purposes and motives

[marycatelli]

One advantage of hunting around for deeper motives (which I rambled about here) is that having given your character motives for their purposes, you can then utterly deny them their purpose and see what happens next.  I find it works best in the opening or even in the backstory.  Jack wants to steal the Eye of the Night to get revenge for his father's having been framed and killed to keep him quiet about the jewel.  And in the first chapter, the noble has the Eye of Night crushed into diamond dust for magical purposes. . . .

Poking at a story that starts like this:  the heroine wants to prove her father's innocence and discovers in the opening scene, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he's guilty.

Heroes can be interesting, 'cause they tend to flounder around for a bit.  (And keeping in mind the bottom desire on Maslow's pyramid -- survival! -- can be the only thing keeping the story going.)  But then, having dug deeper, you know what they have to fulfill by some other means.

Villains, on the other hand, tend to be become pointlessly and futilely malicious at this point.  All set to revenge themselves on the universe that has set out to thwart them.  Can be tricky.  Especially when it's the backstory.  But having lost your heart's desire makes all sorts of nonsense on your part a consistent reaction..

Comments

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

I've never really thought about it in so clear a way. My characters tend to come laden with a semi-vague but semi-definite sense of purpose/motive. It's entirely likely that clarifying those motives will help me make stories move.

Like your examples much :)

I don't tend to find that my villains become just malicious, though. Actually, let me rephrase. I am terrible at writing villains :) They're all just people with other goals. Nasty goals from my point of view, often, but still.

[marycatelli]

Some stories have a quirk that causes notions about writing them to crystallize. . . like my heroine's.

But then, I find the real trick with villains is giving them real goal and keeping them villainous.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

My villains are basically people with a much smaller category of "us" and a much more hated category of "them" than my heroes. With resultant power-seeking and pre-emptive striking tendencies. I think it'll work out, but I shall have to write it and see :)

[marycatelli]

Useful but not sufficient. A sour old misanthrope can squirrel himself away in his home, totally indifferent to anyone except himself, but not qualify as a villain.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Granted; they have to both be threatened by the Other and act to eliminate the threat in order to be any good at all as villains.

My heroes are basically race-traitors, so I think I've got that, though :)

[marycatelli]

Eh -- jargon like "The Other" tends to obscure more than it reveals. It begs questions.

Um.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

How is "the Other" jargon? It's not an unusual word, using it in this sense doesn't change its common meaning much, and it picks out a characteristic that could be all a certain set of characters have in common. So as far as I can tell, it's simply a category term.

I'm writing a culture-clash story from both sides, so the term picks out a characteristic that's pretty much crucial to me and can't be generalized any other way. Given which, I'm pretty taken aback to have it dismissed like this, and to be told that (apparently) I'm throwing around jargon for no reason.

Maybe what that means is that I shouldn't be nattering on and boring you about something you don't consider important, but if so I hadn't realized it till just now.

Re: Um.

[marycatelli]

Labeling a characteristic can obscure as well as reveal. In my experience, "The Other" is commonly used in a manner that obscures, because it makes things look as if they have been comprehended when they've only been labeled.

Re: Um.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Ah.
I am, for the record, only using it as a label. 'cause it's easier on everyone than going on and on about my current obsession.