How to Find Powerful Motives for Your Characters

You will often be judged by what you do. To a large extent, you are what you do. However, because others’ perceptions of your actions don’t penetrate to the reasons behind your actions,  you will often be judged incorrectly, or even unjustly. It’s no different for your characters.

In a book, as much as in life, a person’s actions are crucial. Readers want to understand your character by seeing what he does. However, often, it’s your character’s motive that matters even more.

It’s Not What Your Characters Do That Matters—It’s What They Mean to Do

In his book Characters & Viewpoint, bestselling science-fiction author Orson Scott Card explains:

Motive is what gives moral value to a character’s acts. What a character does, no matter how awful or how good, is never morally absolute: What seemed to be murder may turn out to have been self-defense, madness, or illusion; what seemed to be a kiss may turn out to have been betrayal, deception, or an irony… A character is what he does, yes—but even more, a character is what he means to do.

Creating characters who act in exciting and larger-than-life ways is wonderful, but unless these characters also have a reason for these actions, they will ultimately fail to capture readers’ attention. Giving characters a motive (which inevitably extends to a goal, which hopefully inspires an immediate obstacle, which fortunately creates innate conflict) is vital.

>For more about the role motive, goal, and conflict play in scene structure, click here.

Without an awareness of Raskolnikov’s motive, reprehensible as it is, for killing the old woman in Fyodor Dostoevksy’s Crime and Punishment, readers would never have stuck around for 600 pages.

If we didn’t understand that Jane Austen’s titular Emma had good intentions behind her blundering interference in her friends’ lives, we would have abandoned her after a few chapters.

Even characters, such as Luke Skywalker or Clark Kent, whose actions are definably good, become boring unless we understand the motives behind their behavior.

The Secret to Interesting Characters? Interesting Motives

It’s not enough to create characters who do interesting things. They must also do them for interesting reasons.

This is a principle that allows authors all kinds of exciting space to play. We can match motive to action to present a straightforward character (such as Luke Skywalker), but we can also create infinite layers of complexity and intrigue by presenting a character whose actions and motives don’t always seem to align (such as Bruce Wayne).

Motives and actions aren’t always clear in real life. Becoming aware of—and taking advantage of—these complex dichotomies can raise your fiction to a whole new level by deepening your characters, creating subplots, and, perhaps most importantly, offering readers stories they can sink their teeth into and chew on.

Orson Scott Card sums up nicely:

We never fully understand other people’s motives in real life. In fiction, however, we can help our readers understand our characters’ motives with clarity, sometimes even certainty. This is one of the reasons people read fiction—to come to some understanding of why other people act the way they do.

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