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readersperspective · 4 years

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Writing Advice Character Motivation

Your story is driven foreward by what your characters are doing, and normally, by your characters doing something they usually wouldn’t do under normal circumstances. To get them to the point where they do it, you need a motivation that either pushes or pulls them to this action. Also, all of these motivations can be seen in various lights. They can motivate your character to do or to not do a thing by being there or by not being there.

To get you some inspiration for motivations, I collected the main ones a character can have.

1. Morals

Of course this had to be my number one. It is the motivation of our brave knight in shining armour - morals. They fight for what they believe is right, they protect the weak and feed the poor because it is the right thing to do. Morals could also be the motivation of a very religious person, but also of a villain - for example when the villain wants to pressure the victims into following the same morals and ideas they have. Or when the villain thinks they are the only decent human being and have to force their mindset on everyone to bring peace to humanity. At first, “morals” might be a boring motivation, one that was used in the 50s to make superman look even more perfect, but especially for villains, it still is a great motivation, and we can get a lot of inspiration through history - most “historical villains” thought they did the right and justified thing.

2. Law and Order

This one is not hard to explain. If the monarch of your fictional kingdom suddenly decides that every citizen of their country has to go to the religious temple once a year, how many of these citizens would probably do it? People usually like rules, for various reasons - security being one of them, but also, again, morals. And most people follow these rules, if they don’t bother them too much, sometimes even without questioning them. Of course, this might not be the motivation for your rebellious troublemaker, but when you have a soldier, for example, that gets sent on a secret journey by their government, chances are they will go on that journey without questioning the order too much.

3. Honour

This might not be the motivation for your teenage protagonist of a story that is set in modern times, but apart from that, honour is a thing many people died for. Sometimes their personal honour, for example when someone questioned their abilities, sometimes the honour of the family (someone hear a little red dragon?), mostly when it comes to marriage, sometimes the honour of a loved one. It is closely tied to morals, again, imagine again your glorious knight seeing the poor people suffering - not only is itagainst their morals, but also against their honour to just walk by. It is also tied to law and order as well, because following the orders from the top often brings you your special piece of the honour cake, too. Honour is a great motivation for enemies turning into friends (I would not help you, but my honour forbids me to look away) as well as against enemies turning into friends (normally I would help you, but I am too proud to do so, you are my enemy!).

4. Family and Friends

This is a motivation that fits to nearly every character ever, because their barely are any characters that have absolutely no one they are close to. The motivation would be to protect their family or friends, but it could as well be about seeing them again or helping them. Or about keeping them out of harms way, or giving them a better life, or providing for them. Family makes people cross half the world and work themselves to death. And friends can be like family, too, sometimes and for some people they are the same. This motivation is great for every character, but I personally would love to see some villains with family and friends, too. Maybe a secret family they want to protect. Maybe a friend that is very close to them and that keeps them from doing worse things. There are a lot of ways to interpret this.

5. Love

Very close to family and friends, and yet very different. Of course, love can be about protecting someone or giving them a better life, too, but in contrast to family and friends, the love motivation often is about gaining love, too. While characters barely do things to gain more friends (although that absolutely is a thing), we see a lot of stories where a character does something to attract another one and gain their love. Also, romantic love often makes people do things platonic love would not, or not that fast. In its worst form, love can make people go blind and brutal. It is a common motivation in books, because it is a common motivation in real life, and because love is something most of us feel or search for, too. It’s easy to connect to a character that does something for love, but it is also easy to make your character seem a bit too head-over-heels or even creepy for doing something for a person they barely know (looking at you, Romeo and Julia, like what the hell).

6. Self protection

It is easy to understand, it is easy to connect to: self protection. A character with a healthy will to live will put this motivation over most of the others. When their life or health is being threatened, they will do their best to get out of harms way. Of course, most of the protagonists in our books ignore every warning that the journey to their goal or destination might be dangerous. But that is because at the point they decide to take that journey, often the threat is far away - yet. Once they actually meet it and see the whole extension of it, our protagonists often become scared, too, sometimes even run away, and have to decide again: is it worth the risks?

7. Personal Gain and Money

A very good motivation for the anti-heroes and villains. I certainly would not do that dangerous thing! But if you gave me, like a million dollars... I will think about it again. Good for heroes, too, as a secondary motivation at least, but anti-heroes often have the spicy addition of “the moment someone gives me more money than you do, I will not hesitate to accept their offer”. Of course, personal gain does not necessarily have to be money. It could also be a hidden treasure, a nice house, or any other material thing that the character hopes to gain once they accomplished the task.

