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The motive of your character is important. The motive is what drives your character forward, and makes every scene feel strong and meaningful. The character’s motive is what brings about the theme, and what pushes the plot along. Your plot is driven by your character’s motive. Therefore, the character motive could be the most important fundamental part of a story that there is.

Now that we’ve clarified the importance of character motive, we can move on to how you can bring your character’s motive to life in every scene.

 

The Theory

As you may have already worked out, in every scene, the character probably has a slightly different motive. Maybe it looks something like this:

Scene One: Amy argues with robots because she wants them to let her into the hospital.
Scene Two: Amy climbs up the hospital wall because she wants to get into the hospital.
Scene Three: Amy hides from the nurses and doctors because she wants to steal some medicine.
Scene Four: Amy steals some medicine because she wants to save her dying panda.

In each scene, Amy has a different motive. We have an action/reason sequence which displays her motives. This is a short term motive, and that’s a really good thing to have. If there is a scene when your character has no short term motive, then maybe that scene shouldn’t be there at all.

 

But the type of motive I’m talking about is the long term motive. This is the thing that keeps the entire story together.

Now, your long term motive should relate to the short term motives. The easiest way of working out what it is, is by being a three year old.

Ask why.

Why does Amy want to steal some medicine?
Why does Amy want to save her dying panda?
Why does Amy love her panda that much?
Why does Amy not want to be cruel?

Amy is determined not to be like her parents who never showed her love. Her motive is to do everything to show love in order to be different to them.

See how in the end, you can have a big motive causing all of these little things we see?

 

In Practise

Looking at different writing, you can often hear the character’s motive through their character voice. Let me give the example of Amy again.

 

Amy’s fingers scraped against the window ledge and she squeezed her eyes tighty. Please, please let there be no one in there. Sucking a breath between her teeth, she hauled herself up and rolled through the open window. Her knee screamed murder as it slammed against a table that someone had so thoughtfully positioned just under the window.

Hissing out a breath, she sat up and peered around the room. White, white, and more white. Why everything was always so unbearably clean, she could never tell. But that didn’t matter. Her stomach clenched as she stood up. All that mattered was finding that medicine. Saving Joey.

She edged out of the room, scanning her eyes around for any danger. None of the security sensors seemed to have picked her up, and she let out a sigh of relief. That wouldn’t have ended well.

Then again, the sensors picking her up was always slim. Failure. Worthless. No one wants you. No one could ever want you…cyborg.

She gritted her teeth together against her memories of her mother’s mocking voice. I’m not worthless, she kept trying to tell herself. Kept trying to convince herself. No one is worthless.

I can’t say this is my best example ever, but it shows that she is doing this in order to be different. Sure, at the moment her goal is to save the panda, but the reason is that she wants to give someone the love she never had.

 

The Task

You see that above snippet I wrote? Well, I want you to write your own 100-350 word snippet showing a character’s driving motive in a small scene like that. (Also, if you could write at the start what the motive is, that would be great as well.)

Have fun with it, as always!

 

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