Tag Archives: character motivation

Is character sympathy important?

Obviously, with a new book out on the subject, I’ve been thinking about character sympathy a lot lately. Most of the time, of course, character sympathy is subconscious for a writer and a reader—until it doesn’t happen.

Unfortunately, in a book I read recently, it didn’t happen. I never got onboard with the main character, and I frankly didn’t enjoy the book.

confuseSo, without pointing any fingers, I want to analyze what went wrong with this read for me. Details have been changed to protect the innocent.

First, the book happened to fall in the middle of a series, which doesn’t help. Perhaps if I were familiar with the characters already, I could have sympathized with the protagonist a little faster. As writers, we must be mindful of character sympathy whether the book is the character’s first adventure or his fifteenth.

Secondly, the character did have some of the basic principles of reader identification in place.

Giving our character problems is one of the first ways we learn to engender sympathy for our character with our readers. This character started off with an engaging scene showing struggles. She’s facing real adversity here—baaad people have it out for her. So that wasn’t the problem with this character.

The character also had some great strengths, another key to character sympathy. Her physical strengths and cleverness were quickly on display as she bested the bad guys despite being outnumbered and outgunned. She’s clever and witty, and even had me laughing. When she wasn’t being kind of snotty (which worked for her character, but was still annoying), she was fun to watch. So that wasn’t the problem with this character.

Did I mention her tragic backstory? Fortunately, she doesn’t bank too hard on her rough childhood and dead friends and family members as a ploy for character sympathy. So that wasn’t the problem either.

If all these things worked, how on earth did the character fall short? I found two things that I think really undermined character sympathy for me: a lack of sacrifice and unclear motivations.

Sacrifice, being able to put someone else’s needs above your own for just a minute—even something as small having a noble goal—is an vital part of creating identification with our readers. And while this character had a lot of responsibility, she ultimately seemed to care most about herself. She occasionally thought about others—but mostly only to be vaguely sorry she’s causing them so much trouble before she plunged deeper into that trouble.

ConfusedWorse, flinging herself headlong into danger, as she insisted on doing over and over again, didn’t really seem to make sense. A little too much information was being withheld, especially as to why the character thought this course of action was not only right but necessary. Our characters can do courageous things, even if it’s out of character for them, but only if their motivations are clear.

Ultimately, these problems continued throughout the book, and I felt like I was being jerked around by the plot—with the character’s complicity, leaving me in the dark as to why we were doing these dangerous things—rather than living through the character. The longer I think about the book, the more upset I get about it!

Character sympathy isn’t a given. We have to work for it. Don’t neglect character sympathy and leave your readers feeling cheated!

What do you think? Have you ever just not gotten onboard with a character? Why?

Want more tips on creating character sympathy? Read Character Sympathy!

Photo credits: stick figures—Tall Chris; confusing notes—CollegeDegrees360; both via Flickr/CC

Secret sauce: motivating and manipulating your characters

This entry is part 10 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

You know your writerly friends (some of them are you guys) who say of their characters, “I can’t write; Jimmy’s rebelling. He won’t go to Angela’s”? This isn’t something I’ve struggled with a whole lot, but that might be because I have no problem manipulating my characters to get what I want.

I think author/former literary agent Nathan Bransford says it well:


And this [characters coming alive and taking the story in another direction] can really help out a story – while obviously the characters are only alive insasmuch as they’re in the author’s (living) head, this may be a way of expressing that the author is being true to the logic of a situation. The author has a sense of the character, and it’s important that the character’s actions are logically consistent.

At the same time, I always find it curious to hear authors so completely in thrall to their worlds and characters, and I start wondering, “Wait a second, who’s in charge here?”

Hint: the author.

Manipulating your characters with motivation

I try not to over outline, but I usually know (or figure out during the course of a scene or sequence) what my characters need to do next, either for themselves or for the external plot. This isn’t to say it’s always easy to “make” them do that, or to make the jump—I do sometimes stop and say, “Now, why would s/he do that? What would motivate him to do that?” (Or “how can I make him do that, or want to do that?”)

I’m not the only one who believes in character manipulation through motivation. In Scene & Structure, Jack Bickham gives a great example of how character motivation can move a character into place on a scene level:

In one of my recent novels published under a pseudonym which I don’t want to reveal, my heroine at one crucial turning point must decide to visit the room of a sick person in the retirement center where the heroine works. She has just learned at the end of a scene that the resident is more ill than she had imagined; but there are both a doctor and a nurse on duty, and there seemed to me at first to be no emotional or logical reason for my very-busy heroine to drop everything and fall even further behind in her pressing work to pay a visit when such good care is already available. But that was exactly what my plot plans required that she somehow logically do. (56)

Breaking in here to add: note the emphasis on doing this logically. We can’t drag our characters around like marionettes! We have to find something within our characters to motivate them to act how we want—or we need to add something external to prompt them back into our plot. Now, back to Jack:

It took considerable doing on my part to have my heroine feel terribly shocked to learn how serious the illness might be . . . then review her fine relationship with the sick person . .. then realize that good care was being provided . . . but then decide that she would never be able to work efficiently this day as long as she remained so worried and preoccupied, and that she owed it to herself — to make herself feel more at ease about the illness — to make a brief visit to the sick person’s room and reassure herself that the sick friend did not appear at death’s door. Only in this way, she decided, would she have enough peace of mind to return to her overloaded work schedule and try to get caught up.