8. Curiosity

The real treasure are the memories we made along the way, right? This motivation might not be the one that will make your character go to war, but certainly the one that will make your character go on a world trip or move for work. It is difficult to take as your main motive, because for most people, fear for their safety etc. will be stronger than curiosity, but if you have the typical explorer-character or if your story is more peaceful anyway, it is a beautiful motivation. Also, it is a great way to bring up your worldbuilding, either when your character explores the world themselves or when they start asking questions about what is happening around them.

9. Nostalgia

Why do we feel nostalgia? Thinking about it, it is weird to do something just because you did it as a child, or because you want to feel young again, or because you found a picture of your grandparents. And yet people do a lot of things “for the sake of old times”. This could be the perfect motivation for a character to reunite with old friends or to go back to a specific place.

10. Comfort

This one might not seem like a very strong motivation, but look at it from the other side: discomfort of the momentary situation. People would do a lot if you promise them that life will be more comfortable afterwards. Of course, that is often connected to personal gain / money, but you can reach more comfort with other things, too. People protesting against current climate politics has something to do with comfort, too. People not chosing to protest as well. It is more comfortable to close your eyes.

Of course, a character can have many motivations, so you can pick and choose and combine as you wish. I’d even say the combination is what brings spice into your story. How about a villain that does their bad actions to gain money, but also does their best to cover up that it has been them because they don’t want to disappoint their children? There we would have personal gain, honour, and family. Or a hero that does the task for gaining money for being able to provide for a life with their loved one, and also because it’s the right thing to do? Personal gain, love, maybe even family, depending on what they want to provide for, and morals.

Motivation really is a key aspect of your story. Be creative about it, but always remember: You don’t have to be the first one to tell that story, you just have to tell it different than anybody else.

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redorblue · 4 years

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Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

I was going to keep this blog Corona-free, but I read a book that I want to talk about and that touches on the current situation, so I decided to make an exception. The book is called Future home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, and before I start gushing I might add that in the light of current events, the atmosphere especially in the first part can be a bit upsetting. I’m still not quite sure why I decided to pick up a book about the end of the world in the first place. But I’m glad that I did, because it’s just so good.

The story is about Cedar Hawk Songmaker, a young Ojibwe woman who was adopted and raised by a white couple. At the beginning of the book, she is about four months pregnant, which she sees as an opportunity to reconnect with her biological mother and assorted family members. That first meeting is a work of art on its own: it perfectly encompasses the entire spectrum of emotions that such a meeting might provoke, from instant connection and familiarity over awkwardness and stiffness to a feeling of complete alienation because of the stark difference in social class, and the scene jumps wildly between all of them. These dynamics alone would make the story work, but it’s also set in a not-very-distant future that quickly devolves into a dystopia. There are references to climate change, but the event that triggers societal collapse is the stop, or rather the reversal, of evolution, meaning that humans give birth to homo erectus babies, dinosaur-like beings hatch from regular birds’ eggs, dragonflies suddenly have a wingspan of a meter again, and even plant species change beyond recognition. It’s never explained why this happens because in the book nobody knows either, but it causes the collapse of the US as a unified state and the appearance of some of the staples of dystopian fiction: widespread violence, deeply immoral governments, desperate or simply malicious people doing bad things, but also people coming together on a local level and trying to save as much and as many as possible.

So far, so omnipresent. What makes this book such a rare find for me was that it consistently focused on the perspective and the life of this one ordinary person who is not caught up in some high-level political/military game with the powers of evil, who is not even a member of the resistance, but simply tries her hardest to bring her child into the world (and get to keep it afterward). I say this with love, but she’s quite possibly the most unremarkable character in the main cast: she doesn’t smuggle people out or helps to hide anyone; she doesn’t work to form a self-subsistent, safe entity out of the reservation where her mother lives; she doesn’t take the initiative to escape once she’s captured; and most of the time, she’s the least informed person in the room.

But that’s exactly why it works, and why it’s different from other stories out there (more on that later). The dystopia is the setting, and don’t get me wrong, it works - sometimes frighteningly so because it feels so similar to our current situation: most people feel something is coming/here, but since they have little information and no idea what to do about it, they just keep on living while things around them deteriorate. But the dystopia is only the setting, not the story.

