What your character wants to achieve - the specific desire that drives their actions and pulls the entire story forward.
A character goal is the concrete thing your character is trying to accomplish. It might be finding a missing person, winning a competition, escaping a dangerous situation, earning someone's love, or proving themselves worthy. Goals can operate on multiple levels: a scene-level goal (get through this conversation without crying), a chapter-level goal (survive tonight), and a story-level goal (save the kingdom). The story-level goal is what your reader tracks from beginning to end, and it's what gives every scene a sense of direction and purpose.
Without a clear goal, your character is just wandering around and your reader has no reason to keep turning pages. Goals create forward momentum. They give every scene a question the reader needs answered: will they get what they want? Goals also reveal character - what someone pursues and how they pursue it tells us everything about who they are.
Gatsby's goal is to win Daisy back, and everything he does - the mansion, the parties, the reinvented identity - serves that single obsessive aim. The tragedy is that the goal itself is flawed.
Katniss's goal shifts across the trilogy: survive the Games, protect Peeta, lead the rebellion. Each escalation raises the stakes and forces her to become someone new.
Westover's goal evolves from simply getting to school to the far more painful objective of building an identity separate from her family - a goal that costs her nearly everything.
Marlin's goal is beautifully simple: find his son. That clarity lets the story pile on complications without ever losing focus.
"She wanted to be happy" gives you nothing to write toward. "She wanted to open her own bakery before her thirtieth birthday" gives you a plot. Specific goals create specific scenes.
Your character's story-level goal keeps the big picture moving, but every individual scene also needs a smaller, immediate goal. Otherwise scenes drift without purpose.
Characters who want the exact same thing on page 300 as they did on page one haven't grown. Let the goal shift, deepen, or transform as the character learns and changes.
A goal without obstacles is just a to-do list. The gap between what the character wants and what stands in their way is where your story lives.
Give your character two goals that directly conflict with each other: a professional goal and a personal one, or a moral goal and a survival goal. Write a scene where they're forced to choose between them. Don't make one obviously right - let the reader feel the pull of both. Keep it to 400 words.