Character motivation is crucial to the believability of your fiction. Yes, it is fiction, but you can only expect the reader to suspend their disbelief for so long. You can stretch it a bit further in the speculative genres (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, magical realism, etc), but even in those stories, the rules of your story world should be established, and basic human motivation will still hold sway. If Johnny proposes to Sarah and it just comes out of the blue, it’s not going to be believable. Yes, they’ve been dating, but if you’ve been doing well building the conflict that is so important to your story, then there should be…