The story is about motherhood, both with regard to Cedar’s navigating the now two mothers in her life and with regard to Cedar’s own approaching motherhood. It is told in the form of a diary, narrated by Cedar and addressing her unborn child, which makes it feel very intimate. This intimacy is contrasted ever more by the way that the new powers that be (some sort of Christian fundamentalist church-government) try to turn reproduction into a matter of state control and public interest. In the end, the story is about Cedar fighting to be the one in charge of this supposedly very personal experience: mostly against the new regime, yes, but also against the baby’s father and even her adoptive mother. This focus on the personal over the political means that we spend a lot of time in Cedar’s head listening to her philosophical/religious musings (she’s a Catholic) and that we don’t get explanations for a lot of things that happen to her. As someone who loves the intricacies of good worldbuilding, I understand if this is frustrating to some people. But there’s a lot of stuff with expansive worldbuilding and lots of action out there already, and the fact that this isn’t like that is precisely what made this one stick out to me. In addition to that, there’s probably also a lot to be said about the religious symbolism in this book, especially around female saints, which gave it a philosophical tinge that I liked a lot, but half of that probably flew right over my head, so I’m going to leave that for now.

On Goodreads I saw a lot of people comparing this to The Handmaid’s Tale, with some even going as far as saying that they’re basically the same thing and that Louise Erdrich just ripped off what Margaret Atwood did better thirty years before. I don’t think that’s true though. Sure, they share some basic tenets, like a decline in fertility bringing about societal collapse, women being forcibly recruited to have as many babies as possible, or Christian fundamentalists taking charge. But there’s nothing entirely new under the sun, and I think they took some similar ideas and made them into different things. First off, the writing is very different: The Handmaid’s Tale makes you experience the soul-crushing boredom that the protagonist suffers, while Future Home is switches between a meditative tone and more action-y scenes, and the effect of being addressed directly as a reader (remember, it’s diary entries addressed to “you”) changes the reading experience.

Second, it has different themes. While The Handmaid’s Tale depicts isolation and the effects it has on the psyche, Future Home focuses on connections (especially between women) - positive connections, for the most part, but it doesn’t simplify them to a mere “we’re all best friends now”-level. They’re still complex and sometimes complicated, especially when it comes to Cedar’s sister and mothers. Future Home also presents a more balanced view on religion, simply because Cedar herself is a Catholic (one who is even knowledgeable about theology, but has a liberal mindset), while Atwood’s protagonist isn’t very religious. Another thing that sets Future Home apart from The Handmaid’s Tale is it’s inclusion of Native (Ojibwe) elements like reservation politics, history, the importance of a Native female saint (Kateri) to people’s spiritual lives, or Cedar’s anxieties about being Native by blood, but not by socialization. I love The Handmaid’s Tale as much as the next person, but it really is very white, and Future Home isn’t.

However, what this book actually reminded me of was a short story by Ted Chiang that I read recently named “72 Letters”. It builds on the concept of the golem, a figure made out of clay and animated by a piece of parchment with a special word/name on it that was supposedly built by rabbis to defend their communities against antisemitic pogroms. In this story, the technique is adapted to animate all sorts of automatons and get them to perform menial tasks - if you manage to find the right name for the creature, something that comprises its essence and capabilities in 72 letters. The society-shattering crisis in this story is still a few generations away, it sets in when a handful of scientists find out that in a few decades, all men will turn infertile, but it already brings out the worst in some of those in the know. The idea is to use the golem-animating technique to sort of artificially inseminate women, but mainly those of the middle and upper classes because God beware people decide on their own how many children they have and the unwashed masses take over. It’s not a very long short story, sadly, but it shares a few themes with Future Home like state control over reproduction, the ethical limits of science, God’s role in evolution and reproduction, and the struggle between different groups of people - social classes for 72 Letters, species of humans for Future Home. 72 Letters tackles the issue of significant changes to reproductive abilities from a Marxist perspective, while Future Home’s approach is more feminist, but they’re both interesting perspectives. What they definitely do show is that it’s not an intrinsically religious problem to want to take control over who procreates and who doesn’t, but that the same drive can be found in secular and even supposedly “progressive” people/ideologies/institutions, and that’s a lesson worth listening to.

#future home of the living god #louise erdrich #the handmaids tale #margaret atwood #72 letters #ted chiang #book review #coronavirus #covid19 #covid-19 #covid 19

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condensed-theorem-shop · 7 years

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Providence

Another glowfic setting.

I have written about Providence previously here and here. The name is @curiosity-discoverer-of-worlds’s invention; he’s also devising a magic system for it, which I am Very Enthusiastic about.

The following is excerpted/prettied up/expanded from chat logs about the setting.

(cut for length)

<FacelessDude> I'm unsure how people in bad home situations leave?

<Moriwen> It’s straightforward for a Provider: go to college, go get a job, get married. Harder on a Caretaker, but it's not like there's some kind of law against moving out and setting up a household on your own.

<FacelessDude> Maybe they can leave to be part of a new household in a new settlement?

