What's my Motivation?

Or, more importantly, what's your character's motivation?

GMC. Other writers used these three letters, and I didn't know what they were talking about. Eventually, someone was kind enough to explain it to me.

It means Goals, motivation, and conflict.

Today, we’re going to concentrate on Goals and motivation. It is challenging to write a romance novel if you don't know what your character's goal (outer motivation) in the story is. Books fail when a character's goal or motivations aren't clear or don't make sense. What do external motivations look like? Ask yourself what your character is trying to achieve. These goals can take many, many forms. Here is a tiny example:

• Beating Breast Cancer

• Winning an election

• Getting out of debt

• Finding their mother who gave them up for adoption

• Escaping a natural disaster

• Finding a successful career

• Winning a scholarship or award

My character wants her work selected for a photography exhibit.

The next important thing to know is what kind of arc you plan for your character. Is it a change arc, a failed arc, or a static one? Will your character change for the better by the end of your story and learn from their mistakes, stay the same, or even grow worse? My character is on a change arc. She's going to learn to love herself, pursue her craft of photography, and know that what she initially thought she wanted, to live in a beautiful villa and win her husband back she no longer desires. She wants to live in nature, in a treehouse, with animals, and run with wolves.

Inner motivation is what is next on the agenda. It's believed that unmet needs are what causes us to need certain things. The drive to satisfy an unmet need is our character's inner motivation, and achieving the goal becomes the story's driving force or goal. It's something that's disrupting their happiness and creating an emptiness in their life. It feeds into their outer motivation. My character wants her work selected for a photography exhibit and needs to develop a body of work; therefore, it feeds into her winning a scholarship or award—their outer motivation. According to onestopforwriters.com, an online source that helps writers write:

"There are five basic categories of needs that all humans must possess to be fulfilled: physiological needs, safety and security, love and belonging , esteem and recognition , and self-actualization . When any of these needs is missing, it becomes a motivator, driving real people and characters to do whatever is necessary to fill the void."

• My character’s need in this instance is love and belonging. Realize I could have picked any of the other one’s listed above but for this story I picked the one above.

• Her unmet need is to form a deep trust bond with another. The characters been in a marriage for twenty years with her famous rock-star husband, who’s cheated on her while traveling on the road with his band.

In order to fulfill the love and belonging void I could have selected another unmet need. Below are others I could have chosen (realize there are many, many others):

• Experience romantic love

• Experience healthy friendship

• To build a family

• To be accepted by others

Realize that minor characters will probably not have character arcs or in depth goals. Still, your main characters, including your villain, need them to become whole, engaging, and believable for you to have a book that goes beyond a stereotypical romance book. I know you don't wish to write one of those. Along with Goals and Motivation is Conflict, which includes outer and inner Conflict. I'll save that for another post and other things (the lie, wounds, fears) that affect our character's arc progression.

As writers, we aim to pick goals, motivations, and conflicts that tie closely together to tell a cohesive story. The same goes for crafting the lies, wounds, and fears our characters have. When readers write and tell us they thought our characters felt real, that's because we created people who were fully fleshed out. We brought them to life.

If you want to learn more about Character Arc progression and Goals, Motivation, and Conflict, I offer the following: Understanding the Story Need, online self-study with Sue Brown, books, Creating Character Arcs by K.M. Welland and GMC, Goals, Motivation and Conflict, The Building Blocks of Good Fiction by Debra Dixon.

Thank you to all who read my new contemporary gothic romance novella, Leather Man, on Kindle Unlimited and posted reviews. I appreciate it.

If you got snow, I hope you escaped by now. Have a great week and get some writing done and don’t forget to read something fun!