Finding Meaningful Character Motivations

The last video I posted had to do with stabilizing characters and making sure the choices they made in our stories felt consistent and meaningful. By using the alignment chart, we can see how they should act in any given situation.

 

But this doesn’t make a character feel round and complete. They need motivations in a story to help make them feel like real people. They need to want something. And that something can be anything! It can be something vague, like power or love. Or it could be something specific, like making their business succeed. 

 

Ultimately though, we don’t want fifteen motivators that pull the character in different directions. Instead, we want to pick a few that will really disrupt a character and make them feel like a truly confused and growing person.

 

The video I made below shows how to make a character’s motivations conflict and how to make our characters feel more engaging.

https://youtu.be/5AhK_d9mnAQ

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