<Moriwen> Yeah, setting up with a group of people in similar situations is totally plausible. Another option might be asking to move in with a connected family group -- your Provider parent's birth family, or a married Provider sibling's family.

<Moriwen> There's also a class of jobs-for-Caretakers, in which you move in with some other family and get given room and board and a small salary in exchange for providing a Caretaker-y service, and those are popular among Caretakers who want to leave their home situation, though uncommon in an absolute sense (overall it’s really uncommon for a Caretaker to have a proper job like that).

<Moriwen> “Live-in aide” would be an example -- something like "help elderly person who has trouble moving around" would normally just be done by one of the household Caretakers, but, like, if you've got a severely disabled kid who needs actually-trained assistance, you might get a Caretaker to move in with you for that.

<Moriwen> A major job-for-Caretakers ("major" being relative, still) is "family therapist,” which means a specific thing in this setting.

<Moriwen> If someone's not treating their kids well, and it doesn't rise to the level of abuse but they're also not shaping up with family pressure, one of the aunts or uncles might report them to family court (which is a whole thing), and a very common result from that is a court order to have a family therapist live with you for a while and help you break out of harmful dynamics.

<Moriwen> Because on the one hand they're really concerned with child welfare, but on the other hand "remove person from family" is considered pretty extreme.

<Moriwen> I picture the family therapists as being kind of like Supernanny, if you've ever seen that.

<FacelessDude> I have, albeit I was also picturing something vaguely like a "life coach"?

<Moriwen> That too! They do a lot of, like, "so that interaction seemed like it left everyone frustrated, let's work through some better ways to deal with this situation."

<Moriwen> You can hire one voluntarily, too, and it's not that uncommon to do so -- like if you just can't get along with your in-laws, or Aunt Bertha keeps undermining everyone's parenting, or something.

<Moriwen> Providence is super pro-child-rights, partly because the combination of "spanking is super illegal and your extended family will so report you" and "you can TRY taking away your kid's x-box for talking back but if your sister-in-law thinks your kid was speaking truth to power she can invite him over to her suite and give him candy" means that Earth-style discipline does not so much function.

<Moriwen> So your options are kind of "express disapproval, hope that your relationship with kid is good enough for them to care" or "talk to kid, explain convincingly why you want them to do a thing."

<Moriwen> You can try to, like, refuse to let your family near your kid, but (a) hard when you live in the same building, and (b) they can take that to family court, and unless the kid expresses not wanting to be around them or you can make a really good case they're subtly abusive, the judge will be Super Unsympathetic.

<Alicorn> Or you can convince extended family that consistent discipline is indispensable.

<Moriwen> Right, yeah, so if you can get the whole extended family in on it, you can manage discipline, which for most families means that you can do punishment but only in really clear-cut situations (no dessert, you hit your sister).

<Moriwen> Obviously it's possible to get an entire extended family who are just awful but it's harder, especially because Providers aren't going to be super excited to marry into that family.

<Alicorn> With regard to that: in the same way it's good to have lots of caretakers come up in your household, is it worrying if your caretaker kids move away?

<Moriwen> Yes, definitely -- like, obviously there can be explanations ("they're super noise sensitive and just could not tolerate the family size") but having it happen more than once looks really bad.

<FacelessDude> Comparable to someone changing their gender behavior just to leave the bad situation?

<Moriwen> Comparable in some ways! Maybe some kind of cross between that and "young teenager making serious attempt to run away from home," in how unusual/worrying it is.

<Moriwen> There's not mandatory schooling -- most people do homeschooling, with various family members available to tutor specific subjects, and it's not government-regulated.

<FacelessDude> Do they have any sort of centralized testing?

<Moriwen> No, except for, like, SAT-equivalents for applying to colleges/jobs. So if you want to teach your kids absolutely nothing, and your kids are fine with that, you can get away with it.

<Moriwen> But there are public schools, and it's super illegal to prevent your kid from going to them. (Few enough people use them that they can be largely individual-tutoring-based also.)

<Moriwen> So a few super poor people send their kids there, or people who just happen not to have the resources in their family for tutoring. But also, if at any point your kids decide they want an education, they can show up to school and say "I want to go here now" and someone will sit down with them and help them figure out an education plan.

<Moriwen> (And if they thinks they’re going to get in trouble for that, they can tell someone there, and that's the sort of thing that gets a serious investigation and maybe a court-ordered family therapist.)

<Moriwen> So you get a mix of different kinds of students in the public schools. Some of them go there full-time -- kids from really poor families, or from families who just weren’t giving them an education, or who just showed up one day and said "I hate my family's teaching style just teach me."

