The Story Engine fields

Want, Need, Wound, Lie, and Truth give every character an arc you can check your manuscript against as you write.

The Story Engine is a set of five fields on every character’s canvas, built around a common way of thinking about character arcs. They’re optional (plenty of minor characters don’t need them), but for anyone central to your story, they’re worth filling in.

The five fields

• Want: what the character consciously believes they need to achieve.
• Need: what they actually need, which is often different from what they want.
• Wound: the past event that shaped how they see the world.
• Lie: the false belief the wound left them with.
• Truth: the realization that would let them let go of the Lie.

Backstory and arc notes

Alongside the five core fields, a character’s canvas also holds a backstory field and an arc notes field, for anything that doesn’t fit neatly into Want/Need/Wound/Lie/Truth but still matters to how they develop across the manuscript.

How to use them

There’s no required order and no validation forcing you to fill every field before writing. Some writers work these out before drafting a single scene; others discover a character’s Wound halfway through their manuscript and fill it in retroactively. Either way, having them written down in one place makes it easy to check a scene against the arc you’re building toward.