Outer wants, inner needs

and the quest that reveals it all

It is a principle of storytelling in the scriptwriting world that every hero has both an outer want and an inner need.

The hero’s initial quest pursues their outer want: they want to get the girl, get rich, lock up the bad guy and restore peace in the world.

But the audience, wise as we are, knows that this thing they’re after is not what they really need.

Eventually — usually about halfway through the third act, just as everything has come crumbling down — the hero also realises that what she needed all along was not the want she had been chasing but actually her inner need. And when things get real is when she drops everything to channel all that heroic energy into fulfilling her need.

Inner needs are the more elemental things in life, like self-acceptance and breaking down our emotional walls and finding a sense of inner peace, but they often masquerade as outer wants — romance and riches and putting wrongdoers in their rightful place.

It would be easy to say that we should simply determine our inner needs and run after them, and quit wasting all this time on outer wants.

But then we wouldn’t have a movie, would we?

It is always a helpful exercise to look for the inner need behind the things you decide you want, but do not try to do away with wants altogether.

Often it is the quest for our wants that reveals the things we truly need.