Every story ever written boils down to the same basic concept: One actor struggles against another actor. It can be characters, events, countries, castes, concepts, ideas…but all stories are the stories of a struggle. Most deal with the struggles of individual characters so that is what I’m going to talk about here.
Characters have personality, pasts, preferences, hopes, and motivations. If they lack any of these things, they are less-complete as characters. If you’ve ever heard of “one dimensional characters,” then you have heard of a character who lacks one (or more) of the above traits. For example, in many stories written by young authors, characters lack the necessary traits to make them have depth and believability. The trait I’m going to focus on here is the trait most often looked over: motivation.
Why do characters make the choices they make? Why do they go the directions they go? What drives them? These are the questions you ask when you try to uncover a character’s motivation. Now, this is easily enough done for protagonists (usually “the good guys”) but what about the bad guys? Nothing irks me more than to read a story where the bad guy does things because…he’s the bad guy. Villains require motivation just as much, if not more, as heroes. After all, in the villain’s mind, what he’s doing is the right thing and the hero is wrong to oppose him.
I’m currently working on the first draft of the sequel to Twilight of Lanar’ya and the entire first part deals solely with the motivations of the villains. It explains why they feel the way they do. It explains the events of the first book from their point of view. They’re after something and they’ll stop at nothing to get it. However, in their minds, they are completely right to want this thing. And, the price that must be paid to gain it is acceptable. Tragic, but acceptable. They do not reveal in their enemies’ downfalls. Instead, they view their enemies with a mixture of pity, contempt, and anger. After all, if those fools would just broaden their horizons a bit and try to understand things instead of dogmatically accepting what they were taught, the villains would have no need to fight them.
It’s really interesting to get in the mind of a person who is utterly ruthless and will do whatever it takes to achieve his goals. Interesting villains often bring more to the story than the most interesting hero. After all, heroes are easy for anyone to understand. Getting readers to identify with and understand the villain enough to sympathize with him…even while he’s being a sadistic son of a bitch…that is something I wish more writers would experiment with. It’s something I hope I’m moderately successful in pulling off with this series.
And now, to sleep so I can proofread Twilight of Lanar’ya tomorrow and decide if the second draft is complete or not.
