Character motivation is one of the most important driving forces of a book’s narrative. It’s enormously significant in making sure your characters are interesting, that their actions make sense throughout the story, and that the events of the plot feel meaningful. With that in mind, how can you make sure your characters have clear motivations, strong enough to keep them going throughout your book? Let’s have a look.
What is character motivation?
We talk about motivation in our own lives a lot. I’m just not feeling motivated enough to go to the gym today. I know I should study for my exam next week, but I just can’t find the motivation. I was super motivated to eat healthy while doing my food shop and now my fridge is full of vegetables and I have no crisps and I regret everything. When we’re talking about character motivation, we’re talking about something slightly different, something a bit bigger.
Your character’s motivation should be the thing they want most in the world. Wanting this, and trying to get it, will be the rationale behind a majority of the decisions your character makes. Their desire for this thing—their motivation—should be something that propels the plot forwards to its eventual conclusion. That conclusion will also tie in with their motivation; are they going to get what they’ve been chasing all along, or not? Will they have to sacrifice the thing they’ve wanted this whole time for some greater purpose? The clearer your character’s motivation has been up to the point of the conclusion, the more invested your readers are likely to be in the outcome. It’s hard to care about a character’s ending if they don’t seem to care that much, and having a strong sense of motivation helps you avoid that particular issue.
There are different types of character motivation
Motivation can come from a range of sources, they can be internal or external. Internal motivations come from within a character, such as a desire to fulfil a particular ambition, to fit in, to make up for things the character has done wrong in the past. External motivations on the other hand come from—you guessed it—the world around your character, or physical needs. Things like the need for food or shelter would be external motivations, also a desire to escape from a particular situation, or to enact change in the world.
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The important thing about your character motivations is that they need to make sense. That can come from a character’s backstory, or from the way their world works. A character whose motivation is to gain power might have grown up in a situation where they were often afraid, and had little to no control over their surroundings. A character whose motivation is to get in with the popular group at school makes more sense when you can see the benefits they’d gain from that.
A character’s motivation is allowed to change and evolve over the course of a book, or series of books. It can be a key part of character development—either realising that they don’t want the same thing they used to, or that what they thought they wanted needed to be achieved in a different way to the one they were approaching it with. Think of the classic romantic comedy trope of a character who thinks they want to be with one character, only to discover that the person who was truly right for them was somebody else all along.
Not every character in your story needs to have a deeply complex motivation for everything that they do, but the more integral a character is to the plot (or the more time readers will spend with them), the more important it is to have a clear sense of what it is that they want. You might want to have a look at my post on tiers of characters to help you work out how central some of your supporting characters are, and therefore how much detail their motivations need to have.
Examples of character motivations
Let’s look at a classic first: Tokein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The motivation driving the whole expedition is the destruction of the One Ring—the motivation for that being to destroy Sauron. Frodo, as the main character, has a very clear aim, and others gather around him because they also want the ring destroyed (or, in Samwise’s case, because they want to help Frodo himself). Many of the supporting characters have other motivations at play, some of them in direct contradiction with Frodo’s goal, which results in interesting character relationships and interactions.
No matter what else goes in on that trilogy—and there is a lot that goes on—the main characters never lose sight of their motivation. That keeps the story feeling coherent, and keeps readers invested in the outcome, right up to the point where Frodo has the opportunity to throw the ring into Mount Doom.
How about a more modern example? I’ve made no secret of my love for the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, and one of the things I love about it is that the character’s motivations are clear and used to great effect. Karou, particularly in book one, wants with every fibre of her being to belong somewhere. She doesn’t feel totally at home in either of her worlds, but she works hard to carve out spaces for herself anyway. To make friends. To make herself useful.
When access to her original home is ripped away from her, she’s prepared to go to the ends of the Earth (pretty much literally) to find her way back. The only thing that manages to distract her from that goal is the bewildering connection she feels to Akiva; her primary motivation is pulling her in two directions as she tries desperately to find what she’s been missing all her life.
What’s your favourite example of character motivation in a story?
If you’ve read or watched anything with great use of character motivation, share it in the comments!
This is such a big part of character development for me. I much prefer books that have strong characters and an average plot to those with a great plot but average character development. Obviously great for both is ideal, but it would be characters for me if I had to choose. If I get to the end and the book unravels and I’m left confused as to why someone has done something it completely ruins it for me x
Sophie