July Experiment: What's My Motivation, Mr. Director? (Patreon)

What’s My Motivation, Mr. Director?

Greetings from the Mad Fiction Laboratory! It is high summer here in New England, which means that all my little green and growing experiments in the garden are starting to grow up big and strong and I can’t honestly say whether or not cucumbers this size are capable of achieving sentience but you just can’t discount the idea completely. One must always be careful with cucumbers. It’s been a mild summer in Maine which IS RUINING MY PLANS. You see, I planted moonflowers in the spring, which are magical and amazing and absolutely definitely sentient, and they need seething, broiling heat to make blossoms because they are temperamental jerks, so I have this massive green vine monster devouring the front of my house with not a single flower on it yet. August, all my hopes dwell in you! We hit 100 degrees last year in August several times, so everyone think uncomfortably hot thoughts for the stubbornest of the Lab denizens.

I dithered around a lot deciding what to write about this month. In fact, I had a completely different topic in mind about two and a half minutes ago. But my fingers are tricksy and strange, and they don’t listen at the best of times. So writing about aliens and animals and non-human intelligences will have to wait. We’re gonna talk about motivation. 

Creating characters that people get attached to is basically the living room of fiction. Other rooms are super important—you can’t eat without a kitchen or rest without a bedroom or relieve…er…narrative tension without a bathroom. But the living room is the first thing you see when you walk in, it’s the central core where all the other rooms connect, it’s where entertainment and camaraderie and social interaction and interior decor kick back on the couch with beers and chips. It’s where the living takes place. If readers love a character (or indeed hate them) they will put up with nearly any other flaw in a story just to see what happens to that person/creature/thing/boiler. Hardly anything even needs to happen in a story if the protagonist (or antagonist—heroes can be boring, one-dimensional, or even annoying if others are not, see Sookie Stackhouse, Buffy, Jon Snow, or any Everyman protagonist. Even Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter are basically just these guys, you know?) is compelling enough. See: almost all of literary fiction. And if that protagonist is not compelling, if that living room is always a mess and there’s dirty bowls full of moldy food and old socks everywhere and the armchair never met a couch or curtain it could match and the television only gets one channel which is Univision, well, no amount of spectacular plot or language or worldbuilding will buy back your reader’s attention. 

There’s a reason there are so fucking many panels at conventions about creating strong characters. (We’ll save my mouth-cannon of repressed magma-rage at the infinite strong female character panels I’ve had to be on for another month.) Character is story; story is character. Character is worldbuilding; worldbuilding is character building—a person is the result of their world as surely as their parents. Character is style and style is character: how a person speaks and thinks and the linguistic quirks that differentiate any human/creature/thing/moonflower from any other endears or repels the reader as surely as what they do. And at the core of character is motivation. The reader must at least understand it, preferably sympathize with it, ideally feel it in their own bones. What drives us, what moves us to act or keeps us from acting, the gas in the tank of a sentient being. 

I spent a lot of my youth in theater. I wanted to be an actress for most of my life, until I figured out I wasn’t pretty enough or unselfconscious enough to really make that work. But honestly, most of what I know and understand about building a character and fully inhabiting them comes from my theatrical background, not any formal training in creative writing I ever had. Most academic writing instruction is based around the workshop, which inherently takes an outside-in approach. You made this thing already, give it to us and we’ll tell you how you did it wrong because you are wrong and you should feel bad. Now go change it, weirdo. Acting takes an inside-out approach. Here is a thing someone else made already. Let’s take it apart and examine it and make something authentic and three-dimensional and emotionally present without changing any of the pieces. Weirdo. The beginning writer is focused on the expression of their own id and ego through the text, the beginning actor is focused on expressing a character’s id and ego via the text and strives to subsume their own as completely as possible within Peter Pan or Lady Macbeth or the Coffee Is for Closers guy. Which is why the stereotypical cliche actor line is: what’s my motivation? They’ve got the engine carefully notated in a three-ring binder—they’re looking for the gas.

