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The mainspring of story is desire. What drives your hero on from one scene to the next? What shapes their actions in a consistent way? It is their desire, they thing they are driven to attain. The ...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29867 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29867 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
The mainspring of story is desire. What drives your hero on from one scene to the next? What shapes their actions in a consistent way? It is their desire, they thing they are driven to attain. The desire can be anything that reasonably drives someone to action: love, lust, greed, revenge, the desire to save, the desire to return. But you have to find the desire, the want that is strong enough to drive the character forward in the face of mounting opposition and disappointment. And then you need to manufacture the opposition and create the disappointment, and drive the character on toward that point where they have to make a fundamental choice about their values, either recognizing what their values really are or making a change in their values. The key elements, in other words, are force and resistance, rock and hard place, devil and the deep blue sea. Once you find those you have the mainspring the drives your story from one scene to the next.