Episode Transcript

At some point in almost every first draft, something happens. You start out excited, inspired, the story is pulling you forward, and then somewhere around the middle of the draft you start to feel bored with your own story. You open the document and nothing pulls you in or. Maybe you’re still showing up, you’re still writing, but something just feels off.

Like the story lost its pulse somewhere and you can’t find it again. So the writing starts to feel like a slog. Maybe you abandon the story because there’s nothing pulling you forward, or you start and stop, start and stop. Maybe you start something new and the cycle repeats.

So you go back, you reread what you have, you tinker with your opening. Maybe you rework your outline, but you still don’t feel the same vigor for the story. That feeling is not a sign that something is wrong with you. So let’s get that straight off the bat. It’s not writer’s block. It’s not a lack of discipline

It has everything to do with one thing that’s missing. Missing from the main storyline, missing from your characters, and missing from every scene. That missing piece is not a better outline. It isn’t more creative freedom. It’s character motive.

 Character Motive

That is the piece that is missing from most stories I read.

Motive is not what your character wants. That’s the object. That’s the goal. It’s why they needed badly enough to keep going when everything gets hard. So there’s a difference between what your character wants, which is. What most writers know, they have a good feeling for what their character wants to achieve by the end of the story, but there’s a difference between the want and the motive.

What a character wants is the surface layer. It’s the concrete goal. The thing they’re chasing, whether it’s to get the girl, win the war, climb the mountain, survive grief, or recover from illness, and most writers know this, plotters put it in their outline. Panther feel it instinctively in their early scenes.

Most writers know their character’s goal, driving them through the action, but knowing what a character wants isn’t the same as knowing why they need it. And without that why the story eventually loses fuel and the scenes don’t hold together.

So what does character motive look like?

In the novel, the Kite Runner, Amir wants to build a successful life in America.

That’s the concrete goal, but his motive is guilt. He needs to redeem himself for betraying Hassan as a boy. Every major decision he makes runs on that guilt. The whole story is essentially one man trying to outrun his own conscience until he finally stops running in the memoir Wild. Cheryl Strai wants to complete a 1100 mile hike alone and unprepared, but her motive is forgiveness.

She needs to forgive herself for how she fell apart after her mother died. The Pacific Crest Trail is just the road she chose to walk toward that reckoning. Now, some protagonists make on the surface at least choices that have tragic outcomes, and they make those choices knowing the damage that they’re causing.

So they’re making choices under enormous pressure. For example, in Beloved Toni Morrison’s main character commits an act that on the surface looks like the most unthinkable thing a mother can do. She kills her infant daughter by cutting her throat with a hand saw in a woodshed. She does this to spare Her from being returned to slavery, seeing it as the only way to protect her daughter from the hell of captivity. But her motive is love so fierce and so desperate. It becomes indistinguishable from protection. She would rather see her daughter die free than live enslaved death is the only freedom she can guarantee.

Now, you don’t have to agree with her choice to feel the complete, agonizing internal logic of it. That’s motive working at the highest level.

Do you see the pattern in these stories?

The external want is what drives the plot forward. It drives the action, but the motive, the deeper why underneath is what makes readers feel it.

It’s what gives every scene higher stakes, more emotional weight, more tension. It’s what makes us care whether the character succeeds or fails. It gives us a deeper experience of the story and much more investment beyond the external goal. When character has motive, everything in the draft gets easier to write.

Scenes that belong become obvious because they connect to the why. Scenes that don’t belong become obvious too. They’re just things that happen, not things that matter. The middle stops feeling like a maze and starts feeling like a real path when motive is missing. Even a perfect outline won’t save the story.

Even the most instinctive writer will lose the thread because the story has no engine. It has events, but it doesn’t have a reason to keep going.

How to find motive in your own story

Here’s a question that you can come back to again and again – Why does this matter to my character more than anything else right now?

Not what do they want? Why do they need it, and why now? 

It needs to feel like a matter of life or death. And I don’t mean literal physical life or death, although that could definitely be on the line. But you want to sit with your protagonist for a moment. Think about what they’re chasing in your story, the goal, the desire, the thing driving the plot forward.

Now ask yourself, why does this matter to them more than anything else? What’s underneath the want?  What would it mean to them if they failed? What are they really afraid of losing? What belief are they trying to preserve?

It’s usually not stated directly, but it’s underneath the language. It’s infused in every scene.