But the writer has to do it all: act every part, inhabit every role, design the lighting, the sets, the blocking, the costumes, direct the action, write the dialogue, do every job in the theater from script editor to stage manager to leading man. We have to build the engine from scratch and we spend a lot of time learning and unlearning and relearning where all the parts go and how they fit together—but in the end we’re still going to need that gas to make it go. So I’m going to tell you what I think about every single time I think about motivation.

Back when I was super cereal about being ready for my close-up, I worked with this director. I won’t say who, because he actually was a level of successful you could easily find on IMDB or your local streaming service, and also because he is now deceased and I’m about to speak ill of the dead.

Let’s call him Scarface. Not because he was ugly or scarred in the face—he wasn’t—but because holy hot damn say hello to my little friend did he love that movie. He used it as an example of great acting all the time. Now, that’s not that weird in the annals of dude directors, except that at the time I was a 15 year old waif with all the worldly experience of a unicorn plushie and all the self-confidence of the fruit on the bottom of a discount yogurt tub. Scarface absolutely mortified and traumatized me as a young actress. He told me I was shit every day, he told me I’d never make it, he told me I was blowing my shot by screwing up so much, and then he’d tell me to loosen up and have fun with it. He swore and smoked and wore a scarf in the summer and tried to get me to access my deepest childhood trauma for a comedy. He was in many ways a stereotype of himself, but at 15, I didn’t know that stereotype, I just knew I was terrified of and fascinated by him, which is, of course, why people act that way in the first place, because to someone brand new, even cliches are terrifying and fascinating.

Scarface talked about motivation all the time because of course he did. And he had a theory and the theory was this: when you get down to it, everyone has the exact same motivation. Every character you’ll ever play or see, from Blanch DuBois to Master Blaster to Iago to Roger Rabbit to Miss Piggy, the they all want the same thing because all people want the same thing, and we’ll all do terrible and wonderful things to get it. 

Everyone’s motivation is to get love. 

I remember so clearly his examples, because he only used two and even at 15 I thought they hardly summed up all of human behavior in its bizarreness and complexity. Scarface said: “Think of Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, all that crap she’s willing to put up with from Bill Pullman with the sleeping machine and the kleenex, just to get love. And then think about Tony Montana in Scarface—he kills people and hoards money and he moves like he does…” at this point my director went into full Pacino impression before my mortified eyes, thrusting his pelvis out as he strode back and forth across the stage, “…because in his head he’s always fucking everybody in the mouth but even that, at its core, is all about just feeling loved and accepted and understood by somebody.”

Leaving aside the hilariously gendered spectrum there, in which the extremity of a woman’s quest for love is tolerating a CPAP machine and a man’s is straight up murdering and/or getting head from tons of people while gargling cocaine, this actually made sense to me at the time. It’s certainly most 15 year olds’ deepest motivation. It’s obvious in a romantic comedy, if less so in epic fantasy or space opera or military drama. Respect, admiration, worship, loyalty, deference are all expressions of love, types of love. It’s not always or only sexual. Love from parents, friends, siblings, subjects, men, women. Whatever kind we are missing, it’s the only one that’ll do. Syndrome in The Incredibles wants to be loved (respected) by people who reject him, so does Miss Piggy, so does Cleopatra, so does Marty McFly, so does Agamemnon and Kilgrave and Donald freaking Trump. Human beings are bottomless pits when it comes to love. If we didn’t get enough as a child, we chase after it forever. If we did, we constantly search for a repeat performance of that perfect, anxiety-free, no-conflict, us-focused love we experienced when we were little. Perhaps what differentiates a villain from a hero is that, for a hero, there is ultimately an amount of love that will be enough, that will satisfy them and make them happy. For a villain, there is no end to their need.

Call that one the Scarface Rule. 

The key is understanding that this isn’t even about protagonists—it’s so easy to plant that need in someone you expect the audience to identify with, to understand good and honorable things done for love in the face of existential threats. Yeah, yeah, Iron Man wants people to love him so he swooshes around in a suit saving people, what a huge insight. The harder thing is understanding that villains are wrecking the place for the same reason, and so are the Wormtongues and Ramsays and hedge fund managers. It may not always look like wanting love, and the deeds done in its name may never result in anything like love, and a hug ain’t gonna fix it, but it pulls everyone’s compasses all the same. Take your villain. The worst, most vile and selfish and destructive character you’ve ever created (or read about). Imagine the perfect world that they want to create, the end game, and tell me it isn’t one where everyone loves and respects and listens to them, whatever else it looks like. If you can express this along with all those other evil plans, it humanizes anyone and everything, it humanizes a chair, it humanizes a lamp, because it’s something no reader finds alien. 

