Things Your English Teacher Won't Tell You

What’s the deal with Motivation?

All right, let me just ask you, what is your motivation? Let me guess, it’s “I want to become a writer so I can be rich and famous, go on talk shows and ride around to all my book signings in the back of a limo while sipping expensive champaign!”

Okay, now that I have your attention…

Everyone, no matter who we are or what we do, is motivated by something. It can be a good something, or a bad something or a so boring you don’t even notice it something, but every action we take, from getting up in the morning until you go to bed at night, you do for a reason. So do the characters you create.

Have you ever read a book or watched a movie where you couldn’t really understand why the people in it did the things they did? It was hard to care about them, wasn’t it? You can have the most interesting setting and absolutely coolest characters on this or any other planet, but if they are only going through the motions because it fits the plot, then nobody is going to believe or care about them. To make a character seem real, the things they do have to have a reason for doing them.

Love. Greed. Desire. The will to prove yourself or maybe just to survive. All of these things are motivators. So is being forced to do something against your will. Or craving power. Or hate. Or fear. Or…

Well, you get the idea. No one does something without a reason, even if they sometimes don’t understand that reason. This is called internal motivation – or internal conflict- and it is very important, especially for your protagonist. They need to struggle against something inside themselves. They need to have a problem that only they can solve and whether they succeed or fail isn’t half as important as the simple fact that they try.

There is another type of motivation, the big bad problem that is forcing your character to move. Could be a natural disaster or a war, or someone pointing a gun at them and telling them to hand over their cash. This is called external conflict, and it is as important to your plot as internal conflict is to your characters. In a good story you need a healthy dose of both, a problem inside your protagonist only they can solve, and a driving force that is pushing them and the people they care about hard enough that they have to take action.

We will get into this deeper as we go along, but for now start looking at the characters and what they are doing the next time you watch a movie or an episode of your favorite show. Try to understand what both their internal and external motivations are, and if you can’t find any, then ask yourself just how did something so lame get the greenlight to be produced!

Motivations. We all have them, but it’s up to you to discover what they are.