May I have a Glass of Water?

A little while back, I learned that there is an important concept in fiction that I had not grasped. I don’t know if I understand it now, but at least I know that I am aware.

Motivation.

If a character does not have motivation, your story will be without direction and even without believability. All your characters must want something. The place where I learned this referred me to Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules For Writing Fiction. Go look it up if you will, it’s good stuff.

But anyway, Vonnegut’s third rule is this:

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Why is your hero running around, trying to save the world? Because he wants a safe place to live. Why is the heroine running from the vampires? Because she wants to live.

Motivation will make your characters come to life. When they want something, it will drive them to do things you hadn’t even thought of. It will also give you something to aim at. A character will aim to reach what he or she wants, and do pretty much anything to get there.

However, there will be things that your character does not want. This will cause them to run away from whatever they don’t want, perhaps altering a straight course to the thing they want.

When you put those two together, you have an ending. I think it was Holly Lisle who said that in most stories, the hero must overcome that which he fears (or does not want) to get to that which he does want (his goal).

Obviously, this does not apply for every story, but it is generally applicable in some or other way.

Another important factor of this rule of Vonnegut is the word every. Not just the main characters should have wants. The villain should definitely want something, but also the secondary and minor characters. It’s not a problem if you have a flat shopkeeper that appears once in your story, but every character that has anything to do with the progression of the story should want something.

In the end, it is all about motivation. If you want something, it will drive you to action. Action leads to conflict (especially if your character is avoiding something) and conflict makes stories. Don’t just let things happen to your hero and then he just gets dragged along. Give him something to aim for, and he will come alive before your eyes.

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From Flat to Round

The talking of characters being flat and round had always baffled me, and truth be told, it still does to an extent.

But I learned something important from EM Forster’s book, Aspects of the Novel, there is one line that sums this up pretty well :

“A round character must be able to surprise us convincingly.”

There are two important parts in this sentence. The character should surprise us, as well as the surprise being done convincingly. You can’t try to make a character round by letting them surprise us with something that they have no motivation or reasoning to do. If your reader can’t believe that your character would do something like that, then your characters had not succeeded in becoming round. EM Forster calls these characters flat characters pretending to be round.

Now the question is this. How exactly to we build up our readers into believing the surprise when it comes?

Every event that a character experiences can change him. Subtle changes, or major changes. If you can somehow create a series of events that would change him in such a way that it is not unconvincing when the character surprises, then you have succeeded.

But when you think about it, isn’t that the wrong way around? Shouldn’t you follow your character and bombard him with events and watch as it changes him? Then find him later surprising you with something? Then you think back and find that all the events had led up to this one decision? That all the events had changed your character in such a way that this one decision is convincing?

I would think so.

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