Do you know what your characters want? And is there a deeper desire underneath that one? 

A character’s motivations can help make them “relatable,” drive the story’s momentum, and create obstacles. Additionally, characters/ desires can serve different parts of themselves, which can help make them complex and multifaceted. But what is a good character motivation and how do you share it with your readers? 

Homework: Write a scene from a secondary POVs character. Pick a concrete goal for them that is NOT the protagonist’s goal. How does that change the way they react in the scene?

P.S. Want to come write with us in 2025?! Our retreat registration is open, and we are starting to fill up! We are going to unlock our creative processes in Minnesota and explore Story Refinement as we cruise down the Mexican Riviera! Learn more here. 

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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Dongwon Song, Erin Roberts, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Motivation and goals. Motivation beyond the story. Motivation and goals may shift. What happens when they achieve their goal? Eight jewels of Rovisla. Some goals and motivations conflict with each other. Ability, role, relationship, and status. A headlight writer. At the edge of the cliff, what does their motivation make them do? 

[Season 20, Episode 07]

[Howard] Writing doesn’t have to be a solitary activity. That’s why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you’ll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you’ll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 20, Episode 07]

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Motivation and goals. 

[DongWon] I’m DongWon.

[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I’m Dan.

[Erin] I’m Erin.

[Howard] And I’m Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We have been talking about different lenses that you can be using to view things. So what we’re going to be talking about now, coming off of our history and community, is we are going to be talking about this idea of identity and that the motivation and goals and that as a lens that you can apply. So a character’s motivations can help them… Make them like relatable to the reader. It can drive the story’s momentum, it can create obstacles. But what is good character motivation and how do you share that with the reader? How do you make that visible on the page? So we’re going to be talking about, like, what do they want? What part of themselves is the goal serving? What are some of the things that you think about when you are thinking about motivation?

[Dan] For me, it’s important that the characters have motivation beyond just the story that they’re in. I mean, the first Star Wars movie is such a blunt instrument example of this. He wants to be a fighter pilot. That’s his motivation. It’s dumb and it’s small and it doesn’t matter very often, but it is distinctly not I need to go and rescue this princess and destroy the Death Star.

[Howard] But he also wants to go get power converters from Tosche Station.

[Laughter]

[Dan Wells] That is true. That’s the thing that he wants.

[Howard] Which is, he wants to get off the farm.

[Dan] To get those in order to get off the farm.

[DongWon] Well, he wants friends, specifically, which becomes his most important character trait throughout the entire arc of Star Wars, is that Luke is someone who cares about his friends. Right? So what we just cleverly done there is unpacked how many different motivations a character can have its, even when what they want seems very simple, which is to be a fighter pilot.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Erin] That, I think, there’s a lot of times the motivation they have on the surface is not, like, the true thing motivating them underneath.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Being a fighter pilot is about being away from here. It’s about literally flying off, it’s about wanting glory, it’s about wanting recognition, it’s about a lot of those things. Those can get then applied to a different goal. So a lot of times, like, the character’s motivation and goals seem like one thing. The motivation underlying stays the same, but the goal shifts.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] This is something that I think is so important because sometimes you’ll see people and they will have the goal shift, but they won’t realize that the new goal does not match the motivation. For me, the thing… You’ve probably heard me talk about this before, that I talk about objective and super objective. That the super objective is kind of the deep-seated hole that is always there that they’re trying to fill. When I’m playing with the idea of goals, I try to think about when they achieve their goal, because often there’s the short-term goals. What is the new goal that immediately replaces that? An example that will hit too close to home for our listeners is the idea of, well, I want to be a writer. Okay. So I’m going to submit something. But I’m not a writer, because I haven’t had anything accepted yet. Even though I’ve submitted something. Then, oh, I’ve had something accepted, but I’ve only sold one story. So there’s this constant… I think for… I think the really interesting goals, the ones that are very sustaining, are the ones where the character is constantly redefining themselves to tell themselves that they haven’t met their goal… Their… Yeah.

