Character Motivation - Tumblr Posts

97 character motivations

Need a masterlist of character motivation ideas?

Here’s 97 different character motivations you can use for anything from your hero, side-characters, villain, or even to craft smaller subplots. Save this post for later!

Saving a family member from capture

Saving a sibling from disease

Saving a pet from danger

Saving the world from ruin

Saving a friend from heartbreak

Saving the town from financial ruin

Saving friends from dangerous deadly situations

Saving a love interest from dying

Saving themselves in a dangerous world

Saving a community from falling apart

Saving a child from a potentially dangerous circumstance

Saving a place or location from evil forces

Saving a ghost from limbo

Overcoming a phobia

Overcoming an addiction

Overcoming marital struggles

Moving on from loss

Finding a significant other

Finding a new family (not blood-related)

Finding true biological family

Finding out an old secret

Finding a way home

Reconnecting with long-lost friends

Getting out of a dark state of mind

Finding peace in life

Beating a disease

Beating an arch nemesis

Forming a peaceful community

Transforming a location

Bringing someone back to life

Winning a competition

Going on an adventure

Getting a dream job

Keeping a secret

Escaping a location of capture

Proving a moral point

Proving a political point

Winning a political campaign

Betray someone

Ruin someone’s life

Find a suspect or killer

Find the answer to a mystery

Discover ancient sites & secret histories

Perform a successful ritual

Summon the dead

Save a country from dictatorship

Become the most powerful in a community

Outshine a family member in business success

Prove someone wrong

Win prize money to help someone in need

Get revenge on someone who wronged them

Find the person who wronged them

Develop significant scientific progress

Gain respect from family

Get over an ex-lover

Move on from a painful death

Keep their community alive

Lead their community

Heal people in need

Preserve a species (animal, alien, plant…)

Discover new world

Get recognition for hard work

Become famous

Get rich to prove themselves to people who doubted them

Break a long tradition

Challenge the status quo of a community

Defeat a magical nemesis

Take over a location to rule

Find out truth behind old legends

Help someone get over their struggles

Prove their moral values

Prove their worth to an external party

Become a supernatural creature

Keep something from falling into the wrong hands

Protect the only person they care about

Start a revolution

Invent new technology

Invent a new weapon

Win a war

Fit in with a community

Atone for past sins

Give top-secret information to an enemy as revenge

Kill an ex-lovers current partner

Reinvent themselves

Raise a strong child

Make it to a location in a strict time period

Find faith

Find enlightenment

Find out more about the afterlife

Confess love to a friend

Solve a moral dilemma

Have a child of their own

Avoid being alone

Run away from past struggles

Reinvent themselves as a new person

Impress a colleague or boss

Avoid a fight or war breaking out

How To Write Character Motivation

This little (not-so-little) post is all about how to give your character a motivation for that goal all the while taking into account important things like the backstory, worldbuilding, themes, and such.

Keep in mind the fact that there are billions of different goals and connecting motivations so this advice is probably not applicable for everything :)

Again, these are just some tips. I am going to be assuming that you have some basic information about your character like what they want and where they come from :D

A) Questions, Questions, And More Questions

Take your character and ask them what their goal is. Then ask them "why?". Force them to answer. Then ask them different "why" questions based on what they answer!

For example: "Character A wants to kill the dragon"

Why? The dragon killed my family.

Why did the dragon kill your family? My father was a monster hunter who was upsetting the dragon's food resource.

Why did the dragon kill your other family members? My mom and my sister were collateral damage in the dragon's attack.

You can do this little exercise with any type of goal from crime, adventure, romance, to any other genre I haven't listed yet!

B) Deep Psychology

Now you have ask yourself, actually your character but you know, "what is this really about"?

What does this goal symbolize for this character?

Character A wants to kill the dragon because she believes it will end her own nightmares about the death of her parents. This is a thoughtless attempt to grieve without grieving.

Character B wants to steal a treasure of their home village because he believes that by gaining the financial rewards associated, he will be adored by his new community of outsiders. This is a desire for belonging.

You get the point. These goals aren't just about stealing your home's sacred treasure for wealth or killing a dragon for revenge. It's about universal desires we all share. To be loved, to be strong, to be great.

This is necessary because most people don't live in isolated villages housing secret treasures nor do they kill dragons. If you want your audience to connect with your character, the audience needs something universal to latch onto.

C) Themes And Misbelief

Most great stories feature a "misbelief" or mistaken assumption. This is the potentially fatal flaw of this character who believes something that is either not reflective of reality or will endanger something they care about.

Even if Character A kills the dragon ten times over, their family is gone. They can't kill their grief. They have to authentically work through it. Besides, I can't imagine how completely f#cked the food web would be if an apex predator like the dragon died.

If Character B used the sacred treasure to gain untold wealth they most likely would gain the acceptance and support of the "outsiders". But isn't it more important to protect the tradition. Their culture? Their people? It's a good thing to protect things that need to be protected!

