3 Motivations I Will Never Use in My Stories
Ah, the Internet. Where silly writers can post earnest pledges to which they can be held years in the future long after they’ve changed their minds.
Well, general public, I am that silly writer. So today, I will be letting everyone with a connection know about the three character motivations I will no longer be using in any of my stories. Forever.
At least until I change my mind.
Because a prophecy said so.
Some of my favourite stories use prophecies to motivate their characters’ actions: C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising sequence, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, even Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle (sort of). Many of them use prophecies well.
But for every screwed-up Thane who makes his own fate come true through greed and hubris, there are dozens of fantasy characters who set out on plot-coupon-collecting expeditions, using in-story prophecies as a kind of Dungeon Master’s intro to sketch their road map. Or, even less interesting to me, good writers will occasionally have a bunch of nasty antagonists doing horrible things to the hapless hero, who wonders why, until near the end, he finds out that he is the subject of an ancient prophecy that says he’ll bring down the bad guys.
The reason I don’t like putting prophecies into my stories can be summed up by my reaction to the scene that usually follows this revelation: the hero gets all “Why must I have this horrible Destiny???” And I get all “so… you didn’t realize it was up to you to stop the bad guy, despite other people being useless and despite standing for the opposite of the bad guy’s morals until some random lady (usually) went into a trance and spoke in rhyme?”
For every prophecy that asks questions about how what we believe about our future affects what we do, there are ten more that take away the protagonist’s (or antagonist’s) agency. These kind of prophecies turn masks for “because the author says so.” And I’m not interested in having that in my stories any more than I already do.
Because he/she/it was born evil/good/this way.
Some of my favourite stories use this motivation, too: the Lubbockin in Diana Wynne Jones’s House of Many Ways, Voldemort and Harry in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the early depictions of the Ferengi in Star Trek: the Next Generation.
Characters of this nature are inherently good or evil depending on their race, parentage, and/or the circumstances of their birth, with no influence from their present situation and life choices. Parents were in True Love with each other? Good, even if you have been abused your whole life! Member of a particular race? Evil, even if there is no reason for you to want to do bad things! Product of a loveless relationship undertaken for selfish reasons? Evil! Child of true noble heritage? Good!
With respect to Lady Gaga, unless the author is working in the kind of story in which a character can represent straight-up evil (e.g. It in Stephen King’s It, the Rider in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising), I find this motivation morally troubling. So we should decide people are evil based on what they are instead of what they do? It’s particularly unsettling because it lends itself easily to and can often be found in racist stories.
And it doesn’t even help the story. In each of the stories I listed above, there are legitimate reasons for the characters in question to choose to do the good or evil things they do. The antagonists have every reason to feel disenfranchised or threatened. The main characters have every reason to want to fight the people who have been hurting them and those they love. To attribute character choices to inherent personality traits seems less interesting to me than exploring these existing motivations — and it makes me despise villains and like heroes less.
Because f*** you, that’s why!
My character is just so crazy and rebellious and weird! HE DOES WHAT HE WANTS! (Note: language, sexual descriptions, and, uh, general being South Park warning for that link.)
The distinction between an arbitrarily oddball character and a character who has deep-seated reasons for being different from other people can be subtle. When I’m reading, I can’t stand the needlessly quirky character who seems to result when an author confuses randomness for personality. To be sure, a character who muddles the two can make an interesting read — most of the artistic- and intellectual-types I know, including myself, at least went through a phase in which they thought that being different was the same as being creative, and it can be fascinating to explore the reasons why a character might think so.
Likewise, eccentric characters who ignore society’s rules to pursue goals of their own can also be interesting — for instance, the various incarnations of Sherlock Holmes tend to ignore social niceties in order to solve the case as quickly as possible. Or consider Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci or Wizard Howl — both men have outrageously vain dress sense, but it’s a humanizing touch that shows another facet of an already obvious aspect of their personalities (they need to feel like the top dog and sometimes have to trick themselves into doing so).
But when characters don’t transcend their appearance of a haphazardly selected bunch of eccentricities, they get boring fast.* Worse, when their motivation for doing plot events is “Sure, why not? I’m KA-razy like that!” it takes a lot of the tension out of the story. If this character makes decisions in a literal split second, why should I care if he or she gets the goal?
So there you have it, Internet. Make sure to bookmark this page so you can make me eat my words in the future.
* True, characters of this nature can sometimes work when they’re minor characters whose encounter with the protagonists raises interesting issues about chance, passion, and control (e.g. the amoral “chaotic” characters in epic fantasies, like the Fair Folk or Wild Magic, or classical Bacchanal characters, like Dionysus in Euripides’s The Bacchae). And a protagonist whose tragic flaw is the inability to have any motivation other than impulse — I would argue that Peter Pan is a protagonist of this type — can be powerful.
But, frankly? Those are easy to do poorly and difficult to do well, and, as a writer, I’m not driven to explore them. So for me, this is another motivation no-go.
What’s your take on the use of prophecy in the Harry Potter novels? You already addressed that series with your second point…but I think that a lot of what Harry does in those novels is based around prophecies / other people telling him what he’s supposed to be doing.
