Give Your Characters Goals

Give your characters specific, urgent goals. Make the goals important. Make them believable, and make sure they’ll have emotional impact for the reader. If the character’s long-range goal is to find happiness or inner peace, you’ll have to give him a dramatic, difficult history that will infuse the goal with power through contrast. No matter how important the goal is, it has to be urgent in order to have emotional force. Put pressure on the character’s ability to achieve the goal. Make it a race—against time, an enemy, his own mental stability, financial security, danger, another’s choices—to keep the tension high.

From “Fiction’s Connecting Link: Emotion” by Kathy Jacobson from:
The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing edited by Meg Leder and Jack Heffron