<Moriwen> But you also get teenagers showing up being like "I love my family okay but can you please teach me about evolution now" and coming every afternoon for a week to have evolution tutoring and that's it for their public schooling. Or maybe they don’t have anyone in their family who can teach them music, so they just come for one period a day to learn that.

<Moriwen> It’s not even that unusual to have a kid show up at the public school saying “I brought my work from home, the baby’s fussy and I can’t focus,” and they have quiet study rooms for just that sort of thing, and the tutors will help you if you have questions and otherwise leave you alone.

<Moriwen> Or to have a whole family of kids showing up in the morning saying “hey, our family’s getting ready to move, the whole house is in chaos with packing and no one has time to teach us, they sent us here just for the next couple of days -- we’re supposed to be learning about adding fractions and parts of speech, here’s the lesson outline they had prepped,” and the tutors will work with that.

<FacelessDude> One thought on worldbuilding is that the family setup makes exploration/settling in other continents harder. Like, not impossible, but ... I’m thinking of how being sent to the Americas and Australia was a punishment?

<Moriwen> Yes, it makes sense for there to be more of that. And, like, I'm sure you still get "entire family picks up and moves to America to escape religious oppression.” And the occasional "well, this sucks, but we're brutally poor, so the two of us are just going to have to go move out to the frontier and start a new family.”

<FacelessDude> Yeah, but it's a bigger production. And it also makes it much harder to do "send one and then they will pay for the rest to go along." Not impossible, and you still have a version of that but with provider groups. But it does not make it easier.

<Moriwen> Yeah. Still happens, but harder and less frequent.

<FacelessDude> Yeah, there’s more inertia. Possibly some people will decide to start the household before going to the new frontier too.

<Moriwen> ...ooh, actually, I bet a lot of historical settlement is less messed up in Providence! Because if you're a Provider and really want to go explore a new place, "move there, marry native, integrate into culture" starts to look really appealing.

<Moriwen> Like, historically, some of the less messed-up settlement seems to have happened when people just intermarried with the native population a bunch, and I can see a ton of that happening here.

<FacelessDude> This also leads into the other bit of worldbuilding, which is the shape of their urbanspace. I was thinking their cities are not necessarily denser, but they are definitely more sprawled? Because while "move a day’s walk away from your family" might not be the same sacrifice as moving to another continent, it's still a sacrifice.

<Alicorn> Adjoining apartments. When new people move in, plaster over the doors to any apartments they don't want included. You can still live in skyscrapers like this, it's just a bit harder.

<Moriwen> Yeah, I think cities are probably bigger both horizontally and vertically.

<FacelessDude> Yeah, and I also think they are more likely to be interconnected by inhabited bits? Like -- they still have wilderness, but it's easier to avoid, because City B and City A have more villages in between. And there is more regular public transportation between cities, and it's safer.

<FacelessDude> I was also imagining that the inventions of new ways of transport and communication were a bigger deal. And maybe they got the concept of "video letters" earlier too? Basically things that amount to "make me feel closer to home through better communication" were more widespread.

<Moriwen> Yes, this seems right. And I imagine they're really big on public transport, yeah. There’s the population density, and the fact that it's hard to figure out how many cars you need for a household like that (if everyone wants to go different places at once maybe you need a dozen! but that's silly most of the time), and the fact that they're big on children having freedom of movement.

<FacelessDude> And also I was thinking that movie projectors became -- kinda like a typical household appliance? At least until TV was invented. And public theaters are still a thing, but one way they could be different is the possibility of "family sized" rooms or something. With nice seats, maybe also meals, because it’s like a "family night out."

<Alicorn> Like karaoke rooms but for theater.

<Moriwen> Yeah! I like that.

<FacelessDude> If people found out about Jeandad in Providence, would he be burned at the stake?

<Moriwen> Ha. Not literally but, like, if everything came out there would probably be people agitating for him to get the death penalty.

<Moriwen> That wouldn’t actually be the case in our world. Nothing he does is even potentially a capital crime in the US. Heck, the odds are very good cps wouldn't even end up doing anything, given that they're a nice middle-upper-class family and Jean will insist very convincingly he is ~so happy~.

<Moriwen> But in Providence the lines are much brighter -- any kind of corporal punishment is go-straight-to-jail-do-not-pass-go illegal. And people in Providence take relationships with inherent power dynamics seriously. The classic cases are considered to be parent/child, teacher/student, doctor/patient, and officer/soldier; aggravated physical or sexual abuse by the person with power in any of those relationships can potentially be a capital crime.

#worldbuilding #glowfic #providence #longpost

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