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| Photo credit: Lord Mariser on Flickr |
What I mean to
say is that every action any character in your novel takes must have a
motivation (and P.S: speaking is an action).
Think about your
everyday life for a moment—from waking up in the morning to climbing into bed
at the end of the day—and I think you'll find that there is very little (if
anything at all) that you do without any motivation or reasoning at all. Even
something as simple as eating lunch (motivation: you were hungry) or playing
video games (motivation: you were bored, or didn't want to do something else,
or really just wanted to reach that achievement, etc.) has some form of
reasoning behind it.
What's my point?
We don't do anything without motivation and neither should our characters.
This tends to be
an obstacle when certain plot points need to be met, so our characters must do
stupid or evil things in order to accomplish our goals for the manuscript.
Without enough planning, when looking back at the WIP, writers often stumble
across scenes where characters do something without a clearly defined
motivation.
This happens most
often with antagonists. In most novels, the antagonist must do some pretty
terrible things to the main character in order for the plot to progress—whether
it's stealing his lover or trying to kill him or embarrassing him in school (or
at work)—antagonists must set our characters back and create conflict.
But antagonists
are characters too, and they need to be well developed with believable
motivations or their actions will fall flat.
Because I love the
Harry Potter series and one of the
best ways to learn how to improve your writing is by taking a look at the
expertise of the greats, I'm going to use the most evil and yet still
believable bad guy I have yet encountered in a book.
That's right: I'm
talking about Voldemort.
As most of you
know (regardless of whether or not you've read the series), Voldemort does many
a terrible thing to our main character Harry. Without spoiling anything for
those of you few readers who have yet to read the series, Voldemort kills
Harry's parents when he's a baby, tries to kill him a dozen or so times
throughout his lifetime, frees the most evil of wizards from Azkaban (wizard
prison), murders many of Harry's friends and loved ones as well as tortures and
kills others, goes through a very painful process of fragmenting his soul and
murders his loyal followers when their usefulness expires.
And yet,
Voldemort doesn't do things only because he's evil—he has a goal, a motivation:
to be the greatest wizard who ever lived—greater even than the famous Albus
Dumbledore. Above all else, he wants power and immortality.
Unfortunately for
Voldemort, there's this pesky orphaned teenager who keeps getting in his way.
Despite all the
evil, horrendous things Voldemort does, never once did J.K. Rowling fall into
the trap of making him do things just to be evil—everything he did led back to
his number one goal, every horrible action he took had a motivation.
Can you say the
same for your characters?
Take a look at
your WIP. Can you justify your characters' actions with motivations--or are
they simply acting for the sake of the plot?
29 comments:
This blog came at just the right time for me. I just started into adding another two characters to my WIP and I need to add their plotline into everything, but I am not quite sure where to begin. And as you talk about their motivations it got me thinking that I need to think about what they want ultimately at the moment and in the future also. Thank you for the great example of Voldemort in this too.
Terrific! It is so important to do this. When I get stuck, that's what I do. Ask Questions.
This is a great post. I have recently been trying to get more motivation in my characters - realized some of them were just existing.
That has been the question of my weekend! I keep trying to wrap my head around why everyone does what they are doing. its slowed me down a little bit but its also helped me to make a few tweaks to my outline. great post.
So glad this post was able to help! Motivations are really important to pin down while developing characters, and what better antagonist to use as an example than Voldemort. :D
Thank you, Laura! Asking questions is one of the quickest ways to get going again whenever you get stuck in your writing--and a fantastic brainstorming method. :)
I'll admit I have in the past been guilty of that as well. Motivations are something I have to usually develop more during the revision stage.
Sometimes slowing down to analyze our writing and make those tweaks is the best thing you can do for the WIP. Glad you enjoyed the post!
That's a very good question, Ava. I'll keep that in mind when my edits come back on my second novel. I'll ask myself those tough questions then. I will endevour to ask them a little sooner on this third novel that I just began writing last month.
Hope things are well with you.
