Characters and Motivation

Writing a story is easy. You create some characters with names and recognizable human traits, you give at least one of them a conflict, and then you explore how they do or don’t get past the conflict to get where they want to be. Easy!

Of course, it isn’t that easy, as anyone who’s ever tried with a modicum of objectivity about their work has discovered. And while any aspect of the storytelling process can befuddle and frustrate, the hardest is probably characterization. There’s a reason most non-writers who have a ‘surefire idea for a hit novel’ will give you an extremely plot-heavy pitch: Plot is often the easy part in the sense that cobbling together a bunch of plot points from other stories and hanging them on a plot arc isn’t so hard. But characters can be hard.

Or, more accurately: Good, believable characters can be hard. The secret to success is motivation.

Micro Motivation

The trick of it is, there are two kinds of motivation to worry about. One is the macro stuff, the big-ticket motivation that pushes your characters through the story — like, they want revenge on the bully who ruined their life, or they want to murder their next door neighbor, or they want to save their daughter from a serial killer. This is something most writers figure out early on, the need for their characters to have a reason to be in the story in the first place.

What a lot of writers don’t figure out is the necessity of micro motivation for all the other decisions your character makes. For example, let’s say you have a character named Chuck who has just been abducted by aliens, and your plot requires him to do a bizarre dance the aliens teach him. Now, you’re god in your own story, so all you have to do is write

Chuck thought about this bizarre dance and decided he would do it. To hell with dignity!

And mission accomplished. Except, of course, that you’ve given the reader no reason why he’s decided to do this. And that can be crucial, because readers can smell when something is done Because Plot. Characters shouldn’t do things simply because the plot doesn’t move forward unless they do it. There should be a reason behind their actions.

Does that mean you have to explicitly state that reason every single time?

Chuck chose to dance, because he suddenly remembered being in high school and never dancing at the school dances where all the other kids danced. His dying mother had said, I hope you dance, so now he would dance!

It does not. Your character’s motivation should be organic, a part of them, and preferably something that doesn’t require a block of exposition to explain. Sometimes the best way to explain motivation will in fact be some quick epiphany on your character’s part, of course, but that should probably be an exception.

Then again, what do I know. I spent the whole day wearing mis-matched socks, and my pants are three sizes too large.