EVERYBODY WANTS SOMETHING

The third foundation of storytelling is human motivation. It begins with learning to see what people want.

Stand in a supermarket queue for two minutes and look at what's going on around you.

A little kid wants a packet on the shelf by the till. His mother wants him to stop whining. The cashier wants the woman in front to find her card. In fact she probably wants to go to lunch. The woman wants last month’s special to still work. The man behind her wants the queue to move. The shop owner, quietly, wants all of them to leave with more than they came in for.

You can call that people in a supermarket. Or you can see a room full of competing wants, which is a lot closer to a story.

This is the third thing I've been practising as I work through becoming better at storytelling. After learning to notice particulars, and then to find the meaning inside them without inflating it. This is the one that changes what an ordinary day looks like.

There's a version of this taught in screenwriting: a character wants X, an obstacle stands in the way, conflict follows. I know, most of us are not writing films, but it is an easy and useful way to think about it. However, before that formula is worth touching, one needs the perception underneath it. We need to be able to see wanting even when nobody has said a word about it.

This is how little it takes to turn an observation into story..

A man sits on a bench. Maybe there’s something there, but nothing is moving.

A man sits on a bench waiting for his daughter. Now something has changed, because the present moment is incomplete. He wants something that hasn't happened yet, so there's a future in this scene, and we can lean towards it.

A man sits on a bench waiting for his daughter. She is forty minutes late.

Where is she? Why is she late? What is he doing with his hands? Will she come?

What was added wasn’t much. But it created a gap between the way things are and the way he wants them to be, and every decent story ever told lives inside a gap like that.

The word "want" is doing more work here than it looks like it's doing. Nobody has to be pursuing anything grand. Wanting is usually small. Someone wants an object, or an outcome, or a piece of information. Someone wants to be recognised, or understood, or taken seriously by the people they work with. Someone wants the traffic light to stay green. Someone wants to get out of a conversation. Someone wants the meeting to go the way they've planned it. Someone very much wants you not to ask about the thing you're about to ask about. Someone wants to keep believing something about themselves: that they're a good father, that they're still the one people call, that they haven't wasted the last ten years.

That last kind is the most interesting, because people are often not aware of it. They can't tell you what they want. 

But their behaviour can.

Which is where the noticing becomes important again. Desire is almost never announced. Nobody says they would currently like some recognition. What you see is a man telling the same achievement story twice in one evening. Or somebody mentioning, lightly, who they had lunch with. Or maybe a colleague going peculiarly quiet when another colleague is praised.

The storyteller may be tempted to say "he desperately wanted recognition." It's usually a mistake, and the same mistake we've encountered before on this journey: Don't hand over the label. Show what the man did, and let me arrive at the want myself. I'll believe my own conclusion far more than I'll believe yours.

Then there's what happens when wants meet each other.

I wrote recently about a three-year-old at a shiva house whose father asked how many sweets she had. She answered by opening her mouth wide so he could look inside. Part of what makes that charming is how clean the wanting is. He wants information. She wants to give it to him. He asks a question. She opens her mouth. Shabbat Shalom.

Put an adult in that chair and watch it complicate. I want to answer him. I don't want him thinking I'm greedy. I don't want to admit it was three. And why is he asking me in front of everyone? Four wants, occupying one person, pulling in different directions, and the behaviour that comes out is very different from that little girl’s straight forward answer.

That's the point at which people become more interesting rather than merely observed. A single want is a situation. Wants that can't both be satisfied is now a story.

One more thing has to be true before any of it matters. The want has to cost something.

Let’s say I want coffee and the machine is broken. That’s mild irritation. Now, if I've been up all night preparing for the most important presentation of my career and the machine is broken? It’s the identical desire and the identical obstacle, but a completely different scene. Something is now at risk.

And stakes are subjective. A lost teddy bear has negligeable financial value. To a four-year-old at bedtime it is a catastrophe. The question is never whether this is objectively important. It's how much it matters to them.

By the way, that same distinction decides whether communication works in a business. A client tells you they want a new website. That's the stated want, but it's probably not the real one. Because behind it there's something like: I want to stop being embarrassed when I send people the link. Or I want to be taken seriously by the type of buyer who currently doesn't call us. Work built on the stated want produces a website. Work built on the real one produces a change. And when you're trying to reach an audience, the same rule applies from the other side. What matters isn't what should be important to them. It's what actually is important to them.

So, if you want to get better at storytelling, here’s the practice for this week.

Stop searching now for interesting observations. Search for wanting instead. One a day is plenty.

Record four things: What happened, described as plainly as you can. What the person in the moment appeared to want. This should be marked clearly as inference, because it is one. What was stopping them getting it. And why it seemed to matter to them.

That last question will sometimes have the answer: I don't know. That’s fine. Leave it there. Manufactured stakes are worse than absent ones.

There’s one constraint, and it's important. Don't choose dramatic situations. Someone receiving terrible news teaches you very little, because the wanting is obvious and enormous. Much better is the man trying and failing to catch a waiter's eye. The machinery is easier to see once you've learned to find it running quietly.

Back in the supermarket queue, nothing is happening. A woman is still looking for her card and has now checked the same pocket twice. The man behind her is saying nothing at all about how long this is taking, and saying it quite loudly. A little kid has been told no for the fourth time and is edging closer to a tantrum.

Nothing much is happening, and there are four stories in the room.