WANTED: The ache and drive that makes stories move
Six Weeks. One Burning Question: What Do You Want?
“Desire is the engine of the world. Without it, nothing moves.” — attributed to various sources, arrived at by everyone
Here’s what we know about desire: it’s the reason characters get off the couch, the reason memoirists return to the page, the reason poems exist at all. Every story ever told is, at its core, a story about wanting—wanting and reaching and falling short and reaching again. To write without desire is to write without a pulse.
But desire can be hard to identify and even harder to write.
To name want—on the page, in a character’s body, in the marrow of a memoir—requires a kind of nakedness that most of us have been trained, very carefully, to avoid. Too often, we write around the wanting instead of into it, or, worse yet, we never identify the wanting at all.
On the page, this dulls the story, stalls the narrative drive, muffles the energy. In our lives, this stops us from going all in for what we want or k…