I think the saving grace here is that really Harry is just a C student – all throughout the novels he’s not really depicted as being Very Good At Wizardry, just Very Lucky. In my view, he ultimately bases his decisions on protecting his friends, rather than “the prophecy said so”.
Back on the other hand, he DOES demonstrate the whole “why me” angle of prophecies.
Yeah, I never found Harry to be a character with much agency, which is perhaps why I don’t like him very much — certainly not as much as I like almost every other character in the series, even the evil ones, because they’re more interesting. He doesn’t seem to me to have moral growth or interesting struggles.
The HP prophecies frustrated me because they seemed like the least interested possible answer to “why is Voldemort after Harry?” I was like, “So?” at the end of Book 5. I wanted there to be something interesting ABOUT HARRY, not “The author secretly told Voldemort before the story started.”
re: motivating Harry self-sacrifice, yeees… I see how his care for his friends was his ultimate motivation. But to me, that motivation could’ve stood on its own: it would have been much more interesting if Harry didn’t go as the Chosen One but just because Voldemort was asking for him and threatening to kill people if he didn’t. The prophecy was totally unnecessary to the drama of the moment, and so was Snape’s posthumous exposition.
I’m curious about whether you are lumping real and fake prophecies together. It seems like the prophecies in MacBeth are somewhat ambiguous the ones that matter could almost be fake (although pretty much any dramatic Shakespeare play is full of prophecies and portents that are somewhat legitimate and this takes nothing from the sense of agency of the characters, since this more reflects the way that the people of his time viewed the flow of events, major historical events had portents, omens and prophecies involved). Fake (or dubious) prophecies seem to me less subject to the problems you suggest, but they may raise some of the same problems. I think this whole idea depends on what kind of story you want to right, but yeah certainly can be a temptation for easy writing, in any genre there is probably the potential for the characters to feel the force of necessity (only star ship in the quadrant that can respond to the emergency) and if not set up right this reveals the whole story to be set-up on visible rails.
I can see how Voldemort and Harry end up being portrayed as being born evil and good respectively by the circumstances of your birth as you suggest, but the author’s intent ( as suggested in exposition which may not have shown through in the actual depiction) is that they both made choices and took actions that habituated them to their ways over the course of their lives, although both had some tendencies one way or the other.
I think a wider point is neither to over-determine the characters actions with too many motivations (including environmental, upbringing etc.) to be the way they are (so not only raised in a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but abusive parents, inducted into a blood cult, sold into slavery and conscripted into a bloodthirsty army with harsh training and constant propaganda), nor to overdo the symbolism (I think the circumstances of Voldemorte’s and Harry’s birth are more intended as symbolic of their mutual fates then supposed to be determinate of it) nor indeed to make the characters appearance to reflect their type (avoid the villain all in black, hunched and misshapen body, reptile or insect features with a goatee and a mustache that he constantly twirls when not wringing hands or tapping fingers together). I think any of those things is going to risk rendering the character simplistic, cause us to focus on things about the character instead of the characters themselves and create weird moral messages.
Anyway, seem like worthwhile constraints, I would just point out that it depends on the genre and tradition you are writing in (and even where ones writing talents lie), although I think your privisos already admit that.
Fair enough. Yes, I think the overall idea that over-determination of characters’ actions is a good blanket term for my main ideas.
I’m not sure I agree re: Harry and Voldemort. Short version: I think JKR characterizes actions and choices as *showing* what you are vs. *making* what you are. I lfound this essay on it interesting: http://ferretbrain.com/articles/article-161.html What do you think?
Yeah I read that years ago (possibly when you linked to it at some time) and I was unconvinced then as I am now. Perhaps I give JKR to much credit, but here is how I see the Harry Potter series in contra-distinction to the blog post (responding at random to various points).
Hanging too much on the word show “our choices show our nature” show here could be meant in the sense of express and express although it primarily means something like make known can also be somewhat constitutive. When we say an act of bravery is an expression of someone’s courage I don’t think that means we are saying the act is only indicative of bravery and not a constitutive element of bravery.
So Voldemort had an out could have tried for redemption but Harry and Rowling knew he would not take it. I take this more in line with Aristotle’s idea of choice (from the Nichomachean ethics) than the one Ferretbrain suggests. The thing is here when was the crucial choice made, of course at the end when he was about to face off with Harry in the final confrontation he is not going to surrender and go quietly to prison and spend a life in remorse and seclusion, even after a tangy taste of full Potter love, but that’s because of all the choices he had made up to that point. The truly vicious (as in viceful) person is vicious not in one or two acts or choices, but in a series of choices that form and habituate a bad character that leads to ever more bad choices. I think that point is made by the exploration of Tom Riddle’s past in Books six and seven. Dumbledore knows Voldemort used his power for some pretty serious mischief at the orphanage but tells Harry that others have done some pretty nasty stuff as kids and sorted themselves latter hence why he was willing to give young Tom Riddle a chance at Hogwarts. Dumbledore seems to recognize at various stages of development both that Riddle has done nasty stuff and that he might yet turn to a different path. At the end of the story Voldemort’s demise seems predestined and independent of any of his actions, but this is just the illusion of history.
