Motivating Your Characters

In Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friend and Influence People the author states that everyone is searching for a feeling of importance. How to get to that end result is as varied as each individual person. Some seek importance through their children, through their career, through their possessions, through social standing, and some through the thrill of power that kidnapping another and torturing them brings. All want the same end result--for their existence on this earth to matter.
The same is true of well-developed characters. There should always be a good "why" behind their actions. This is not to say all characters act like sensible Minnesotans, but there should be a trail of reasonable actions that make up the characters in your story. Even the insane characters. This can be tricky, and for me this depth of character is formed in the second, third, fourth and fifth revisions. If you can't answer the question, "Why did he do that?" with a satisfactory reason from the text then you either need to go back and reinforce that trait or you need to change the character's actions!
Details make the character alive for your reader. A character who stutters during confrontations or wipes his forehead with the bandanna he keeps in the pocket of his cardigan sweater is a much more rich experience for your readers. They know people who do these kinds of things.
One note--NEVER write something like the following. "Bart was a kind person, always patient during hard times..." This is flat, doesn't engage your reader in the plot of the story. Instead, allow your reader to discern this trait for themselves by the way Bart acts and reacts within the story. Show us his kindness and his patience in Bart's interactions within the story. If it doesn't come out naturally within the context of the story it wasn't really true of Bart after all--and your reader won't buy it. (Never underestimate the intelligence of your readers!)

More tomorrow,
Traci DePree