Now, as I have grown up and grown as a writer and lived a bit and no longer have strange men in scarves yelling at me about fucking people in the mouth in order to illicit a quick-witted comedic performance for crying out loud, I’ve developed an addendum to the Scarface Rule. Yes, everyone wants love. But not quite just love. So here’s my postscript to the Scarface Rule, in honor of a director who made my life hell in service of the artistic sanctity of dinner theater. Call it the Waif Addendum.

Everyone’s motivation is either to get love or be safe. 

Part of the reason people love superheroes so much is that it’s a fantasy of someone so strong nothing can hurt them. That’s a core fantasy, from the time we are small, small and helpless and surrounded by giants who never seem to fall down when they try to walk or have to ask anyone else for help when they’re thirsty, who can reach the candy cabinet so easily and don’t have to take naps or baths or share their toys and never get called mean names by the other kids. Of course, adults do get called names and have to share and bathe and ask for help, but the little one never sees it or hears about it, so every grown-up, for awhile, is Superman. And Superman is always safe. When we want to be Superman, we want the adulation, sure, but we also want to be invulnerable. We want to be safe. And we want the strength so we can keep that safety and extend it to the people we like. 

Once you say “everyone,” that statement has to be incredibly flexible. And everyone wants to be loved kept running up against despots in my head. Because successful despots have love. Adoration, praise, even worship, from their inner circle, from the masses. And it doesn’t stop them from doing horrible things that obviously won’t increase respect or admiration or love in any way. They do those things in order to safeguard what they already have, and keep the people they deem worthy on top of the heap, protected from hunger, worry, thirst, poverty, loneliness. The safest place to be is on top, the one who gets to decide how everything else is divided. It’s the old war of resources we’ve been fighting since forever. Something deep in us always thinks there’s not enough for everyone to have some. When trying to understand real or imaginary villains, you can’t just shrug and say: they’re monsters. Monsters gonna monster. The old adage is that every villain is the hero of their own story—but some villains do know they’re villains. It’s just worth it if, in the end, they’re safe and loved on their own terms, whatever that means to them. If they get to be Superman. If things get to be like they were on the very best day of their childhoods forever. If they get to be absolutely certain their partner won’t cheat on them ever again. If they can rid the world of something that they imagine can hurt them or reduce their share of the cures for hunger or thirst or loneliness or longing, even if that something is women or people who don’t look like them or environmental regulations. If they can feel completely confident their children will never have anything bad happen to them. If they can make utterly sure no one can ever think they’re so weak that they’d call them one single cruel name, not any more, not one more time. 

Scarface, my old director, was very sick when we were working together. I didn’t know it, but he did. Six months later he had died of AIDS. He was a complete abusive asshole to me during his last months in this world. He did and said all that crap knowing he didn’t have much time left. He did it because he was lashing out. Because he knew he’d never be safe again. Because he’d never gotten the kind of love he wanted, and he never would now. Because if he could make the fruit at the bottom of a discount yogurt cup cry the way some director or other definitely made him cry, she’d remember him the way he remembered his mentors, and maybe his memory would be safe, even if he wasn’t. Maybe twenty years after he was gone, someone would still be talking about what he taught them, even if they also remembered him as a rather impressively consistent and thorough dick.

RIP Scarface. You’re safe with us. 

When you build a character, however large or small, you have to start from motivation. They have to want. They have to need. They have to be incomplete. The Scarface Rule and the Waif Addendum are a place to start. Everything can get more complex and weird from there, but almost everything people do comes down to one of those or both. Most of the worst things that have ever happened and most of the best. Writing is radical, bone-jarring, sustained empathy. So is reading. If you have trouble getting into the heads of characters who are very unlike you, who do things you would never do, who are larger than life or crueler than death, whose experience is fundamentally alien and opposed to your own, well.

Say hello to my little friend.