Your characters have attitudes before your story starts.
Before page one and sentence one, they already have a strong point of view about the world. More specifically, they are evaluating how the world (the life all around them) is treating them.
Good or bad.
It’s critical that you know what makes them tick before whatever happens in the juicy novel you’ve dreamed up. They are real people with struggles.
I’ve been thinking about all this since listening to another great episode on one of my favorite podcasts, Scriptnotes. (The discussion about motivation starts at about the 27 minute mark.)
What do your characters want before the tornado rolls across the prairie? The answer makes a big difference in how we feel about how they deal with the approaching storm and the resulting wreckage.
Ever wonder why a character feels flat on the page—perhaps one you’re reading?
Or maybe one you’ve written?
As your story begins, you need to give readers a solid view of your character’s dreams, wants, yearnings, and things that make them irritable, too. This irritability issue was a big one for Scriptnotes co-host Craig Mazin (“Chernobyl,” “The Last of Us”) on the podcast. And when he started talking about what makes characters irritable, this whole issue really clicked in for me. Suddenly, I could see the payoff.
Mazin referred to a list of four things that define whether something can be considered alive. “It needs to reproduce,” he said. “It needs to ingest and possibly excrete. Oh, my favorite one is it needs to show irritability. Irritability is reaction to stimulus. We have, as living creatures, an innate irritability. Things bother us and create a want.”
What is your character’s main want (or multiple wants) before your story starts? What does “winning” look like for your character? Where are they are on their journey to get what they want before your devious plot comes along and disrupts their efforts, sets them back, forces them to adjust everything all over again?
What is their belief system about the world? What incidents, situations, or experiences led them to shape that view?
Jon August (“Charlie’s Angels,” “Go,” “Big Fish”) on the podcast: “We talk on the show sometimes about negative intrinsic motivators. So fear, shame, jealousy, self-doubt. But I’d like to talk a little bit more about sort of the positive version of those …I’ve been watching shows and movies recently where I feel like after two hours or eight hours, I still couldn’t really tell you what is motivating them internally. What are the positive internal physical motivators like? What’s their desire? If it was a musical, I couldn’t sketch out their ‘I Want’ song. It’s like they’re kind of isn’t one in there. They can feel a little bit lifeless because as humans I know they should have something like that in them.”
Jon didn’t quite put it this way, but I will: we’re more likely to relate to negatives. (Think of the opening scenes in “A Man Called Ove.”)
And then Mazin makes it clear why some characters don’t seem, well, alive.
Mazin: “It’s because the characters are only apparently motivated by circumstance. But ideally circumstance is the second thing that happens. The first thing that happens before the show or movie starts is they already are irritable about something—something is missing, something must be known, something must be uncovered.”
Did you catch that? If your story is the only thing that shapes your character, it may fall flat.
Remember, your story “is the second thing that happens.”
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