Motivations and barriers
All of us have things that motivate us. We have things we want. We have things we need. We have goals. We have dreams. Take me, for example. My currents goals are (a) finish writing the first draft of my novel (give me another five years), (b) complete my joyful to-do list (52 things I hope will bring me joy, one for each week of the year), (c) buy a house (might need to win the lottery first), (d) be a better person (a lifelong endeavour), (e) be a better writer (also a lifelong endeavour), (f) learn to play the ukulele (I’m getting really good at “The Bare Necessities”), and (g) reduce my TBR pile to less than two-thousand-eight-hundred-and-seventy-three.
That’s a lot of motivating elements and it doesn’t even touch on what I need (food, shelter, human interaction, sleep, energy, to win the lottery…) And the characters in our stories are exactly the same. They want things. They need things. And they all have multiple motivations rather than just one single goal that drags them through the day.
All of the motivations I’ve listed above are imbued with a sense of difficulty. These aren’t things I can accomplish in the blinking of an eye. I also have much easier goals (writing this craft article is much easier than writing my novel; just now I was feeling a little nippy but it was easy enough to get up and put on a jumper). These exist in conjunction with the harder ones, but they aren’t generally as interesting or as imbued with emotion. This is the other side of the equation – our stories are generally more powerful if we make it hard for our characters to get what they want.
Motivations and barriers – that’s my focus this month, honing in on one particular story and thinking about how the build of it is structured around these two key things.
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Story-level motivation
Here’s a story I love by Emily Rinkema – The Interview (Emily Rinkema | Variant Lit). I love the way it starts. I love the ways it ends. And I love the whole journey from A to B. That journey is based around a clear character motivation. The narrator wants to be the successful candidate in this interview process, however bizarre and weird she finds that process to be.
At the start of the story, we have clear anchoring of the motivation. Have a look at the first line and think about how quickly you become aware of what this character wants:
“I’m ten minutes late to the interview to be my mother’s daughter. I’m confident, as her actual daughter, her only child, that I’ll have a leg up…”
I often talk about the importance of anchoring a reader in place and time, but character and character motivation are equally important. The earlier we know what a character wants or needs, the earlier we can start to connect with them at an emotional level.
Active character steps
In “The Interview”, the narrator’s story-level motivation is kept in the spotlight throughout. Everything that happens here, everything that the narrator thinks and feels—it all comes back to that motivation in some way, the story building around it towards its wonderful denouement.
While it’s possible to write stories about passive characters, mostly we want our protagonists to be active in some way. And that word “active” (which often gets bandied about) very firmly comes back to motivation. What is our character doing to get what they want?
In “The Interview”, the narrator first tries to disrupt the process. She says, “This is fucking ridiculous.” Then we have the first interview where she actively thinks about where to sit. She answers her mother’s questions up until the point when her frustrations get in her way. After the interview, her motivation shifts slightly—she wants to know what happens next—but again she’s taking active steps to achieve that.
External barriers
Another element of creating a sense of build is putting barriers in our character’s path. Here, we have the other candidates—the set-back in paragraph 1 of the slim, athletic woman who makes the narrator “question all of [her] life decisions.” Then we have the barrier presented by there only be one chair in her mother’s room.
For the second interview, the narrator is required to bring a presentation. While this isn’t a barrier as such, it has a similar effect. In order to create that sense of build, we don’t want things to be easy, and we want the difficulty level to increase as the story moves from beginning to end.
Internal barriers
Barriers can be external like the ones I’ve picked out above, but often when we up the stakes, it’s worth considering internal barriers. Human beings are complex and there’s generally a lot swirling around inside our minds. In “The Interview”, notice how the emotional landscape of the first paragraph shifts from confidence to doubt to shame. The way the narrator says, “This is fucking ridiculous”, comes across as a defence mechanism. When the interview gets underway, we see more doubt, a shift back to confidence in the way the narrator answers the first few questions, but then an explosion of self-sabotage—“you know the answer to that, are you fucking kidding me?”
The steps a character takes to achieve their motivation can also be internal. Before the second interview, the narrator persuades herself that the other candidate is looking “a little less catalog-ready today—anxious, tired.” Later in reference to her more global motivation (see below), she momentarily persuades herself that “[she’s] been wrong about everything, maybe [her mother] does love [her].” Other internal steps towards her motivation might have been psyching herself up, using mindfulness to get on top of her anxiety etc.
Global motivation
At the start of this article, I talked about the many motivations I currently have in my life right now. If I were to go away and write a story, though, I’d pick just one. Or at least, I’d pick one as the “story-level motivation.” But as already mentioned, human beings are complex. We have things we want from any particular moment and we have things we want more globally out of life. For my stories, I tend to think at three levels.
Level one: story-level motivation (the motivation that’s specific to this specific scenario). In “The Interview”, this would be that the narrator wants to be picked for the “job”.
Level two: mid-level motivation (how does the story-level motivation fit into the character’s current life). In “The Interview”, the narrator wants to resolve the care situation around her mother; note how there is a tension between this motivation and the story-level motivation when a small part of the narrator is rooting for the other candidate.
Level three: global motivation (what drives the character more generally in life). This will tend to be more ambiguous in most stories, but one global motivation that stands out for me in “The Interview” is how the narrator seems to be searching for love.
A lot of the most powerful stories shift from focus on story-level motivation to that more global motivation around their emotional zenith and this is exactly what I see in “The Interview.” Does the narrator still care there about getting the “job” or are her thoughts much more focused on wishing her mother could return to something resembling how she was before, to yearning for that sense of connection that has never completely been there? Does the final “I’ve got to believe there’s a chance” refer to the “job” or does it refer to those other things? Or is it all the motivations tied together in a really clever fashion?
Other characters
Another thing that happens in the final moments of this story is that the narrator projects her contemplations onto the character of Tom, wondering why “he chooses to spend his days with other peoples’ parents.”
In terms of analysing character motivation, this provides the final piece of the puzzle. Not only does the main character have motivations at different levels, not only do they take steps to achieve their goals and face barriers to achieving those goals, but all the other character are exactly the same. Here, Tom’s actions need to align with his motivations, and that’s perhaps a thing we don’t think about enough with our secondary characters. What is driving them? Even if this doesn’t make it onto the page in any way, this feels as though it’s something we should know.
So, there you are. Motivations. Barriers. A wonderful story to illustrate it all. Hopefully, that has given you lots to ponder. And hey, who knows? Maybe it has given you a bit of motivation as well or helped you hurdle one of those pesky barriers.
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