Motivation x 2

So, motivation.

Why is your character taking the MacGuffin to the MacGuffin Disposal system?  Why is his plucky sidekick along for the ride?   What is the love interest pursuing that puts her (or him, if the protagonist is, say, a female auto mechanic) on the same path as our intrepid hero?

The answer to these questions is what motivates each character, drives them into the story and keeps them going when the chips are down.  Some characters motivations are weak, and if you know, you can judge at what point that character would cut and run – or betray the hero!

Characters motivations help define both their strengths – and their weaknesses.  If someone is spending their life hunting down the man who murdered their father and scarred them in a duel, they will likely learn to be one of the best fencers in the world.  However, a failure to achieve that kind of motivation could lead a man to drink, to a deep abiding alcoholism.  Both the strength and weakness of the character flow from his motivation and its details (oh, and virtuacookie to the first to catch the reference :))

Lets take another example from my own work: the lead character of ONSET: To Serve and Protect is a police officer, first and foremost.  His core motivation is to protect the innocents around him.  This leads to him calling on his greatest strengths only when others are in danger.   He only calls upon – or indeed, realizes – the full depth of his power when doing so is the only way to save men and women he is responsible for.  However, it also leads to him doing some astonishingly stupid things to try and protect others – including going into fights with things his side normally uses nuclear weapons to kill.

Your characters motivations are essential to know to help drive your plot and shape it – and sometimes, they’ll change your plot as you realize you can either have a character act against their nature, or adjust your plot for their nature.  Sometimes, the story justifies the first.  Sometimes, its more important to keep your characters true to themselves and fix the plot around that.

The times two in the title is because I also want to discuss another type of motivation – one I’m currently having issues with.  The motivation for us to actually write.  I wrote earlier about trying for five hundred words a day, and that is a goal that I’m currently dramatically failing to meet – I think I’ve put a thousand words in a word processor in the last two months that weren’t for work or this blog.

Finding things to motivate us to write is a big deal.  If you’ve got contracts, well, deadlines wouldn’t exist if they weren’t one of the most effective motivators in the world.  Money is another good one, and the combination works for a lot of careers

An amateur author, writing for yourself, really, doesn’t have that oomph to deadlines and desires.  We write to have fun, to see our stories take form.  We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t enjoy it, and generally when I sit down to write, it is fun.  I do enjoy it.  But getting myself to do so can be hard some days.  Its often a lot more lazy and easy to play a video game instead of sitting down and marshalling thoughts enough to write.

So my battle for the moment is finding new ways to motivate myself to write.  Any of my readers care to throw in thoughts on the topic?