“Why Johnny Had to Rob That Bank: Giving Your Characters Believable Motivation”

No character in your stories is believable without some kind of motivation.  Motivations can be as simple as love, money, revenge, honor, glory and there are plenty of others.  The website Novel Now lists 7 tips for developing character motivations:

1: Give each character their own contrasting motivation

2: Use character motivations founded on rational and irrational beliefs

3: Decide how aware your characters will be of their own motivations

4: Let characters’ drives develop as new plot events occur

5: Don’t give characters what they want too easily

6: Try to be subtle in revealing what drives your characters

7. Make motivations complex to increase readers’ interest

 

In my own stories, I like to develop motivations of key characters as a part of writing a background bio.  For example, in my upcoming science fiction short “In Plutonian Seas,” the main character is a fellow named Joe Skellen, who commands a mission to the (presumed) subsurface ocean on Pluto.  In his bio, I said this:

1. Joe is strongly driven to prove himself as a man due to guilt over how he ran out on wife Kristen and son Tyler in 2126.  He intends to try and make up for his failures, both as a father and for losing most of his Trieste crew on Europa by having a successful mission at Pluto with Trident.  Joe is strongly driven to make Trident a success. 
2. When Joe Skellen encounters the Plutonian Bugs who template his memories and fashion nanobotic re-creations of those memories, he finds himself confronted face to face again with his past failures and having to live them all over again.  When he encounters the swarm simulation of his son Tyler among the corpses in the wreck below the Plutonian ice, he loses all control. 
    
   In this little snippet, I’ve given Joe a reason to be somewhat fanatical about making his current mission (on Pluto) a success.  It’s personal.  In this case, the motivation is residual guilt and a strong desire to make right what wasn’t right in the past.  Joe is also keen to reclaim a sense of honor for his name and reputation, as both were tainted by an earlier accident and his supposed part in that.  This is why I do fairly extensive bios of main characters.  I’ve now got motivation and readily re-callable memories of specific incidents and events to flesh out my character as a believable person.
    

I’d like to address Novel Now’s 5^th and 6^th points from above.

Point number five tells us not to let our character achieve what he wants too easily.  In other words, a successful story shows our hero struggling at some level to achieve what he wants.  Characters, like real people, grow when they struggle to achieve something.  They learn things about themselves and others.  They try different tactics only to fail again.  Then they try something else.  Only when the end looks bleak and it seems that our hero will never achieve what he wants do you allow him to surmount his difficulties and triumph in the end.   Or not.  Sometimes, our hero never achieves his dream but perhaps achieves something else he might not have ever suspected.  When that happens, he gains insight as to what drives him…and the reader gains insight too.  

Point number six tells us to be subtle in how you reveal what drives your characters.  In other words, don’t just put in a sentence that says: “Joe was motivated by guilt.”  It’s almost always  better to show than to tell.  Put Joe in a situation where this notion is revealed, by what Joe does and says.  Maybe a conversation with a crewmate.  Or Joe remembering something.  Or reacting strongly to something that reminds him of the earlier accident.  The point is: let the reader discover for themselves what Joe’s motivation is.  That makes for a more engaging story.

Providing and illustrating motivation for your characters is a true art.  Success depends on how well you know your characters—yet another reason to do a bio at least for the main ones.  How would Joe react in this situation?  You’ll find yourself asking that question over and over again.  Answering that may well provide you with insights as a writer too.

The Word Shed will take a short hiatus for the next 2 weeks.  The next post comes on June 19.  Look for it.

See you then.

Phil B.