[DongWon] Well, this… Again, we can go back to Star Wars for this, because what Luke wants is to become a hero like his father was. He becomes a hero like his father was at the end of Star Wars, and then discovers what an awful fate that is in the second movie, when he finds out what happened to his father and who his father is. Right? So we see this evolution of Luke’s goal as he’s searching for an identity, as he’s searching, quite frankly, for love of a parent, of community, of people around him, and how much that goes against him as he struggles in the third movie with am I like my father or am I not? Right? So you can see how the goal shifts as the objective and the super objective kind of move around him. What I love about that also is that wasn’t a plan when they made the first movie. That evolved over the writing of the second and third movies. So you can see the way in which writers find ways to disrupt a character’s motivation and goals to keep tension moving, to keep the story interesting and developing, and they end up with one of the most enduring stories of our generations.

[Howard] The understanding and application of… Mary Robinette, to use your terms, the objective and super objective hinges pretty heavily on whether or not you understand that in yourself. I’ve had career conversations with artists, with writers, with cartoonists, and I often come back to, hey, do this job because you would be drawing comics anyway, not because you want to get rich. I remember as a kid, is a really little kid, kindergarten age, I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a doctor because I felt like that was a neat job. Then in high school, I wanted to be a rock star because I wanted to be a rock STAR and I wanted to be rich. Neither of those were things that involved the actual passions that I had for doing things. It wasn’t until later in life that I realized, wait, I like making stuff. Performing in front of people less so. Carving people up into little pieces with knives, quite a bit less so. I like drawing and telling stories. So the motivation for my character was really driven by the thing I’m passionate about, and the super objective was, boy, it sure would be nice if I could do this full time. What steps do I need to take to do it full time? So, what is it that your character is deep down have discovered about themselves that they really want? Or, what is it deep down that they haven’t discovered that they really want? That they haven’t explored yet? Maybe the character arc is about learning that.

[Erin] First of all, just a note to self that in a crisis, I will never let Howard perform any sort of surgery on me.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Cutting somebody up into little pieces may not be what people think of when they think of medicine…

[Dan] Very [garbled] characterization.

[Howard] I planned to put them back together. I mean…

[Mary Robinette] I was convinced that I was going to be a veterinarian until I was a senior in high school, looked at my grades, and realized it was a bad option and went into puppetry. But I also changed from… I wanted to make sick animals well, and in puppetry, I just made animals.

[There you go. Garbled]

[Erin] [garbled] worse. I love that. What I was going to say also in addition to life lessons, is that what I like about that is that it talks about how the super objective is something that sort of beyond individual, kind of, like, titles, or you may not understand what it really means to be a doctor. There’s just something about it that you identify with. The reason I bring this up is because a lot of times in science fiction and fantasy, I’ll hear people talk about their character’s motivation as really tied into, like, the world itself. They’re like, the character’s motivation is to get, like, the eight jewels of Rovisla.

[Mary Robinette] Sure. Yeah.

[Dan] My favorite books, Rovisla. Okay. Continue.

[Erin] Sorry. So, yes. So, like, that’s the thing that you’re, like, well, why? Like, I don’t know one jewel of Rovisla from another. So, like, what is happening…

[DongWon] How many apostrophes are there in Rovisla?

[Laughter]

[Howard] There are three, and they are all jewel shaped.

[DongWon] Okay. Got it. Please continue. I’m… This is very interesting.

[Erin] Sorry. So, since I don’t know anything about the world, that motivation means nothing to me. Often, in early chapters of a story, if you focus too much on the Rovisla and not enough on the internal super objective…

[Howard] The apostrophes…

[Laughter]

[Erin] The apostrophes, so to speak, then you don’t actually get what makes that character interesting, and people glaze off of it, because we relate to super objectives that we can understand.

