Want versus Need: Another Way to Think About Story Structure

By David Griffin Brown

Two Roads to an Ending

The concept of want versus need offers another way to think about story structure. Apart from the most experimental fiction, every narrative has a trajectory: a protagonist chasing something they want, facing obstacles along the way, and confronting success or failure in the climax. That want is the external goal. Beneath it lies the need, the internal conflict or the misbelief the character must come to terms with.

Some stories give us characters who get what they want because they finally recognize what they need. Others deliver tragedy: the character either fails to reach the goal or achieves it only to realize it was never what they truly needed. This model doesn’t replace concepts like narrative goal or internal conflict. Instead, it provides us with another way of wrapping our heads around the complexity of narrative structure.

The Goal that Drives the Plot

With few exceptions, stories fall flat without a clear external goal. The goal focuses the rising action, shapes the stakes, and keeps readers invested. A character drifting from scene to scene without a tangible desire feels aimless. The goal gives the story its spine.

Take Gatsby pining for Daisy Buchanan. His goal is simple: win her back. But the green light across the bay isn’t just his unrequited love—it’s the whole glittering illusion of the Jazz Age. His pursuit of Daisy pulls him into conflict with her husband, her class, and the moral emptiness of the world he’s idealized. When Gatsby fails, it costs him everything.

In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged gives us another kind of goal. He must master the magic within him and defeat the shadow he himself unleashed. The stakes are epic, but the danger is intimate. The shadow is his own arrogance made flesh. When he finally triumphs, the victory sets him free, internally and externally.

Frodo destroying the One Ring offers the purest version of the narrative goal. Clear, tangible, high stakes. If he fails, Sauron wins, Middle Earth falls, the story ends in darkness. But simple doesn’t mean shallow. Tolkien gives us a goal that sustains three volumes of hardship and still lands with weight at the climax.

Whether small or sweeping, the protagonist’s goal drives the plot because it sets the character in motion. This is the want.

When Character and Plot Collide

A story can’t live on external stakes alone. Readers need more than the question of whether Frodo will destroy the Ring or Gatsby will win Daisy’s hand. We need to feel the personal stakes, to see how the pursuit changes the character along the way.

That’s where the need comes in. The internal goal is rarely conscious at first. It hides beneath misbeliefs: I’m only worthy if I win. The world is against me. Attachment makes me weak. These lies drive the character’s choices until the story forces a reckoning.

Winston in 1984 wants to rebel against Big Brother, but he needs to confront his own illusions about freedom and loyalty. Anne Shirley wants a family, but she needs to learn self-acceptance. Paul Atreides wants to reclaim his birthright in Dune, but his need—the piece he can’t see—is to understand what power will cost him.

When the want and the need pull in opposite directions, plot and character collide. That friction creates the energy of narrative.

Outer Battles, Inner Wars

Plot is the transformation of the internal by the external. The battles on the surface—the villain, the disaster, the love interest walking out the door—these shape the real war happening underneath.

Sometimes the connection is obvious. Ged’s arrogance unleashes the shadow he must later defeat. Sometimes it’s more subtle. Esther Greenwood’s depression in The Bell Jar impacts every external event, twisting opportunities into threats, relationships into traps. Either way, the story works best when the outer struggle forces the character to confront the inner one.

A flat plot resolves the external problem without touching the internal. The hero wins the battle, gets the girl, claims the crown—and remains unchanged. We might cheer for a moment, but the story isn’t likely to be memorable. We probably won’t finish the final page and start texting friends OMG YOU HAVE TO READ THIS.  When the external forces the internal to shift, when victory or defeat costs the hero their illusions, that’s when we really connect to their journey and transformation. And that’s when a story lingers.

Trajectory: From Spark to Climax

The inciting incident crystallizes the want. Something happens that disrupts the character’s status quo and hands them a goal—while also raising the stakes of failure. From there, the story’s trajectory runs through rising action toward the climax. Striving, struggling, facing setbacks—that’s the heartbeat of plot.

The midpoint often brings a revelation or reversal. Sometimes the character glimpses the need here but doesn’t yet act on it. Sometimes they double down on the want, clinging to old lies even as the story tightens the screws.

And some of the toughest obstacles stem from the character’s unacknowledged need. Miscommunication, self-doubt, arrogance, fear—these can sabotage the quest more effectively than any villain. Gatsby fights rivals, circumstances, and time itself, but the most devastating blow comes from his own illusion: the belief that Daisy embodies his dream and that the past can be remade. His external quest crashes because his misbelief has blinded him.

The climax brings the want and the need into direct conflict. Now let’s look at this model in terms of what the old Greek dramaturgists referred to as a comedy and tragedy. In a comedy, the character recognizes the need before or during the climax, and that growth makes victory possible. In a tragedy, the character realizes the need only after losing the want—or never realizes it at all.

Story Arc Outcomes: Wins and Losses

In the comic (or traditional) structure, transformation comes before the climax. The hero faces the inner flaw, embraces the need, and wins because of it. Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea accepts the shadow as part of himself, gaining the wisdom to defeat it and restore the world’s balance. Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice confronts her own… well, her own pride and prejudice, clearing the way for love and reconciliation. The external goal succeeds because the internal conflict resolves.

Tragedy flips that order. The hero either refuses the need or realizes it only after losing the goal. Gatsby realizes too late that Daisy was never the dream he thought she was. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights spends years consumed by revenge and obsession, only to see the emptiness of his pursuit in the end.

Some stories land in between. The character gives up the want but gains the need instead. Or they achieve the want but at a cost that makes the victory hollow. Paul Atreides gains the throne in Dune but inherits a jihad he can’t control. The Buendía family in One Hundred Years of Solitude breaks some cycles but remains haunted by others. These tragicomic endings stay with us because they taste of both defeat and transcendence.

Weaving Want and Need

When drafting or revising, start by naming your protagonist’s want and need. What does your character chase on the surface? What wound or misbelief drives them underneath? Then design the plot so that every external obstacle also presses on the internal one. Let victories ring empty until they confront the real issue. Let failures cut deep enough to force change—or to break them entirely.

A climax without that pressure risks feeling thin or unearned. Winning the battle means little if it doesn’t transform the hero in some way. Losing means little if it teaches them nothing. The stories that resonate and persist give us both: a plot that couldn’t belong to any other character, and a conflicted character who is inseparable from the plot.

David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling and Story Skeleton: The Classics. His debut novel, When the Sky Breaks, was released in 2025. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.