What motivates your protagonist?

Pick out one of the most recent story or novel you’ve been working on. Clear your head and think about it for a minute or so. Go over the plot, and the main protagonist. Who is that person (or animal, or alien)? What are they doing in your story? Why are they doing it?

And now ask yourself the title of this post:

What motivates your character?

It’s perhaps one of the most important–and possibly difficult–questions you can ask yourself about the story you’re working on.

As I’ve said in the past, the most important emotion to trigger from a reader is empathy. They need to feel empathy for your characters in order to relate to them. A boring character isn’t boring because of what he does; he’s boring if the audience couldn’t care less about him.

And one of the surest ways to build empathy toward your character is to clearly define what that character is motivated by. (Related post: What motivates your villain?)

There are all sorts of ways to approach this, but I think the best is to ask yourself these two questions:

What does your character want?
Why does your character want it?

That why is often left out when writers give tips on plot. It’s often a character-goal-resolution formula. But if your reader can’t get a good feeling of why the character wants–or even better, needs–to achieve that goal, why should the reader even care?

And I think now would be another great moment to hate on the Dark Tower series. I could never relate to Roland Deschain (and that has nothing to do with the fact that I look nothing like Clint Eastwood.) Yes, he needed to get to the Tower. I get that after seven books (now eight, plus several graphic novels and a movie). But for the life of me, I can not recall my favorite author ever telling me why Roland needed to get there so badly and why I should care.

So I really don’t have too much else to say about it. This post isn’t really a “How to motive your characters” post; it’s more of a reminder that you need to be able to come up with a clear reason of why your character is chasing after a goal, be it love, revenge, power, or whatever.

You’re writers; you can figure it out. Just in the end, when you send that hero on a journey, give him a believable reason to start down that path.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any good examples of character motives, feel free to share them in the comments section.