- stormbringer -

THERE ARE CLEAR DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY WITH OVERLAPS AND REINVENTIONS AND OFTEN EVEN FLIPPED EXPECTATIONS!!!!

THE BINARY WORKS BECAUSE OF THIS DELECATE FORMAT AND BRINGS IN NEW AND INTERESTING ANGLES BY SUBVERTING EXPECTATIONS!!!

It’s surprisingly easy to come up with an incredibly cool plot and characters without giving the characters enough motivation to make it actually compelling enough to read or even write. If you have a cool af idea that you somehow just can’t bring yourself to write, ask yourself what the main character wants, and how is that driving their decisions?

They need to want it so bad that it makes them look stupid. They need to impulse-buy a half-broken spaceship by mortgaging radioactive land, because they’re just that desperate to prove themselves more than a discarded scrap of a far greater history. They need to want their home and their people safe so much that they’ll risk their own soul to march across hundreds of miles of unknown and terrible danger to throw a cursed ring into a volcano. They need to love someone so much, and need them to know it, that they’ll blurt it out in the middle of a press conference or royal ball, or surrounded by enemies with a garrote at their throat or about to be frozen in carbonite or in the middle of a storm-tossed sea battle between pirates, British Navy, and the undead—or, they need to love someone so much that they’ll swear fealty to an evil emperor and kill a bunch of friends and children for the power to save them. They need to be so balls-to-the-wall insane in at least one regard that the plot isn’t just happening to them, they are in some way causing the plot.

As an Aro-Ace who was very uncomfortable with your post until this point: THANK YOU!

Also, one caveat: there is one rare type of story where the protagonist cannot become stupid over what they're after. This is the detective story where their character is in many ways a placeholder for the audience to try to solve the puzzle (as opposed to more thrilery types of detective story) and the detective's internal motivations are basically irrelevant because they are in many ways a framing device.

How do you write a protagonist where the thrust of the story is that they don't know what they want?

the character's want at the beginning of the story is to find out what they want, so they'll try anything once

they do a bunch of dumb shit chasing the feeling of wanting something, no matter how fleeting, in case THIS is The Thing

they have something they think they want at the beginning of the story that turns out to really be something else

throw a character at them that DOES want a thing and is dragging them into said hijinks whether they like it or not -- especially if not, then their initial Want is "get me the fuck out of here" (possibly with a side of "but also I need to rescue my friend from themself" if it's too easy for them to otherwise just nope out of the plot XD)

But, when you're sat there staring at a character who is coming into the space of the story crunchily fucked up in some way which is flattening their ability to want things, or rendering 'what they want' so abstract or orthogonal to what's actually happening that it isn't providing the driving energy...