Character Motivation: How to Craft Realistic Characters
List a few of your favorite novels, and I’m sure they all have one thing in common: a memorable lead character. Character Motivation: How to Craft Realistic Characters
Such famous personalities, from Captain Ahab to Atticus Finch, and from Harry Potter to Katniss Everdeen, seem like long-lost friends. It can take a lifetime to learn how to create characters and give them the inner strength to become heroes. People hire book publishing agent to get help in creating a craft realistic character.
To be convincing, your characters must not only grow and change over the course of the book and have a meaningful arc, but they must also feel real and be easy to understand. How do you bring your main character to life? It is not a secret. You must construct them with authentic and genuine motives. If you do this well, who knows what will happen? You could play Dorothy Gale or George Bailey.
What is Character Motivation?
To make the story make sense, our main characters have to act like real people in real situations, not like puppets.
Give your celebrity requirements, desires, and ambitions, even if he is a superhero or lives in a faraway nation.
Allow his flaws, mistakes, and regrets
These will explain his motivation. In the end, we need characters with personalities.
What he does with such an incentive will determine whether he is a hero, a loser, or a villain.
Where else would he get his strength when he ultimately meets his burette? The more you can demonstrate and explain why your central character does what they do, the more authentic, intriguing, and unforgettable your tale will be. That is how we establish an emotional bond between your reader and your character.
I’ve said many times that readers want to learn something and laugh, but they also want to feel something. That’s how you keep them flipping the pages until the very end. In the start, writers write a short article or get help with article writing services from the best companies.
Types of Character Motivation
Abraham Maslow, a humanist psychologist who passed away, thought that people had to meet some basic needs before they could be happy and motivated to meet their other needs.
He listed the following as universal human needs:
- Physical: Food, drink, sleep, shelter, and clothing are all physical necessities. When all of one’s energy is focused on survival, one’s focus on everything else suffers.
- Safety: Once bodily demands are addressed, personal, financial, emotional, and physical security become crucial.
- Social: The need for affection and approval can be met by family, friends, and close relationships.
- Self-esteem: once the desire to be respected by people around us, personally or professionally, is met, the drive to achieve more grows.
- Self-actualization: this happens when our basic needs are met, we feel mentally at ease, and we want to live up to the purpose we were made for. If all of a character’s reasons were written down, there would be an infinite number of ways to combine the above.
However, as authors, we should be concerned with two forms of motivation:
Internal Motivations
- Anxiety
- Curiosity
- Desire
- Ability
- Payback
- Integrity
- Passion
External Motivations
Physical responses to the outside stimulus, depending on the criteria, are not necessarily normal but occur as a result of an unanticipated or undesirable event.
- Money
- Regulations
- Deadlines
- Acclaim
- Survival
- Contest
Trauma could also motivate your character.
- Threats of violence
- Witnessing violence
- Sexual abuse
- Physical abuse
- Emotional abuse
- Neglect (physical or emotional)
- Accident or illness
- Natural disaster
- Loss/grief
- War
How to Craft Your Character’s Motives
Developing your character’s why necessitates more than simply selecting from a list of justifications. Incorporate character motivation into your story by doing the following:
1: Not neglecting your villain.
One of the most common mistakes I see in books is a bad guy who does bad things but never explains why.
He appears to do horrible things because that is his role—he is the bad guy.
Give your villain a backstory that explains how he justifies his actions.
Too many fictional villains appear to like being bad. In the actual world, villains do not consider themselves to be villains. They have good reason to assume they are correct. A genuine opponent should have enough motive in his history to make the reader sympathize with him.
2: Using backstory
Everything that occurred before Chapter 1 is referred to as “background.” What influenced your hero or villain to become the person he is today?
Things to consider whether or not to include:
- Siblings
- When, where, and to whom was he born?
- Where he went to school
- Political party membership
- Occupation and income
- Goals
- Skills
- Spiritual existence
- Friends
- A close friend
- He could be single, dating, or married.
- Worldview
- Personality traits
- Anger is a catalyst.
