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My dear Ereki,

So last week was kind of crazy. I felt quite overwhelmed and my involvement throughout the week was really bad on here. I hope to change that this week, and feel like I’ve already gotten off to a much better start than last week. Only have to write this and then I’ll be done with all my Monday kick-myself-into-gear activities.

This week we will be talking about motivations.

It’s so very difficult for me to zero in on one specific topic and look at it all by itself, because the way my brain works, I connect things. So that’s partially why all my discussion posts are so long…

But here goes.

Motivations are not the same as goals or needs. Goals are the (usually) external things your character wants to be accomplished. Needs are the (internal) things your character desires.

Motivations are why. Why your character wants such-and-such goals. Why they feel such-and-such needs. I’m sure we’ve got into this at some point over the past month or two because this is definitely a related issue, but I think it is worth discussing as it’s own special topic.

There are a few things that are useful to remember about motivations:

1. They generally grow out of a sense of lack. People don’t usually decide one day out of the blue that world peace is really just a worthwhile goal to devote their whole life to. There has to be some personal history to that. Growing up in a war-torn area. Losing family members to war. Etc. Etc. Etc. The motivation behind an external goal for world peace is going to be something very visceral and emotional. A distinct lack of peace in their life, external and internal. A desire to help others find healing often comes from a sense of being wounded and deeply hurt oneself, and desiring others not to suffer the same way.

2. Motivations can change. This process of changing from one central motivation to another is known as a character arc. Generally, we tend to think of a character arc as simply the way that a character grows throughout the story. And that’s fine, on one level. It is true. The character arc is the path that they follow along their course of growth.

But it is much more helpful to dig beneath the surface and see the underlying progression from Central Motivation A to Central Motivation B. At the beginning, the character is motivated by desire for world peace. The lack of peace that they see in themselves and everyone around them drives them to seek peace in the world. However, throughout the story they begin to find that peace at all costs at the expense of principle is worthless – and so their first priority, or motivating principle, might change to a love for what is right, and therefore a different goal.

We will get to character arcs in a few more weeks, but for right now, this is probably good enough.

3. Motivations can stay the same. Sometimes, the arc that a character goes through is not transformative (oh, look at that, I’m starting to classify character arcs! Watch out, we’ll have a few more classifications when we get to that topic XD), but is instead reformative. That is to say, the character never leaves their motivating principle, but begins to approach it from a new angle or perspective. Going with the whole world peace example – perhaps they change from wanting to achieve world peace from the top down (via government) to achieving that peace by person-to-person influence spreading as a grassroots movement.

The goal stayed the same because the motivation didn’t change, but the method of achieving it changed throughout the character arc of the story.

4.  Motivations will directly affect goals and needs. I mean, this is almost obvious. Because they are the why behind the goals and needs, and so they are directly connected.

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This is all I have for tonight. If I keep trying to drag this further I will simply wake up tomorrow morning with a very confused guild and have to retract basically half of what I wrote. XD So. In the interest of everyone’s sanity. I’ll stop now and see what you guys have to add or detract from what I have so far. 🙂

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