[DongWon] Yeah. Well… Sometimes the best thing you can do, sometimes, is give your character exactly what they want. Right? If you are searching for the eight gems of Rovisla, and you’re 50 pages in the book, and you get the eight gems of Rovisla, that can be such an interesting moment of, like, oh. Oh, no. Now what? Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] What is the story here? Right? Like, them realizing there are still problems that aren’t solved in fulfilling their quest. Right? Like, one of my favorite novels of all time was one when I read it when I was very young which is Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown. Right? The goal that she sets out to do, she accomplishes way earlier than one would expect given the length of that book. Everything that follows after is what takes that work from being a delight to being an absolute masterpiece.

[Mary Robinette] That’s one of the things that we actually saw in N. K. Jemison’s book last season, is that on one of the timelines of the character, that it’s like I want to be a really amazing Oragene.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And, yeah. Got that. Ooo, not what you actually wanted. And there is all kinds of complications that come from that. One of the… The next episode, we’re going to be talking about stakes and fears, but I just want to say that one of the things that I love about a really good, juicy goal is that achieving it creates the next problem.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that I love, I’m going to tell you about after our break.

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[Mary Robinette] I love giving a character goals and motivations that are in conflict with each other. So I break it down in my own brain when I’m trying to come up with them, with… By talking about ability, role, relationship, and status. This is basically what the character is good at, or not good at, the responsibilities that they have, the relationships, the loyalties, and then where they are kind of in a power dynamic. So, if I have a character who’s like I love my mom and I want to be there for my mom, but also, if I am there for my mom, that I have to miss this big stakeholder meeting where, I don’t know, stake-y things happen.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I’m imagining this to happen at a steakhouse.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I was thinking actually different kinds of stake, like the stabby vampire thing.

[Vampire? Oh, boy.]

[Howard] There is this aphorism that I’ve… This saying that I’ve held close and tried to live by for much of my life. It’s don’t put off what you want most for what you want at the moment. That is itself the current between the two poles of conflicting goals and objectives. Your… In that sense, in the way I took it originally, is the battle between your immediate appetites and your long-term desires. I mean, that’s every substance addicted person ever where they are fighting this battle against a now metabolic desire for a thing that is hurting them, and is preventing them from achieving their long-term goals. That doesn’t mean that for goals and objectives and motivations to be in conflict, one has to be wrong. But that’s a very common real-world occurrence.

[DongWon] I think time is a great way to create conflicting goals and objectives. Right? What happens on this timeline, what happens on that timeline. Another way is through relationships. Right? Were going to talk about this more when we get to talking about stakes, but the way in which our different goals represent different aspects of who we are in life. Right? What my goals are as a student, as a professional, as a family member, are all really different things, and those are often in conflict with each other. Like, our professional goals and our relationship goals are famously often in tension with each other. Right? In terms of, like, balancing work and life.

[Dan] Yeah. The first Toy Story movie does this really well. Where what Woody really wants ultimately is he wants to be the beloved leader of the toys. Like Mary Robinette was saying, that sometimes the goals can be in conflict with each other, he misinterprets this to mean I have to be the favorite toy. To the point of becoming this incredibly venal selfish guy who’s trying to get rid of one of the other toys. Buzz Lightyear shows up, he’s the new favorite toy, and Woody is ready to sacrifice him completely. Because he has misinterpreted his own motivation. Then, when he finally gets what he wants and gets rid of Buzz, he immediately realizes, oh, no, I can’t be the beloved leader of the toys if I have thrown one of them out a window and cursed them to be lost forever. So he spends the second half of the movie trying to be the beloved leader inclusive of Buzz rather than excluding him from them.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I also think something really fun about, like, really understanding the motivation of your character is that it can help you, or at least it helps me, somebody who kind of writes forward, I’m a headlight writer, so I’ll write what I understand until I get to the part where, like, the light I can no longer see what I was originally aiming for, and then I figure out the next part of the story, and then figure out the next part. A lot of times when I’m at those transition points, I go back to the character’s motivation and think, okay, I got them to the edge of this cliff. What motivates them? A character who’s motivated by being seen as amazing is going to, like, dive off the cliff in a really, like, spectacular way. Whereas someone whose motivation is more about care might say, okay, how can I make sure this is a safer cliff for everyone, and create a path down it? So, figuring out what that motivation is means that this… The story, even as goals change and plot points change, the story still feels like it has a nice emotional through line. Because it’s still responding to what the character’s motivation is and what that makes them want to do.

