The Big Question

What does my character want? I don't remember if Stephen King or Joss Whedon (or one of his writers) was the one who highlighted that as being the seminal question the writer needed to be able to answer, but that made sense to me as being a good place to start.

So...one character: The easiest character to start with is....Herve. He wants to get whatever he can from Reynaldo's pocket. I'm presuming he's a somewhat professional pickpocket, that he lives on the fringe of society--and as I think about it, I think he knows Reynaldo. Close associates, even. The comic touch of the round robin pick pocketing leads me to wonder if this is something of a game, can Herve pick Reynaldo's pocket without being caught. If I remember Oliver Twist correctly (haven't read it in....years. Jr hi, I think), Fagin or the Artful Dodger had the young criminals-in-training try to pick his (fagin's or the Dodger's) pockets to prove mastery. Maybe that's the feel for the left side of the picture. I want to make Herve a sad character, misfit and either looked down on by everyone, or never taken seriously--comic relief, but in a dehumanizing way.

And I keep returning to the idea that Alessandra, Reynaldo and Herve are gypsies, or something similar, but I'm not confident about that. Unless Reynaldo isn't stealing from her, but rather retreiving something that the soldiers don't need to see....hmmmm.....gotta think more.