Authorly: Motives

[matriarch]

Agreed with Mat. Food, clothing, shelter, love; those are needs. Everything else is the gravy that motivates us beyond simply surviving.

But what deeeelicious gravy it can be.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Wow, this is a spiky little jungle to walk in.

Stella's concrete example of the story with too much discussion of motivation and the one with too little is a good one. I do always devise clear chains of motivation for characters, even those in very short pieces. But I am very careful not to load the narrative with it. When you need it, you do need it, though. A reader will put up only so long with a lot of causeless behavior, and rightly so.

Dialogue is the place for this, I think, usually, or a brief snippet of interior monologue played against a dialogue with deliberate obfuscation or lies. I can give examples if you give me a minute. The point is, sometimes you do need to tell the reader why, if only limitedly, and a page of explanatory prose in the narration is not going to be any fun.

Brando , in "The Wild One" Someone asks him; "Hey, what are you rebelling angainst?" and he says "Whattaya got?"
Unfortunately, there is little further attempt to establish his motivations. The movie is terrific eye candy, though...

 

[cantdog]

Yeah, but that's not the question of the thread, really.

In fiction, I feel cheated by characters with simple, flat, driving needs. Wants. Whatever. It ain't simple.

That's why I liked Kane, the fantasy protagonist in the books by Wagner, over black and white sort of good and evil characters in fantasy. I don't think you have to get all Manichean about it. There's more to evil than power lust or 'homage to rags and sores,' as Beaudelaire put it.

 

[Stella_Omega]

by the way, these crow (raven? ) avs of yours are wonderful...
A good little trilogy with a good character with complex needs and wants- is "Skeen" by Jo Clayton. Skeen is a ruin raider, burglar, unwilling hero, with a lot of backstory. Clayton does a pretty decent job of putting all into a narrative.

 

[cantdog]

There are layers to Easy Rawlins, too. (That's Walter Mosley's character.) Through most of one of the books, he reports what he did and also clearly disapproves of himself as he was then.

 

[Stella_Omega]

There are layers to Easy Rawlins, too. (That's Walter Mosley's character.) Through most of one of the books, he reports what he did and also clearly disapproves of himself as he was then.

I like that idea! You could write a whole story about how you've repented- and describe in great detail all the things you repent of doing... Or I could, of course...

 

[cantdog]

Feel free of it! It's not a bad notion.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Feel free of it! It's not a bad notion.

A bit Munchausenesque

 

[elsol]

Is want a real goal for all that we do in reality or is want a fiction, something that motivates, in as simplistic way as possible, continuity and character action/ reaction?

I'm a neandrathal.

The only things I don't do out of 'want' are the things I do out of 'need'.


Sincerely,
ElSol