[Mary Robinette] I think that that’s a really good point, that the character’s motivation and their goals affect the actions that they plan, that they take, in the story. That changes the shape of the story. So when you’re looking at the story… This is one of the reasons we wanted to include this in our idea… In the who and the lenses that… You can… It’s not just, ah, this is a very juicy character. It’s… It will affect the shape of the whole story.

[Howard] I think it’s… Just in terms of story structure, if you’ve got an outline that on the surface just looks like it holds together beautifully, with twists and turns and pinch points and a great ending and whatever else, but your character motivations don’t match, it’s going to be a struggle to read. It’s going to be a struggle to edit. If you’ve got a story where your outline is weak, but the character motivation is really strong, and at every turn of the page, at every hard return as you are writing, you are following what that character’s voice in your head is telling you, you might end up with something where, yeah, you have to go back and edit and wrap a plot around that in some way, but you’re going to end up with something that’s a compelling read, and more of us are going to enjoy it.

[DongWon] I mean, this is specific to my approach to storytelling and what I enjoy to read, but I’m very much a plot derives from character person. Right? Like, I think when I see story problems arise, so often it’s because somebody came in with an idea of here’s what happens in the story and then tried to backfill what the motivations were that got them there. Sometimes when you do that, it’s really hard to get motivations to line up with the actual events that you want to have happen. Versus if you flip it, and this is admittedly a little bit easier if you’re a headlight writer like Erin versus a plotter, but having a strong sense of what your character’s motivations are, are the things that can lead you to interesting complex plots. Right? As you have characters who want different things, and, for themselves, have their own tiered wants that are in conflict with each other, that’s where complexity comes from. Right? When you have a character who wants three things, two of them are in conflict with each other, and they’re trying to pick between those, and another character also wants three things that intersect with the first character’s things, you have so many places you can go to, so many choices you can pick from. That’s when the interactions, the intersections between these plot arcs are going to feel really nuanced and exciting because you have the richness of this whole tapestry that you start weaving together.

[Mary Robinette] It’s interesting, as you say that, because I’m… I tend to be a plotter, but I do not plot my character arcs. I think that’s because I come out of theater, so character is the thing that I’ve internalized the most. So I’m like, here are the events that are going to happen, and part of what I enjoy is this is how my character reacts to them as these events stampede across their goals. One of the things that I will do sometimes is that I will give my character a small goal at the beginning that’s just like a cup of coffee, warm pair of socks, just want to take a nap. Whatever it is. I think of that as kind of my avatar of success, for now we are in a safe secure place because we can have the thing that we have not been able to have. As a… Related to that with the Glamorous Histories, once Jane and Vincent are married, I didn’t want to do the will they, won’t they kind of thing where it’s constantly breaking a couple up. So I gave them the motivation for the all four of the second books, that all they want to do is get off the page and go have sexy fun times.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Things keep getting in the way of that. So I do think that if you can give them something that is not related to the plot in any way…

[DongWon] Yeah

[Mary Robinette] Shape or form, that it can help make things a lot more interesting.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of things that can make stuff more interesting, we have a little bit of homework for you. So, we’ve been talking about motivation and goals. I want you to write a scene from a secondary point of view character. This is not something you need to include in the novel, this is… Or short story, this is an exercise. Write a scene from a secondary point of view character. Pick a concrete goal for them that is not the protagonist’s goal. How does that change the way they react in the scene? Can you take those reactions and bring them back into the main scene and make it more interesting?

[DongWon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.