-Jimmy
That's crazy! I'm in the outlining stages of one of my 5 WIPS (all in outlining process actually...) and I realized I didn't really know my antagonists motivation. I knew his history fairly well and I knew what he was trying to do but I realized just yesterday that I didn't know why. So I basically took a blank sheet of computer paper and drew out a timeline starting at 1940 when he was born and ending in 2018 when he died and labeled major events in his life which altered his mission, goal, and motivation. I found that it helped as did this article. Thanks so much for writing this block. It does give my stories a much better "Writability" which is irreplaceable so thank you again. :)
I love how you take Harry Potter for explaining things. The thing about Harry Potter is, regardless of reiterative reading there are still new things to discover about the characters.
Love Voldy's picture, Ava. And, of course, I love your example. I can't remember the exact quote, but at one point Voldemort mentions that he almost killed two trick-or-treaters on his way to the Potters' home, but didn't because it was quite unnecessary. A good example of your point.
Thanks, Jimmy. Good luck with your writing and editing!
Creating a timeline for your antagonists life is a fantastic idea--I haven't done that before, but I imagine it certainly helped pinpoint his motivations as well as nuances that deepen him as a character. And I'm glad my blog helped! :)
I don't know if you follow Susan Sipal's blog (@HP4Writers on Twitter), but if you like my occasional Harry Potter references, you'll probably love her blog. She focuses solely on what writers can learn from Harry Potter.
That being said, I have to agree--the depth of the world J.K. Rowling created is so deep and intricate that even upon a second or third reading there's still more to learn.
Now that you mention it, that trick-or-treaters thing sounds vaguely familiar (although I can't remember the exact quote or which book it came from, either). Regardless, thanks for bringing it up! I'd forgotten about that but you're right--further proves that he doesn't do evil just for the sake of being evil.
Motivating the bad guys is one of the most fun parts. It's easy to imagine that someone might want to do good things, but WHY would someone want to do bad things? (Or maybe it's just me that's evil. :))
Nope! You're totally right--once you get past the challenge of accepting that you need to really develop your antagonist just as much (if not more) than your protagonist, it can be fun to figure out what makes them tick.
Because they don't think they're doing bad things. That's why my favorite villain is Ozymandias from Watchmen. His motives aren't even ostensibly selfish -- he does monstrous evil while totally believes he's working toward the greater good, and tries to save the world by becoming a mass murderer.
This is a good post! Evil characters are just that - evil. But they also need to have something inside of them that makes them human. So I like that you used Voldemort as your example, because he has many of those qualities: Selfish, power hungry, and a tormented past.
Thanks for this post! :)
I haven't read Watchmen however, that does sound like a very complex and interesting antagonist. I find that usually the most realistic and fascinating antagonists are indeed those who truly believe their actions are justified. They don't see themselves as the bad guys--they believe that they are right in doing whatever evil they're committing (and, not surprisingly, their justifications often fall under the "greater good.")
I don't like to think of antagonists as evil per say, if only because we're then often tempted to justify their atrocious actions because of their "evilness." However, I like the point you made nonetheless--every antagonist should have at least one quality that humanizes them.
Totally agree. One of the reasons I like Watchmen is that it challenges so many ideas of what heroism actually means.
great post once again, and something I am really working on in my editing process!
Thanks. :) Ya I like doing timelines and things...helps me to write/draw out my notes and stuff by hand, then I can sketch things also. Then it's a matter of deciphering my handwriting and converting it to my "Notes" file on my computer. Haha.
I take a lot of notes by hand, but I have a bad habit of forgetting to create a digital version of them, which is a problem when I can't find the notebook or the page I wrote the notes on...
Thanks so much! It's something I'm keeping an eye out for when I dive into edits again--which is why I decided to write a post about it. ^_^
Another great post! The motivation for our actions is not always that strong, but it's always there. The lovely thing about characters and their motivation, is that even two characters with the same motivation can act differently.
For example, the very first chapter of Harry Potter. Hagrid, Dumbledore and McGonagall all have the motivation to make sure Harry Potter is safe. McGonagall acts worried and stricte, while Dumbledore tries to lighten it up with his lemon drops (or what was it?) and Hagrid is very emotional. I really like that chapter :-)
That's a great example! It's certainly true that how characters will act on their motivations is just as distinctive and telling (if not more so) than the motivations themselves. After you've figured out your character's motivation, the next step is certainly to determine how they would act on it, depending on their personality.
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