Sometimes you’re just going about your day listening to a podcast when a certain phrase stops you in your tracks. This happened to me with Be There in 5, episode 118, an hour and 40-some minutes in.
Yes, the episodes are very long and I love it. :)
Host Kate Kennedy was doing one of her “Kate-lilah” episodes where she answers listener questions. One of the listeners was feeling pressured by her family to find a partner and settle down. She wasn’t sure what to do about this.
On her podcast, Kennedy talks a lot about how back when she was in college, all she wanted was a boyfriend. She dreamt of getting married, but in the end this didn’t happen until later, after she’d established herself in a career she was passionate about (and eventually led to her podcasting gig today).
As Kennedy tells it, all she wanted was to be loved. That’s what she thought, at least. But as she looked back over her life while answering this listener’s question, she noticed that what she’d really wanted all that time was to figure out who she was.
"If the thing I had wanted most had happened,” Kennedy said, “I would have missed out on my entire life."
Kennedy’s post-college story plays out in the way only a real-life story that doesn’t have to make any narrative sense can. That is to say, it plays out the way most of our lives play out. Sort of random. Some of it makes sense, some of it doesn’t. Themes emerge along the way.
Kennedy graduated from Virginia Tech and managed to land a corporate job in New York City she wasn’t qualified for after she made everyone in the interview cry (in a good way). Because she was always running late, she put a note on her doormat to remind herself to turn off the curling iron as she was rushing out of her apartment each day. She pivoted this note routine into an online doormat business, selling mats with phrases like “turn off your straightener” in big block letters, facing the door.
The business took off. Kennedy was able to quit her corporate job and lean into creative projects she always wanted to pursue. This included an adult picture book about influencers (Twinkle, Twinkle Social Media Star) and the Be There in 5 podcast, named after the text she’d always send her friends when she was going back inside to turn off that curling iron.
While giving advice to the listener who’d written in, Kennedy said that if she’d achieved her initial goal of settling down with someone after college, "I wouldn't have any of this because I had no idea I could do any of this."
Sometimes you don’t achieve the goal not because you’re doing it wrong, but because it’s not the right goal.
Changing characters, changing goals
Storytelling means thinking a lot about goals. If you’re following the “goal → conflict → nevertheless, victory” structure, the main character’s goal is the central force propelling the whole plot forward. But it’s important to keep in mind that a lot of times, the things characters think they want aren’t what they really want.
We touched on this a few weeks ago in my post about unhappy endings. Sometimes a character doesn’t get what they want, but they do get what they need. This can happen in books with happy endings, too. Especially when a character changes so completely by the end that the thing they want also changes.
Kennedy’s story is like that. In her advice to the listener, she explained how not getting the things she initially wanted pushed her to reconsider who she was at a fundamental level. She did eventually get married, but by that point, marriage wasn’t her main goal in life. This wasn’t because she’d become an entirely different person, but because the events of her life changed her in a fundamental way.
The thing beneath the thing
OK but, how do you put this into practice in your own stories? We talked about this quite a bit in my workshop series at the DC Center. It can help to think about what I call “the thing beneath the thing.” What’s the desire beneath your character’s desire? What’s really motivating them to achieve this goal?
And how can you make sure the story challenges them in a way that forces them to grow and chase that deeper, inner desire they’ve been ignoring all this time?
Here’s the exercise we did, with credit to Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World.
First, remember how a character’s desire works in the story:
Think about who your character is at the beginning of the story. Then think about their goal in that story, and how it ends up challenging them. Search for the goal beneath the goal that will force them to step outside their comfort zone.
Finishing this sentence will help you figure it out:
Here are a few examples of how to do it, from Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas:
It’s interesting how often our different desires come into conflict. Frodo wants a simple life, but also cares so much about his fellow hobbits that he decides he’ll do almost anything to protect them. Starr wants to get along with everyone, but she also has a deep sense of justice that compels her to speak out when something isn’t right.
In Kennedy’s case, I might say, “Kate Kennedy was a girl who just wanted to settle down and get married. But then she realized she had dreams of being an entrepreneur.” Those things aren’t *necessarily* in conflict, but she does talk a lot on her podcast about working to figure out her own identity, after years of mostly focusing on how other people perceived her. That tension between being loved and loving oneself sets up a really interesting internal conflict.
In the end, Kennedy’s able to reconcile these dreams. It’s the journey toward this reconciliation that changes her, and turns her into a person that gives advice on a podcast that stops me in my tracks.
With a lot of doormats along the way.
Happy storytelling, all!
–Erin
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Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
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