Character Motivation: The “Why” That Keeps Readers Turning Pages

June 21, 2018 By Leave a Comment

What motivates you to do things? Sometimes it is as mundane as necessity, other times it might be a higher ideal like justice. Every single thing we do in our daily lives has a motivation behind it.

Which leads to our characters—everything they do must have motivation pushing them. Some motivations go without saying: someone who is eating is probably hungry, for instance. But an unusual action needs explanation. Why does someone run into a burning building to save someone? Why does someone pay for a stranger’s meal in a restaurant? Those are the motivations readers want to understand.

The same situation will prompt different reactions from different characters. If they find $100 on the street, one might try to find the owner, one might immediately pocket it, and a third might donate it to charity. Their reactions will show the reader what these characters are like at a deeper level—and give a clue to what motivates them.

The overarching motivation for a character should be consistent. Most people are driven by a deep belief that rarely changes. A person is not going to give money to a homeless person one day and kick him the next—and if he does, then that’s a story in itself. A consistent motivation will help ground your character, and therefore your readers.

Of course, many stories are about character change, and as a character changes, what motivates him or her might change, too. A self-absorbed career man motivated by ambition might put ambition aside after having a child, becoming motivated by his love for his child. As their guiding belief changes, their motivation can change, too.

If your characters’ motivations are going to shift from the consistency they had in the beginning of the story, then be sure to let the reader in on the change as it happens. Take them on the journey, let them live the experiences that change your character. That is, after all, the story—and that’s why the readers came.

For many readers, the question that keeps them turning the page is not only “what happens next”—but “why”. Why your character does what they do can fascinate the readers as much as what they are doing. So when you think about your character, think about the “why”—the motivation.

Do you consciously consider character motivation, or does it just flow naturally for you?

The 3 “C”s of Believability

June 23, 2011 By 4 Comments

Reality can be strange.

On June 11, within hours of each other, my great-uncle Ed and my great-aunt Clare passed away. Uncle Ed was married to Aunt Clare’s sister, so they were in-laws. One lived in Pennsylvania, the other in Washington state. If an author put something so odd in a book, people would say, “That could never happen in real life.”

This got me thinking about the importance of believability in our writing (rather than something profound, like, say, my own mortality). No matter what world we are writing about, whether it is contemporary or science fiction or fantasy, readers must be able to believe in it—to feel that it is real. I identified three elements that make—or fail to make—that belief happen.

The first is context. You need to situate your readers firmly in your world. You need to lay out what they need to know early on, so their expectations match what you are going to give them. They need to understand the rules of your world and then you must follow the rules you set. The events that occur in a story must be plausible—not merely possible, but probable.

The second element is consistency. By this I mean internal cohesion in both events (see above) and in character actions. Characters must always act in accordance to their personality. If you have them suddenly do something far out of character, it rattles the reader. This doesn’t mean that your characters cannot act in surprising ways. But the characters must act in accordance with the internal logic of the story and of themselves. All of us know that sometimes we act out of character—but there is always a reason, and that reason is always consistent with who we are as a person. As long as you clearly show that reason for your character, the reader will believe in him or her.

The last is confidence—a deft authorial voice. If readers feel that they are in good hands, they will follow you more willingly. They will suspend disbelief just a shade more because they have faith that it will all make sense in the end. A tentative, hesitant, or wavering voice will give readers pause and perhaps even make them more attuned to flaws in believability.

If we lack any one of those three elements, we run the risk of breaking the dream for our readers. The moment we step outside the believability box, the spell breaks and we may not get the chance to recapture the magic.

Are there other elements of writing that you think are essential to creating and maintaining believability in our writing?

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