Want, Need, Ghost, Lie

character-building rules and how to break them

Among the myriad methods that writers use to create fictional characters, one popular technique involves four elements that will define a character’s arc and build themes throughout a story. Those four elements are the Want, the Need, the Ghost, and the Lie. Here are their definitions.

Want

What the character wants to get out of the journey, or their personal motivation for continuing from one scene to the next. It can be deep (a character who wants to experience a spiritual awakening or become an adult) or it can be shallow (he just wants the money).

Need

What the character actually needs, meaning the personal, internal growth they have to make in order to complete their journey. Maybe the main character has to learn to be more mature to understand that she can’t grow if she doesn’t take on more responsibilities. Maybe he needs to learn not to take his friends for granted and to put others before himself. This is typically a deeper change because if it’s too shallow (he needs to get better at paying his rent on time) it just becomes a want. This will make the character seem flat and shallow, and the story won’t be very moving for the audience.

Lie

This is something the character believes about the world or about themselves that prevents them from achieving their Need. For example, a character who thinks he’s too weak and uncoordinated and could never join the baseball team, or a young woman who thinks that she’s too inherently bad to ever do anything good again. The Lie has to be created by the writer to specifically act as an obstacle to the character’s Need, otherwise it’s just an unrelated false view the character has about the world or themselves.