- Pleasures and joys
- Fears and anything else relevant to your story.
3: Employ plot twists.
Few people improve throughout their lives. As reality sets in, they grow bitter and resentful, and they abandon their ambitions. One of the reasons they gravitate toward fiction is to live vicariously through someone whose life did turn out better. Allow your hero to grow and change, providing an escape for your reader. However, in character Motivation: How to Craft Realistic Characters, your character’s journey must be plausible enough that your reader would not exclaim, “That would never happen.”
Readers want to understand your tale. Plant cues show strengths and weaknesses, which makes a surprising change seem inevitable but, in hindsight, unpredictable.
4: Employing plot twists
When it comes to becoming predictable, don’t limit your character to a single motivation. Change things up. Incorporate both internal and external motives. A hero may fight with internal terror because he doesn’t want to repeat his father’s mistakes, but he may end up doing the same things his father did.
That is our everyday existence. And the payoff is sweet after the conflicts are handled.
5: Determining your character’s goals
But don’t mix up goals and motivation.
Motivation is the “why” of your character.
Goals provide him with direction.
Because a loved one was slain in the Globe Trade Center tragedy, your hero may wish to protect the world against terrorists (goal) (motivation). So give your hero exterior goals as well as genuine internal motivations to achieve them. For determining the character you can get ghostwriting services.
6: Showing, not telling.
This fictional Cardinal Rule also applies to character motivation.
Readers should be able to figure out why your character does what they do based on what they see and hear them say.
If you have to give a narrative summary of your character, you’ve failed.
The reader’s mental theatre is more powerfully inventive than anything Hollywood can show on film. It makes reading more enjoyable.
Show your character’s personality through his words, body language, thoughts, and actions.
Don’t just tell me how brave he is. display his bravery.
See my blog, showing vs. Telling: What You Need to Know, for more information.
Character Motivation Examples
David Morrell credits his inspiration for creating the character John Rambo and the five-film Rambo series to his pupils who served in Vietnam.
Rambo, a famous military hero, goes home very upset, tormented by battle, and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
That is more than enough reason for him to take actions he would not normally take to safeguard the people he cares about.
Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne is one of the few stories where characters have so many different reasons for doing what they do.
As the pranks unfold, each character becomes more familiar to readers.
- Pooh, the central character is endearing, calm, kind, intelligent, and smart.
- Christopher Robin is Pooh’s dearest pal and the one and only human. He’s knowledgeable and sensitive for his age.
- Piglet, Pooh’s second best friend is little, shy, and afraid. However, when confronted with adversity, he demonstrates amazing courage.
- Eeyore is the definition of pessimistic. He’s Pooh’s snarky, slow-moving donkey pal who constantly sees the worst.
- Kanga is the sole girl is Roo’s caring mother, but she also mothers everyone. She’s always willing to give kind advice and feed her companions.
- Roo, Kanga’s son is a beam of sunlight in the Hundred Acre Wood, always upbeat and full of vitality.
- Tigger embodies vigor. He’s awkward and can’t speak properly, but he makes up for it with his confidence.
- Rabbit (or so he thinks) and is too obsessive, aggressive, demanding, and impatient, but he cares deeply about his friends.
- Owl is the wiser of the two and enjoys hearing himself speak? He is knowledgeable and caring, yet he is easily upset when people get tired of his lengthy explanations.
Maintain Your Character’s Believability
A character lacks authenticity if he lacks a sense of actual compassion.
Readers will lose interest if he does not appear genuine.
They want to know about your character’s flaws, both the ones inside and outside of him or her, Character Motivation: How to Craft Realistic Characters and how he or she deals with them.
He is unlikely to succeed unless he has a compelling reason for doing so.
Give him a fascinating motivation, and you could write a story that your readers will recall for the rest of their lives.
Character Arc Worksheet
If you’re an outliner, this tool might assist you in getting to know your hero when you start writing.
If you’re a pantser (like me), you might want to start writing right away.
Still, you might find this useful for filling in the gaps as you write.
Do whatever feels right for you and your narrative. For further details click here “Book Writing Company“.
