How to Write Believable Characters: Character Motivation
While readers will happily suspend their disbelief for anything from fantasy stories with dragons to horror stories with ghosts, nothing brings them out of a story faster than a character acting against their own interests or desires. As an author then it is crucial for you to fully understand what character motivation is, the role it plays in your story and of course, how to clearly establish it early on so that your readers can understand and relate to your characters.
In this article, we take a closer look at some of the key questions that writers need to address if they’re going to create and apply a believable and relatable motivation for their characters.
About character motivation
Simply put, character motivation is the reason behind a character's actions in any given scene in the story. It is their driving force. For example, if you were writing a heist story each of the characters would need a reason to be taking that risk. They might be desperate for money or maybe they want revenge against the target. Each of these motivations opens up interesting potential directions in the story.
Character motivation is at the very heart of the character profile and is absolutely necessary if you want to create a believable character. It can be anything, from an external need for survival to psychological or existential drives such as love, grief, or achievement.
Why do writers need to understand the character’s motivations?
Whatever kind of story you’re writing, if you don’t understand who your character is and what their desires are they will always feel flat, two dimensional, and ill-defined. More than this though character motivation is important also for the following reasons.
1. Get in the head of your character
You can’t simply make a character act a certain way in order to drive the plot forward. If they have to go into the woods at night to accidentally uncover a secret, they first need a reason to go into the woods at night. Character motivation allows you to step into the shoes of your character and ask yourself, how am I feeling about this situation and what is the most logical reaction to achieve my end goals.
If you do this, you’ll likely find your dialogue quickly becomes heavily loaded and more realistic and the characters can start leading the story. It is an essential step then, for your characters to be believable.
2. Make your characters relatable
Everyone in life wants something, whether it’s simply a hot meal or limitless power, and so should your character. Readers don’t need to like your characters - but they do need to understand them.
Once your readers begin to understand the characters and their motivations, they will begin to see them as human, almost real. Without credible motivations, your characters will read like puppets.
3. Make your characters interesting
A villain who constantly frustrates the protagonist as they try to achieve their goal is much more interesting than one that is simply there to frustrate the protagonist because they’re “evil”. Being “evil” is not enough of a reason for them to act the way they do. They have to care about something, if they didn’t care why would they go out of their way to be in the way.
The same goes for the protagonist. The reader needs to be able to care about this character achieving whatever it is they have set out to achieve. If they don’t care then why would they continue reading? While your protagonist doesn’t have to be ‘good’ or even likeable they do need to be understandable and relatable (check our grimdark fantasy article for examples of gritty, realistic and even villainous characters).
Examples of character motivations
There are various levels to a character’s potential motivation. These desires and wants can be prioritized depending on the character’s situation.
These motivations range from basic survival needs to complex psychological ones. These can be simplified into three categories. It is worth reading up further on this topic and character archetypes.
Examples of Basic Needs:
Food
Water
Shelter
Sleep
Security
Safety, etc.
Examples of Psychological Needs:
Love
Friendship
Accomplishment
Acceptance
Self-esteem, etc
Examples of Self-Fulfillment Needs:
Self-actualization
Creativity
Achievement of potential
There is plenty of room to expand and play with these categories. The most important thing to understand and take away is that all human behaviour should derive from an inherent “need.”
Goals vs Motivations: What’s the difference?
Goals and motivations can easily be confused, however, there is a significant differentiation. A goal is something that a character wants to achieve while motivation is the reason they want to achieve it.
For example, a character is hungry and so they set a goal to get food. A character is poor and so they set a goal to become wealthy.
Motivation is the underlying reason that this person has this goal.
Do character motivations need to be rational?
Characters don’t necessarily have to have rational motivations. In fact, irrational motivation can be a great way to create a character that acts unpredictably and gets themselves into trouble. For example, a character might have a phobia of the dark and even though they are being pursued at night insist on having a light.
These motivations might even conflict with their goals causing them setbacks and frustrations. The important thing for the writer is to clearly establish the irrational motivation and then it’s simply a matter of applying the internal logic in teh various scenarios the character finds themselves in.
So motivations don’t have to be rational — they just need to manifest themselves in plausible ways and subscribe to some amount of internal logic.
Does the reader need to know a character’s motivation?
While readers don’t need to know every nuance of the inner workings of a character's mind, they should, as the book progresses, come to properly understand the character's key motivations and goals. Well crafted books will reveal the character's motivations gradually through actions and dialogue.
On the other hand, the author themselves needs a complete and detailed awareness of what motivates their characters if they’re going to create a three dimensional and believable character.
Can a character have conflicting motivations?
Conflict is at the very heart of storytelling. Conflicting motivations then can be a great way to create well-rounded and developed characters.
For example, your character’s friend injures their leg while they’re being chased. They have two motivations, to escape to safety (basic need) and to rescue their friend (psychological need). They can’t do both, and so how they act will heavily impact how the reader feels about this character and how they develop over the course of the story.
It is only when a character has multiple conflicting motivations and they are forced to choose that we can see the character’s true nature.
Final Words
For some writers, character motivation comes easy — their instinct is to think about how their characters would behave in a certain situation (and not how they think they should behave). It always helps to ask: what do they want? In this scene, and in general. Once you’ve nailed their motivation, your characters should hopefully show you where they need to go.