Do the Motivation with Me!

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 doubt as to whether or not their relationship will go the distance. 

So in this case, you would want to give Johnny some motivation for why he proposes at that time, and it should be built into the cause and effect of the scene outline you have built. 

Maybe Johnny finds out he’ll receive an inheritance when he gets married. Perhaps he is jealous of someone who has caught Sarah’s eye. It could be that Johnny feels guilty over stringing Sarah along after he sees his sister crying over a similar predicament.

Build Motivation into Your Plot

Regardless of where you dig up the motivating factor from, you want to make sure that you:

1. Include conflict.
2. Build cause and effect into your motivation.
3. Relate the motivating factor to the story problem or a subplot.
4. Foreshadow your motivation (and possibly the action you are building motivation for) if it is a doozy. 

Snow White is motivated to run away from the castle when she finds out the Queen is trying to kill her. Because she ran away, she found the Dwarves. If she had just run away from the castle because she was bored or stumbled upon the Dwarves while picking flowers, the story would not be compelling (or even much of a story).  

The easiest way to do it is to just ask yourself why your character is completing any action.

So when you have a chase scene, make sure that the chaser has ample motivation to go after the chasee. If your mafioso character gives his fortune to charity, it can’t be on a whim. He needs motivation. Make it believable. 

Draw your readers into the fictive dream.

Make them live your story.

And never forget your motivation.

Happy Writing!

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