Character Motivation

Recently I've been working on two different novels. Partly because I do better when I can jump from one project to another when I get to a writing roadblock that requires some thinking through, and partially because figuring out a character's motivation can be tricky (which means if you've got a multiple POV story like me, there's a whole lot of motivations you've got to figure out). 

Everyone wants something, right? 

We want caffeine when we first wake up, so we crawl out of bed to go find it. Around lunchtime, we want to eat because we're hungry. At night, we're tired, so we make our way back to our cozy beds and go to sleep. 

Not all character motivations have to be super dramatic (even though those are fun too). 

These lesser exciting motivations can easily belong to the secondary characters that populate our books. Maybe you've got a thief who steals something precious for the sole purpose that they're trying to make money. It's easy to believe, and it makes sense. The trick is to have a good balance between the lesser motivations and the big ones. 

Your protagonist has to have something that they are willing to leave the comfort of their everyday life for, but they can't have everything figured out when they decide to make their move. What that means is that your protagonist has to know enough to go, but not so much that everything else in the story universe is predictable. This is why the lesser motivations can help us complicate the main character's overall goal. 

What that in mind, your job is to learn to layer these character motivations in a way that gives your reader (and protagonist) enough unknowns that drama ensues and fiction is born. So let's go back to our thief example. 

Maybe your protagonist has found a reason to go on a quest. They're looking for something that will save the world. After numerous dead ends and battles, they've finally located and retrieved it. All is seemly well, and they are on their way back to save the day. Until they meet a thief, who has been charged to steal this precious item by the ultimate villain. Now the protagonist, thief, and villain are linked together and the reader is left wondering how all of this is going to work out. 

Layering motivations will not only help you build tension in your stories, but it will also help you learn more about your main character's abilities to problem solve and ultimately give your reader a much better sense of what kind of person it is that they are rooting for. 

Happy writing!