Third somewhat tangential but I think important, Harry’s love being exemplified by his hatred of Voldemort. Here I think the foil is Peter “Wormtail” Pettigrew, Wormtail probably liked maybe even loved the Potters, but he ratted them out from fear and from desire for power. His love can be paid off in fear or avarice, whereas nothing could so buy off Harry’s love, loyalty or his resultant desire for retribution. It’s worth noting that Harry’s desire for revenge has limits and he is willing to offer mercy to both Voldemort and Pettigrew (given his anger this is no a modest act).
People do what Harry does and are not thereby virtuous, Harry just is the designated hero. I think the counter point here is Neville (who of course would have done it in 3 books). In the very first book Neville Longbottom does the wrong thing for the right reasons (loyalty, friendship, courage) and is recognized for it as worthy of recognition (or was that just so Dumbledore could fix which house would win the competition that year). It is pretty clear that for JKR its things like friendship, loyalty and courage that are the core of virtue and I tend to see Harry as being guided by these although sometimes the books can be bad at portraying this (so we get such incongruities as the “gallant” torturing). Now it might seem that this just proves that for JKR it is the mere presence of some spirit of good intention rather than anything substantive that determines right and wrong. However, latter we get to see Neville as the might of been “boy-who-lived” and we also seem him do some actual effectual stuff like killing the big snake, so virtue is more than just good intentions. I don’t think Neville is special just by the designation of prophecy (or Voldemort), rather his intentions and also his deeds constitute his heroic character, and it is an accident of opportunity that separates him and Harry or by implication anyone and Harry.
Harry does actually accomplish actual deeds, but some of them like showing mercy (which is often refused or abused) or getting help from his friends are kind of self-effacing, seem empty or just handed to him. Others seem petty like being good at Quiditch or summoning a Patronius, but I take it as broad strokes characterization (i.e. we are supposed to believe based on these that Harry is actually an accomplished young Wizard in terms of magic despite the characterization arguably showing Hermione doing all the heavy lifting).
Anyway, I admit that this means I read the books as agreeing with me in some crucial respects so this could easily be wishful thinking. Also, it may be too much to expect the books to be particularly coherent at all. Many of the elements are just simplistic appeals to emotion that do not add to any coherent point. Possibly the most accurate reading is that the characterization and plotting is such a mismash as to support any number of readings and that both I and the blog post are wrong to assume any solid superstructure.
One more thought, I would say that on reflection the most obvious rather jarring element of Rowling’s portrayal of human motivation is her tendency to make following through on the “right” sort of emotions and treats as leading to good decisions, even when the emotions are so unbalanced that in real life you would expect someone with those traits to be a raving loon.
So Snape’s creepy possessive stalker love for Lily Potter leads him to join the right side via the redemptive power of love (which is a mysterious thing) rather than say him just accepting that Voldemort will kill her and keeping her corpse stuffed and mounted on the mantlepiece. Luna’s tribute her friends is as I think you put it very serial killer, but supposedly part of what motivates her to do the right thing. Harry seems obsessed with revenge and yet can at the last minute offer his enemies mercy, he has inordinate faith in Dumbledore which the reader does not really share etc..
I think the characterizations acknowledge the idea that being good is not just a matter of good intentions (a theme in the last book) and even that simply having love is not enough you have to do something about it and not sell out etc.. But apparently there is not really an excess or defect (other than absence or limit) of things like love, loyalty, courage or faith, just follow through on them and you’ll be pulled in the right direction with the occasional lapse or fall to angst (although you may still die horribly in the last book).
Of course I think this sort of simplification has an emotional appeal, but it starts to cause problems when you reflect on it too much.
Fair enough. I think our differences probably stem from the level of trust we each have in JKR. I find the article plausible because I don’t see that there is any real choice for any of the characters (with the possible exception of Snape, who explicitly makes a wrong choice and then corrects it, and Neville, who, as you point out, we see growing into someone who makes a right choice. Neville also actually explains his own actions to Harry in Book 7 as deliberate choices — (paraphrase) “I noticed it was important when you stood up to bad people, so I did it when you weren’t here to do it.”)
I think I’m not willing to accept that characterization of Harry in particular because we get to see inside his head. He’s not making any choices (apart from the choice to have mercy — I agree that if JKR had focussed on that, I might have a different impression of the books). He just gets all naturally fired up with the “right” kind of emotions for no good reason. He doesn’t even consider, “Say, what is good? Is what I’m doing good? How do I know that Voldemort is wrong?” IMO, JKR tries to get him to question Dumbledore in the final book, but it doesn’t work for me because it doesn’t feel like “Dumbledore is wrong” is actually an option. It’s like the guest star guy on a sitcom that OBVIOUSLY won’t end up with the main character, because CLEARLY the plot is that Ross and Rachel (etc.) get together with each other. So it doesn’t raise the stakes at all for me.
… I think I talked myself off topic.