Novel Writer's Toolkit: Revised Edition

Continue Tool 5: Character: GOALS AND MOTIVATION

I'm going to continue to break up this section into smaller sections because I've got some diagrams that I believe are important and will help you deveop characters that pop off the page. Some of the sections will be short because I can only put in one image on the side, but when they are short, I will post more than one a day.

Lets get started with GOALS AND MOTIVATION

Your character goals help drive the story because it’s what the character is moving toward for the entire book. The goal should be something external and tangible. While they will have many underlying internal goals, the main goal should be clearly stated. Again, much like the Kernel Idea, I recommend you write this down. Your characters goals will help you set up motivation (the why) and the conflict (the why not) and keep the readers invested. 

Motivation is the most important factor to consider when having your character make choices or do actions. Once you have a feel for your characters’ motivation and they come alive for you, then to a certain extent you lose control over your story. For your characters to be realistic, they have to react like the people you have developed them to be, not like you want them to react in order to move your story ahead. Every time a character acts or reacts, I ask myself if that is consistent with whom I projected the character to be. 

For example, in Atlantis, I wrote a scene where some people were trying to talk my main character into traveling back to Cambodia where he had last been over thirty years ago. Where his Special Forces team had been wiped out horribly and my character had had nightmares about for years. And I needed my character to agree to go (or else the book would have been rather short). But I had to come up with a legitimate reason for my character to go. I had to figure out what would motivate him to agree to do something that he (or any other sane person) would not do. And it had to be believable to the reader, which means it had to be believable to my character.

Often your protagonist is initially reluctant to get involved and circumstances force him or her to do so. Your protagonist also usually begins by reacting, but eventually must make choices and take actions or else they will lose reader empathy.

Remember to consider extremes when writing about characters in order to involve your reader more intensely. You can have a good character and a bad character. But would the reader prefer to see an evil character and a noble character? Think of personalities as a pendulum and understand that the further you swing that pendulum, the more involved the reader usually will be. Therefore, take any very positive trait you can think of and try to find its opposite. Do the reverse. Then use those traits to develop your characters.

You need to study people and also remember that you were not the original mold for mankind. Some people are very different than you and have different value systems. I think authors who have very good characters understand this, much better than the average person.

I read an interesting thing the other day in a psychology book: the author said that everyone has a religion. What he meant was that everyone has something they believe in, even if it's not to believe in God. To write good characters, you need to know what their value and belief system is, then keep them acting according to that system. Even a crazy serial killer has a belief system, skewed as it may be. In fact, dissecting that belief system is often the task of the novel's protagonist in order to catch the serial killer.

I think you need to adopt a psychological structure for character types. You can invent your own from scratch, but it’s easier to use one that already exists and has been thoroughly developed. 

A book I recommend reading is John Douglas’ Mindhunter. Douglas was one of the founders of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit that specialized in profiling. What an author does is actually the opposite of what his unit does. A profiler looks at the evidence then tries to figure who the person is. An author invents the person then needs to come up with the evidence that would be representative of that person. Another interesting aspect of profiling is that it shows that people have character traits that are locked in and that those traits dictate their actions, called habit.