by
Janis Patterson
Okay, I’ll confess. I am a Jessica
Fletcher junkie, and since our local ‘golden oldies’ station is running
episodes of Murder, She Wrote in the afternoon I watch almost every day. In the
opening credits of the last few seasons (where Jessica was teaching in New
York, and which I consider vastly inferior to the earlier years) there is a
flash of her wearing a hideous sweater and standing in front of a blackboard on
which is written ‘Motive.’
Motive. That’s a fancy word for
‘why’d he do that?’ And let’s face it, without motive you don’t have a story.
Not a good one, at least.
To have an interesting story you
have to have conflict; however, this doesn’t necessarily mean people fighting with
each other. It means that one character wants one thing and another something
else. How a conclusion is reached is the story. Why each character wants
whatever he wants is the motive. The action is what he does to ensure he gets
what he wants. It’s why he does what he does, and it can encompass the entire
human spectrum – from murder to gossip to theft to… whatever you need to tell
your story.
Another thing about motive is it has
to be believable and understandable – not to us, necessarily, but to the character.
We may never think that the ritual slaughter of six blonde soprano co-eds is
understandable, but if the killer truly believes that he is creating angels to
protect him by killing these girls the act becomes believable – from his point
of view. Horrible, but believable, because the perpetrator believes it absolutely.
By the same token, if a beauty contest participant believes she can win if she
puts India ink in her chief rival’s facial cleanser and she also believes she
has to win or she is worth nothing, or if the bad guys will kill her, or her
father will disown her, or whatever… as long as she truly believes whatever it
is, it is a viable motive.
Motives don’t have to be sane or
rational – except to the perpetrator. To them it must be the most natural thing
in the world – they want it (whatever it is), so they will do whatever it takes
to gain their objective. To the rest of us it could be horrible or amusing or
anything else, but the perpetrator must believe it implicitly.
Motive is the generator of your
story, and the motives of the characters create the conflict. The crook and the
cop. Two women after the same man. Man versus nature. Whatever. Without motives
and conflicts, you don’t have much of a story.
For example, take Pete. Pete gets up
in the morning, showers, eats breakfast, goes to work, spends the day making
actuarial tables, has a drink with friends, then takes his girl out to dinner
before going home and going to bed. By now you’ve probably written about 1,000
words describing Pete’s day in erudite and deathless prose, but you haven’t
really said anything. You’ve just described the action. Ho-hum. What does Pete
want? What stands in the way of Pete’s getting what he wants?
But, you say, that’s the way life
is. We don’t all have motives and conflicts, so most of our lives are just
day-to-day minutiae. That’s not true. We all have motives – why do we work? So
we can have the money to buy what we need. Or we’re saving for a special
something. And we all have conflicts – traffic was horrible and kept us from
getting to work on time. That jerk in accounting screwed up again, and has made
it appear we were wrong. Whatever. Our motives and conflicts may be more
mundane and on a smaller scale than our characters’, but they are there.
Everyone has them. Fictional characters just have bigger, more spectacular
ones, and it is our duty to provide them in a believable manner.
Remember, if all people wanted was
real life, they’d all sit on the front porch watching their neighbors instead
of reading our books!
