Thursday, July 31, 2014

When Characters Don't Attack



When Characters Don’t Attack: Wrestling Them Into Your Plot


You’ve heard authors say (and maybe you, yourself, said), “My characters aren’t doing what I wanted them to do,” or “My characters have taken over my book!”


Tell the men in white coats they can go back to the asylum. It’s OK. They’re not crazy. You’re not crazy.


The thing about characters is that they’re not people. They’re distilled people. Not whole, not real, but merely cut-outs. Given salient details about a person, enough to give them a recognizeable personality, a goal, and a mode of behavior, but they aren’t actually sentient. So, when this well-defined character in your head does something strange as dances out from the keyboard, you wonder: how did he do that? And why? And how the heck do I get him to behave?


For our first answer, let’s look at the human brain. All your life, whether you know it or not, you’ve studied psychology: individual, social, group, behavioral, all of it. Why did Mom leave me? Why does Dad get so angry? How can I make her like me? These questions epitomize the search for motivation.


Mom is motivated by fear. Dad is motivated by his disappointment that life never meets his expectations. Julie is motivated by chocolate and by witty conversation. Your character needs to be motivated, too. Not just a little bit, but VERY motivated. Internally, externally, emotionally, logically, your character needs to have such a good argument for doing something that he could not possibly decide any other behavior.


Our brains make assumptions. We leap to what we think is going to happen, not what actually does happen. How do you think we drive? If we waited for the visual signal of the car in front of us to acctually process, we’d have already hit it. So our brain assumes that the car in front of us is stopping as soon as we see the brake lights and hear the screech of the tires. We don’t have to see it stop. We don’t have to feel the impact of our car hitting theirs. We are compelled by our assumptions, by our motivations, to stop the car.


Maybe we don’t need to slam the brakes, so we spill coffee on ourselves and feel silly. That’s OK. It beats dying. Maybe you overmotivate your character, and only one or two of the motivations you use actually provide real meaning. That’s OK. Go ahead and overmotivate them. But don’t you dare undermotivate.


And undermotivated character is a wildcard. It’s willful; it’s disobedient. It’s like a bored teenager: you don’t know what it’s going to do. It could explode. It could implode. It could turn Goth.


When you hear someone say: “My character did x, when I wanted him to do y,” you know it’s an under-motivated character. The vast computer that is the author’s brain calculated the personality of the character, the stimulus, and the motivation the character feels and came up with bupkis.


Uh-oh.


Time to dig deep into that character’s psyche. Time to examine whether disappointment or chocolate, witty conversation or fear motivates the character, and then provide that in spades for them. Make the situation so bad for the character that he must leap off the building. Make the chocolate smell so good that she must meet the man who baked it. Make the mother so terrified of her own failures that she must leave, to spare her children the heartbreak of her mucked-up life.


Increase the stakes. Drive the tension up. Create circumstances that force the character to do what needs to come next. And any time your character appears to hijack your manuscript, you look them right in the motivations.

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