In this way I was able to build logic into a key turning point of the story and make my heroine’s immediate cessation of regular work, and visit to the sick room, believable. But none of this would have been possible if I hadn’t put myself into my character’s feelings and thoughts. (56)

To be clear: I have had characters “tell” me things—back stories, histories, twists that can affect and enrich the plot. I’ve had their inner conflicts develop into major interpersonal conflicts over the course of the story. I do sometimes let the plot take a different route that better suits my characters, but the final destination doesn’t change.

But more importantly, as I put more emphasis on figuring out what motivates my characters, what makes them tick, I not only know how to manipulate them better to still accomplish the purposes of the plot (if not the exact scenes I was planning), but I know the characters themselves better, making them more well-rounded and realistic.

My secret sauce example: motivation and characterization

For me, my character motivation revelation came at a high level. Originally, I wrote a novel where the heroine was . . . well, kinda wishy-washy. Halfway through the book, I decided/discovered (I forget; it’s been four and a half years!) that she was an ex-cop. Wishy-washy + ex-LEO, no matter how long she’s been off the force, do not = a character that makes sense.

Finally, I let go of the wishy-washier side of her nature. I changed her motivations throughout the book. Instead of being frightened by the villains, she was trying to protect other people from them. Instead of backing down, she stood up and she fought. Instead of keeping quiet, she kept dangerous secrets for the sake of others.

This changed a whole lot about her, but the plot actions of the story were largely (though not totally) the same. She became a character not to be pitied, but someone you’d want on your side in a fight—and her motivations and her character as a whole finally made sense.

And, yep, this is a change I made in the book that went from rejection to offer!

What do you think? How do you manipulate your characters’ motivations?

Photo credit: Robert V; marionettes—Eugene Wei

Backstory and character motivation

This entry is part 11 of 20 in the series Backstory

Backstory and character motivation can be a dicey topic. This is generally the best use of backstory—to motivate your characters’ actions in the present. However, conveying that backstory is still a trick—and sometimes backstory isn’t the best way to show motivation at all.

As with characterization, backstory can’t be the only way we show a character’s motivations. Again, this suggests that we’re not just products of our past experiences, but that we’re trapped by them. In the world of fiction, this is unfortunately not very compelling. Imagine a character who only ever acts based on the fact that his mother yelled at him. Is that backstory—and the motivation it creates—going to offer enough internal motivation and conflict to craft a mystery/romance/fantasy/literary novel around? Probably not.

Instead, we should look to the story present as well as backstory to create motivation and conflict. As editor and author Alicia Rasley says in “Character Motivation” (emphasis added),

Motivation (especially internal motivation) often comes out of backstory… but the story itself plays out the intermixing of motivation and conflict.

So: Be wary of motivation confined mostly to the internal or to backstory. Give the character something immediate to inspire action today. There should be a present-day event to inspire the manifestation of the internal or past motivation– for example, Heroine inherits the house where her mother committed suicide and decides to start a new life by renovating it. The external motivation is that “starting a new life”; the internal motivation might be to exorcise her mother’s ghost or to deal with the trauma of the suicide. The internal motivation comes out of the backstory, but the external motivation is in the here-and-now of the story.

And motivation, especially that created in the past, doesn’t have to remain static. It can change (and should change) because of the events of the plot.

Backstory is important because it can explain objectionable actions (which are great for increasing reader curiosity), and it gives our characters a place to grow from. But it shouldn’t be the only way we motivate our characters—and as our characters grow, their motivations (and actions) will grow and change with them.

And editor Theresa Stevens has said:

Beware the backstory used to shore up character motivations. It often points to a lack of real conflict or to other plot problems. Every time you’re tempted to reach backwards to explain why characters are behaving a certain way, stop. Ask yourself if you can fix it in the present story moment, because this will almost always be the stronger fix.

This is one of those instances where backstory can be just a little too convenient. We, the authors, need the characters to argue here so . . . let’s give one a traumatic event in childhood. (Thanks, Freud.) Instead, perhaps we should take a longer look at our characters to see if we can’t give them a better reason for conflict in the present.

Yes, backstory is important for characters’ motivation—perhaps even necessary—but if it’s the only way we choose to motivate our characters, are we weakening them? What do you think?

Photo by Colleen Lane