Finding Your Character’s Motive

One of the trickiest aspects of storytelling is finding your character’s motive, and getting it to ring true to the reader. Sometimes it seems that the character doesn’t know their own reasons for doing what they do, let alone if the author knows. If the goal is connection to the reader, a clear, real motive is vital.

My first painful rejection came with the scrawled note that that if I ever wrote anything with a plot, I could submit again. This was so confusing to me! My story had a complex, building plot that followed several maps and planning systems. Why couldn’t the agent see it?

Over time I learned that it wasn’t the plot that was weak, it was my main character’s motivation. I wasn’t completely clear myself as to why she was acting the way she was, and the shallow responses I gave about her motive were just that – shallow. Although there are many factors that influence your protagonist’s actions, they are always indicative of a deeper need, and from there an even deeper need until you get ultimately to the root of all needs.

As the author, you need to be able to identify what it is your MC is really after. Not until you figure out the deepest of needs will your character be real. Having the reader connect on an emotional level with your main character is strongly linked to how well they understand that character’s motive.

I’ve made a short video that explains motive in much more detail. In this video you’ll learn:

• How to represent the external desire and why that’s important
• How to dig deeper to find the need beneath that desire
• What is the need that is deeper still, and how it might change
• And finally, what is the root of all needs that your main character has

Click here to access the video The Four Levels of Motive.

Everyone is driven by desires, needs, and deeper needs. Sometimes in our writing we get so caught up in other aspects of the storytelling that we forget to ask our main character what those underlying levels of need actually are.

This PDF Questioning Your Character’s Motive is a checklist that will guide you through a series of questions to ask your main character that will help flesh out their deepest needs. When you as the author really understand where those needs lie, your ability to present them attached to the plot and other characterization is greatly enhanced. And the reader will connect.

So once you know what the deeper needs of your main character are, how do you attach those to the plot?

A lot of the interweaving will happen organically once you know what the driving forces are. You’ll be surprised how a slightly different use of words or thoughts will show that motivation deeper. But besides the organic strengthening, there are some things you can do to pull that motive out.

• Have your character make bold decisions stemming from his or her needs. Maybe even that go against their instinctual path (Choice Index). This will show the reader what the MC is willing to sacrifice. That in turns shows what they really need.
• Failure. Then more failure. When we put our characters into failure situations, the reader gets to see by their responses what they willingly give up, let go, or shift away from. This will lead your MC closer to what they really need.
• Find the moment in the story where the main character discovers for themselves what the root of their needs is. I like to call this the Epiphany Scene. When they learn that for themselves, all their actions going forward from there are purely driven from their hearts. It usually takes most of the story for them to get there, but when they do, let your reader see that moment.

In the course Clarity of Character at Chicken Scratch Writing School (coming late 2020) we go into these tools for writing motive in much more depth.

As a writer, your ability to understand and then portray your main character’s motive effectively is the difference between a story that get’s put back on the shelf, or one that get’s devoured to the last page.

Happy Writing!