Hey guys! Guess what? This post is on time! I promised that you would get two posts in a row this week and I didn’t lie to you! We’re going to write this next post of the character series. I’m hoping that I’ll be on time next week but for those of you living in the US you know that next week is Thanksgiving. I’ll see if I can write it on time! Thanks so much for writing and don’t forget to subscribe and tell your friend!
Building Better Characters: But Why?
So, we’re going to talk about motivation. I know that a lot of time writers will tell you to write all the personal information first. What do they look like? Who do they have relationships with? What distinguishing feature do they have? Stuff like that. I almost never start with any of these so from my writing experience my character needs motivation before anything else. Then again, I also plot a book before I come up with any real solid character design, so you can use these posts in whatever order you would like but this is the order I do them in.
So first of all, if you have a plot line and you are starting to build a character you need to know why that character is important. Once you know that it’s pretty easy to see how they fit into your cohesive plot line. But for your character to do all the things that you need them to do to fit into your story you need them to have the proper motivation to do those things. If they don’t have the proper motivation they aren’t going to do the things you need them to do, or it will feel really awkward while they are.
In my most recent and most extensive work my main character fights a certain societal group for five whole books. In the second book she fights them because they destroyed her whole planet and killed all her friends. In the third one she wants to protect innocent people. In the fourth one she wants to help the boy she is falling in love with. In the fifth book she realizes that not everyone in the society is bad and wants to protect the innocent people of the society. But in the first I didn’t give my character any motivation. One day she is a simple engineer and then two chapters later I have kicking alien butt as a dedicated soldier in the elite squad. Whoops. No character motivation. I didn’t give her a reason to fight anyone. I really struggled with the first book for a couple years because my character didn’t really have any motivation. All the scenes where she was fighting it almost seemed like she was fighting them aimlessly. And then it occurred to me, I had never ever ever mentioned my character’s Dad. Did she have a Dad? What happened to him? So, I made the invaders kill him in the first chapter. There you go, motivation – Revenge.
Motivation is an important key element to the way that a character reacts to certain situations and sometimes their motivation can change the plot significantly. You should always make sure that your motivation matches your character. If you have a sweet butterfly character who never does anything wrong and suddenly they’re the killer, that doesn’t make much sense. Unless they have good motivation. Now, remember how I keep telling you that the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense? Well this is where that comes in. To make a real character they need to be like real people. So, lets talk about real people for a second.
This is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s psychology which is definitely about real humans.
As you can see there are five areas of need according to Maslow. Let’s talk about these in concepts of characters.
If you take the first section of basic needs, we can write several lists of motivation for your characters. Maybe you’re writing a survival novel. It would make perfect sense if your character motivation was to find food, water, warmth and shelter. Maybe your character is a teenager who’s on the run from her dysfunctional, abusive family. Maybe they just need to feel safe somewhere. That’s good motivation. Maybe your character just lost their job and what they really need is to find financial security. All of these motivations are generic enough that you could apply them to any sort of story.
When we get up to the psychological needs we are really starting to get places. I tend to use the feeling of belonging as my characters motivation 75% of the time. Have you met the newer generations? This seems to be a theme that they relate to better than any other. I can relate to this motivation better than any other. Maybe your character is a glory hog. Maybe they need to have some sort of success and they need someone to recognize their accomplishments. That’s the next level of needs.
Last but not least you could write about a pure character. A character who is just trying to become a better version of themselves.
Now let me tell you something very important about Motivation. Motivation is never just one of these levels of needs. Real humans are complex beings whose motivation generally falls underneath multiple levels of needs. If you want to make your characters make sense, then they can’t have just one level of motivation. That makes them boring. Make your character more human.
And this is going to sound really cliché but, to make their motivation make sense, you need to give your characters a back story that matches their motivation. In the earlier example, if the reader didn’t know that my characters Dad was her life line while being bullied in school, or that he was the one who taught her to be an engineer, or that he was her role model, then they wouldn’t fully understand my character’s motivation to fight the invaders who killed her father. Backstory is really important to any story.
So that’s all I have on this week’s post. I hope that this helped you flesh out a bit of your character. I suggest thinking about a specific book you’re working on while reading these, it helps you to analyze and understand them better. So, anyway. Thanks for listening and keep updated for next week’s post. And as always,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!