If you can answer that question, just sit with it. If you can feel the answer, not just think it, you have your character’s motive, and that’s what’s really urging your character through the action of the story. That’s the work of your first draft. That’s the place to dig because everything else in your story depends on it.

Now, once you’ve found your protagonist motive, ask the same question of your antagonist. Not what are they doing to block your protagonist, but why does it matter to them? What do they need and why do they need it badly enough to do what they’re doing?

A protagonist with clear motive is compelling.

An antagonist with clear motive is what makes a story genuinely unforgettable because suddenly there are two people in the story who both need something desperately. And those needs are on a collision course. 

I think about Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Night.  He wants to destroy the world, but there’s a logic that one could argue is even moral.

Heath Ledger’s Joker is one of the most chilling antagonists in film, precisely because his motive isn’t what it appears to be on the surface. On the surface, he wants chaos, but that’s not his motive. That’s his method. His actual motive is to prove a philosophical truth that civilization, morality, and order are a lie.

That every person given enough pressure, enough pain, and enough desperation will abandon their principles and become exactly what he is. He needs to be right about this. It’s the thing that gives his own existence. Meaning, if people can hold onto their morality under extreme circumstances, then what he is, what he’s become means nothing.

That’s why the ferry scene is the climax of his arc, not the physical battle with Batman. Two boats of people, ordinary citizens and convicted criminals, each with a detonator to blow up the other. His whole philosophy rests on them pushing the button. When they don’t, he loses something more important than the fight.

And Batman is his perfect foil because Batman refuses to kill him, which is the one thing that would prove the Joker right about everyone having a breaking point.

So his motive isn’t destruction. Destruction is the goal, but his motive is validation. He needs the world to confirm that he’s not the exception that everyone is capable of becoming him.That’s what makes him terrifying.

Your Antagonist

Once you’ve found your protagonist’s motive, turn to your antagonist and ask the same questions. Why does this matter to this character more than anything else? The answer to that question is what turns a stock villain into someone readers actually fear or even better have a complicated reaction to.That’s always a good thing.

It also gives us a deeper experience of the story and much more investment beyond the external goal. The external conflict. If the antagonist wants to destroy the world or interfere with what your protagonist wants – whether it’s a person, a situation, an illness, or a battle.

It’s never the surface thing that this person’s situation or character is chasing. It’s what that goal represents. It’s the emotional need, not just the object or goal.

Supporting Characters

Now that you have your main character and your antagonist and you know the motive, think about the motive for all characters your protagonist interacts with in your scene. Even with characters who like one another, who even love one another, motives will still clash.That’s where the tension lies.

Motive helps bring tension in every scene, even between characters who love each other, even when there’s a desired shared outcome. The motives will still be different. I think about MA in the Novel Room by Emma Donahue. Jack narrates the whole novel, but MA’s motive drives the plot even inside captivity.

She needs to protect five-year-old Jack’s sense of the world as a safe place. That motive shapes every single decision she makes – what she tells him, what she hides from him. Her motive is operating underneath the entire story quietly, driving everything forward.

Main Take Away

Getting stuck in your draft is not a process problem. It’s not about whether you outline or whether you don’t. It’s not about discipline or talent or whether you’re cut out to write at all. What’s often missing is simple character motive.

Here’s the thing. Motive is always findable. It’s already in your story somewhere. Sometimes it’s buried under the plot. Sometimes it’s implied, but never fully articulated. That’s the thing about motive. It’s not necessarily something your character is consciously aware of, so it doesn’t need to be explained.

Sometimes it’s there in a scene you wrote intuitively without realizing how important it was, but it’s there. You just need to know to look for it. Don’t overthink it. Just tap into your instincts here, and once you find it, something shifts. That moment when you finally get clear on why your character needs what he or she wants, it brings an energy and momentum to your draft.

Now you know which scenes to keep and which to cut, and which ones need motive operating beneath the language. Suddenly the middle doesn’t feel so lost. You know, you’re writing towards something.

The stories that stay with us, the books we read and can’t stop thinking about – they all have one thing in common. At their center is a character who needs something so badly for a reason so deep and so true that we can’t help but follow them all the way to the end of the story.

That’s what your story can be, and it starts with one question –  not just what does my character want, but why does my character need it and why does my character need it now?

So see what comes up. You might surprise yourself and find invigorated energy to keep writing.

Links Mentioned In This Episode

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Dark Night 

Room by Emma Donahue

 

 

 

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