These stories can either end as a cautionary tale, a lifeless happily ever after, and an impactful happy ever after depending on the character arc and ending of these characters.

If Character A and B "succeed" in their goals but this ruins their overall life, it's a cautionary tale.

If Character A and B succeed in their goals and they suffer no consequences for their mistaken belief, it's a lifeless victory.

If Character A and B choose different goals as a result of a character arc then they will succeed and reach a true happily ever after.

Anguish of Fallen Angels

sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

No offense to writers, but why does everything have to be a fucking love story?

I have found like 2 posts that have actually helped with my style of writing and one of them was literally just grammar. Whenever I go on tumblr looking for writing advice, all I see is relationship writing prompts. Speaking of those “writing prompts”, they are literally just singular lines of context or dialogue. The only person that actually follows the correct definition for writing prompts every post is @writing-prompt-s , which are great and almost every one of them has so much potential, each one of those is an entire, self contained story.

Writing does not require a close relationship ship, nor does it need complex character arcs. People are not malleable, humanity is an extremely stubborn species that does not like change. Too often do I read stories where the villain becomes good at the end, or they are defeated and the MC(s) live happily ever after. There is a reason why the big bad is evil, whatever that reason may be, it is what drives the antagonist. Consistency in what drives a character is important for that character to seem believable, despite what people tell you, people rarely, truly change.

For example, if the villain became evil because of a traumatic childhood, abusive parents, and or neglect, the protagonist giving them the attention they needed as a child wouldn’t change the antagonist. This realization came to me after watching the boys, Homelander is given all of the love and attention in the world by hundreds of millions if not billions of fans and even then he’s constantly on the verge of snapping. When a person is deprived of attention, they either think they don’t deserve it or that it’s their right. In both cases, if you then give that person attention and passion, they will then want more. They were at rock bottom for the longest time and have most likely been in denial about it their whole lives, when you bring someone like that back up they find out that the feeling they previously thought unimportant felt good. They might stay with the protagonist for a bit to hold on to that feeling, but the moment they find out they can get that same feeling from others, suddenly the person that first showed you compassion is no longer unique. This is a very slippery slope to addiction, and addiction can and will make a person do anything for just one more fix of the only thing they care about.

I used this example because it is of the introduction of emotional drive to a story that had lacked it previously, some stories are meant to be love stories from the beginning and that’s fine, but when it is put into another type of story it can completely take over the plot and thus overrides any foreshadowing or themes the plot originally had.

(Spoilers for the boys, skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t seen it yet.)

Going back to Homelander, he is a character driven by attention, he’s already addicted to it. Homelander goes through several relationships in the show, be it real or fake, but none of them help him or change him as a person in any way. The boys is a beautiful example on the human mind’s need to be loved and how it can never truly be fulfilled. In the end, Homelander doesn’t get defeated or proven that it doesn’t have to be this way, instead he listens to his son and walks away. Even though he hasn’t changed completely, he now has a drive that is greater than his need for attention, making sure his son gets the childhood and love he never did. At the end of the show he discovers that love is mutual and that you don’t need everyone’s love to be happy. Homelander learn’s that making sure his son is happy can fulfill him greater than anyone else loving him ever could. Even after all of this, in the very last seen he murders someone and gets praised for it, his old motives and ideals are still there but he doesn’t need them.

However, sometimes love is forced into scenario’s that are completely illogical. Morals are based on a mental line you draw somewhere in your mind, but once you kill someone, suddenly you’ve just crossed the last line. You can make excuses, but ending a life is a one way road. No matter how hard it was to end that life, it will always be easier the second time. Sooner or later that second time will come, nobody teaches you how to forgive yourself because nobody really knows how. Love loses meaning when the person giving it can be ending so easily, don’t believe me? Do you remember the feeling you got from succeeding at something for the first time? Did ever feel that way for doing it again? Life is an endless loop of winning and losing, but once you overcome that final hurdle, what then?

The villain in a story can often be depicted as bored from a life of killing, there’s no going back, so more often than not they just stop. Defeated by a hero, killed by their own machinations, or just simply ending their own life, it doesn’t matter. They’ve killed so much at this point that they don’t fear death and often long for it. I hate it when I read a book and the character is redeemed from this state. Whenever I see a story end with a “happily ever after” I just sigh, it’s completely fine to have a b plot relationship, but it should never be the ending unless it’s actively a romance novel.

Sorry for the tangent, but I have just read one to many “action and adventure” books with a sappy ending. Watching Invincible, The Boys, and surprisingly Avengers: Infinity War has shown me that stories don’t have to have a happy ending, and the ones that don’t are interesting as fuck.

P.s. the only show that sufficiently handles friendship and relationships is my little pony. I only saw it because sister, but damn. There is no reason nor does there even deserve to be a reason why mlp was so well written. It had characters that consistent motivations and morals, event that actively changed who they were as a person, and get this, multiple character traits, I know, unbelievable. The animation was incredible and dialogue and writing were fucking perfect, fight me