It's that time of year again. Are any of my fellow writers planning on Nano-ing it with me this year?

I don't know how I'll do, as I'm sure that I will be terribly over worked. :)

But I have an idea that I am rather excited about. I'm trying not to get too excited, or say too many things about it, because I don't want to crush it prematurely.

There always seems to be one major thing that hinders me when approaching a new story, one thing that prevents me from getting through the storyline: What do my characters want?

I can work out all kinds of details and get into the psychology of my characters heads, but I can't seem to figure out what that one concrete thing is that they want. And that blocks me every time, because otherwise my characters just sort of wander around the page, doing things here or there without actually having a purpose. And it seems to me that my favorite books tend to have characters that have goals of some sort. They want something, and in wanting they take action to get what they want, thereby changing the course of events in the story.

So somehow, between now and November, I need to figure out what the hell it is that my characters want out of life.