Day 64: Motivation pt. 3

Hey this is the first three part post I've done. I'm going to try my best to wrap it up in this one, it's getting a little long-winded, and I'm not sure how well this thought process will actually hold up during review. So far I've said that motivation breaks down into an emotion and a character trait or traits that cause a character to act on that emotion. Simple scenarios make for simpler motivations. For example, a character trapped in a survival scenario would have a fear of dying and would need the determination to try to survive. The motivator they have then is the will to live. Today I want to try to apply this reasoning to more complex scenarios and emotions because those are usually a lot more interesting than simple drivers. I also want to try working backwards by taking a common motivator and trying to figure out what combination of traits and driving emotions might lead to that kind of motivator.

It's obvious how fear of death and determination can give someone a powerful motivator, but what about characters who are never in any danger? Romance as a genre usually doesn't include too much violence, or at least it isn't the focus, so what kind of motivation do characters in a romance have instead? To put it in perspective, I'm going to keep scaling Maslow's hierarchy of needs right up to 'love and belonging,' the need for family, friendship, connection, and intimacy. The drive to find someone to love is about as powerful and instinctual as fear is, but the traits that determine how a character acts on these emotions are much more complex. A chivalrous knight won't treat a lover the same way a swanky womanizer would, even though both of them are responding to the same desire for intimacy. The chivalrous knight has protective traits, and an honor bound sense of duty, so they would be motivated to protect and provide for the person they love. A womanizer has more charisma, and generally a more selfish attitude, and so they might be motivated to convince their lover to protect and support them instead of the other way around. From here I can think of tons of different motivators, all based on how someone with different traits would approach the same desires. I think the model for motivators is still working at this level of needs, and is still useful to me, but let's try the other exercise to see if it will still work.

One of the most common motivators in villains is the drive to attain power. Thankfully, Maslow's hierarchy of needs covers this one as well. Esteem covers the need for respect, status, recognition, and strength. It's hard to label this with a simple emotion though. The desire for intimacy might be called longing, or in a bad case, loneliness, but what is the desire for esteem called? I'm not sure, so I'll just have to call it exactly that for now. It certainly feels different than longing or fear, so I'm pretty sure it is a separate emotion, but things are getting a little muddy.

I think I can make this real simple real quick by summing up with this: A character with positive traits will probably try to do positive things to gain esteem, while a character with negative traits will probably do negative things to gain esteem. That's a little trivial however, because anybody with two braincells already knew that. I think, at the end of the day, saying that a character's motivation is a combination of the emotions they experience and the traits they have is in itself a little trivial. What else would make up a character's motivation besides the way the feel and who they are? This was a useful exercise to get to the bottom of how I conceive of motivation, but ultimately I think there is quite a bit to learn about this topic. I think I am missing something big since my conclusion was so trivial. Maybe I'll figure it out in the future.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley