character feverishly writing more and more the more consuming her desire for Vladimir becomes, as if it’s the only fuel that will help feed those flames.
By the end she’s written something she believes is her best work yet—and she’s come alive in the process in a way she hadn’t for years. Vladimir, she realizes, wasn’t the object of her desires after all…he was just an object that the character convinced herself would fulfill her true desires if she could only attain it.
The realization is the journey—not the attainment of the goal…just like in life.
(I admit I also loved the flipping of the all-too-common script of the stagnated male protagonist objectifying a sexy younger woman who makes him feel powerful and relevant again.)
Does your character actually want what they think they want? How might they be deluding themselves about their true desires? Could reexamining or reconsidering that be part of their arc—or even getting the object of their longings and realizing it’s not what they wanted after all? What are the core driving desires underlying what they think they want?
Read more: “Is Your Protagonist Focused on the Wrong Goal?”
The trap of false wants and hidden desire
Authors often understand that their characters’ goals and desires can change over the course of the story—but that can sometimes lead to a relatively common mistake: The writer pulls their punches, giving their protagonists only lukewarm feelings or interest in what the author knows isn’t their true desire.
Often I see this with romantic relationships in stories—the protagonist is manifestly unhappy with someone who’s clearly a bad fit, or only tepidly committed to the relationship, but when they meet the “right” person their feelings flare to full life.
The instinct to underplay the “wrong” longings is understandable: Authors seem to worry that if their character desperately, fiercely wants and pursues the illusory goal, it may devalue their desire when they finally realize what they truly want, or that it might make their protagonist seem capricious or shallow.
But it’s common and relatably human to believe we want something we don’t really want. Think of the exes you may have longed or fought for whom you’re so deeply grateful you didn’t wind up with; or the career or job you may have felt driven to attain that you eventually realized wasn’t making you happy. (As Garth Brooks says, thank God for unanswered prayers.)
Hell, I do it with something so trivial as shopping, winding up with items in my pantry or closet that I had to have at the time, yet have barely used since. (Ask me about rye berries, black lentils, and my multiple pairs of scarcely worn five-inch stilettos.)
It’s deeply human to change our minds, to reassess our desires through a wider lens of experience or perspective or growth, but if readers don’t see the character’s potent longing for that thing—even if it may later turn out not to be what they really wanted—then stakes are low, the story feels predictable, and the character risks seeming deluded or blind to what readers can so clearly see. They may disengage from the character and their journey—or fail to ever invest in them at all.
Similar dynamics are at work on the opposite side of the coin, with characters who profess their ostensible true desires to other characters (and themselves), or stories where the author tells the reader of their powerful inner longing for that thing…yet we never see evidence of it in their actions or behavior.
This can manifest, for example, with characters who lament that they missed out on a dream—pursuing their creative interests, say—yet readers never see evidence of those longings on the page: the sketches they may make on scrap paper while bored at their “safe” corporate job, sneaking out to museums whenever they can snatch two free hours from other obligations, their powerful emotional reactions to a piece of art that they quickly suppress, etc.
Their ostensible core desire never seems real or motivating, so readers may fail to invest in it.
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As an acting teacher once taught me, great actors make the strongest choices. So do great characters…and great authors.
Whether your character is suppressing their true desire, avoiding it, or simply hasn’t become consciously aware of it, your job as the author is to make them wholeheartedly pursue the thing they believe they want, until experience pushes them to discover the truth. That tension between illusion and self-discovery is their journey, and it’s what creates authentic characters, emotionally resonant stories, and meaningful transformations.
Authors, have you written a character who discovers their true desires over the course of the story? How do you show their initial illusory desires on the page until they do? How do you indicate to readers the motivations that may power their real goals even if they’re initially pursuing the wrong ones?
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