Last week, we learned the difference between Character Driven fiction and plot-driven fiction. But whether the focus of your story is the character or the things that happen, understanding and managing your characters’ motivations is the key to managing plot and tension.
What is motivation? It is the inner drive that propels people, and your characters, to action. It can be a complex drive, like a desire to rule the world, or a simple drive, like the desire to eat a grilled cheese sandwich.
Some motivations are universal. We all need to eat. We all want to protect our children (with a few nasty exceptions). Most of us want to have a sense of accomplishment in our lives. Universal motivations are powerful in fiction, because these are the motivations your readers will relate to the most strongly.
However, some of the most interesting motivations are the ones that we can’t relate to, but that the writer has conveyed so convincingly that we can believe it would motivate a character. These aberrant motivations are usually attributed to villains. They usually reveal the darker side of human nature.
Every character in your book has motivations. Knowing these motivations informs the actions of the characters in any given scene. When your characters start to go off track, or if they seem unbelievable, or their actions can’t be believed, it’s probably an issue with motivation. Either you don’t have a clear enough understanding of what’s motivating your character to convince the reader that their actions are real, or their motivations have changed without your noticing, and their actions are no longer valid.
it is important to understand the motivations of the lead character, the villain and important secondary characters, but it is also crucial to know the motivations of minor characters as they appear in your scenes. Character motivation not only dictates characters’ actions and therefore plot, it also builds tension.
Conflicting motives is not the only way to build tension in a scene, but it is one of the best. Minor characters whose motivations are in direct opposition to the lead character make for wonderful obstacles.
Consider a scene where a receptionist is confronted with your lead character, who is trying to gain entry to her boss’s office. Two characters, opposing motives. What if the receptionist is afraid she’ll lose her job if the lead is seen on the premises again? What if the receptionist is angry with her boss, and secretly wants to let the lead in as retribution? Or what if the receptionist is bored with her job and more concerned about talking to her boyfriend on the phone and simply waves the lead in? Or what if the receptionist knows that the lead will be killed if he walks into that office? As the motivation of the receptionist changes, so do her actions, and so does the scene, dramatically.
To understand the motivations of your characters, you have to step back and see them in the full context of their lives. One of the biggest mistakes I make with characters is to manufacture motivations based on what I need the character to DO (plot). Sometimes this can work, especially with minor characters, because, as in the example above, you can manufacture the whole character, complete with their motivation, to serve a purpose. But you run into trouble when you start pegging artificial motives on characters for whom you’ve already established a context (a history, a personality, relationships, characteristics). A motive that doesn’t fit a character will stand out to readers from a mile away.
How do you avoid this problem? I try to step back and ask, what does the character truly want in this situation? Not what I want them to want, but based on who they are and what they are experiencing emotionally, what do they really want? It can help to return to universal motivations. What would any normal person want in this situation? What would my readers want? What would I want? Does any of that fit the character? If that fails, because your character is different enough to want something unique in that situation, asking the character the question outright can help. The answer will come to you, out of your knowledge of the character. If it doesn’t, you probably need to understand the character better.
Once you understand what your character wants, ask yourself, what is he/she willing to do in order to get it? Again, this works on a large scale–how many lives is the villain willing to sacrifice in order to rule the world–and a small scale–will your protagonist risk losing their job for that delicious grilled-cheese sandwich? The strength of a character’s motivation is directly related to the actions they will take. An fun device is to have the character lose their goal because they didn’t want it enough to do what it took to get it. Of course, this is usually followed by a realization of what they do really want (think romantic comedy).
An important distinction to make: while you, as the writer, must fully understand the character’s motivations, the readers don’t necessarily have to be cognizant of them. They just have to understand, and accept, the characters’ actions. In fact, it’s usually best not to outright state motivations in your writing. If the characters take actions that make sense based on the motivations you know they have, then the reader will feel the underlying motivations.
Motivations in fiction, as in real life, are never static. Your character might crave a grilled-cheese sandwich one day, and scorn it the next. However, unlike real life, characters must always have reasons for their motivations. Motivations, and significant changes to them, have to make sense to the readers.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at the changing motivations of characters, also know as 101 TIWIK #29: Character Development.
This post is part of a series of 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book. Start reading the series at the beginning.
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