Defining Character

Few things are better than singing and dancing pastel ponies to
pick up your day, except when they're flying around in your
head in the middle of the night.
source: mlp.wikia.com

So I've been having a hard time sleeping tonight.  My thoughts just won't shut-up; I have stuff from a My Little Pony song to sharing my testimony with someone buzzing through my head.  So I am posting at an ungodly hour while I wait for my melatonin pill to kick in and knock me out.  I apologize in advance if any of my statements seem loopy.

Recently I've been following a series of blog posts by author Anne Elisabeth Stengl where she defines her personal methods for writing characters and her stories.  You can read the first article here.  Reading these articles has gotten me to thinking more about how I look at my characters.  It has especially gotten me to thinking about how to define my main character in the trilogy I'm working on.

So how do I define character?





Well, I had something click for me the other day.  I went to a family costume/Halloween party at a sibling's house.  My husband James and our little one went to it as well.  I had remembered to bring our son's medicine for his acid reflux on the way there, but I decided not to have us turn around to get it.

Boy did I regret that.

My son had a hard time nursing when the time came around, screaming and crying, so we packed up and left early.  I had some negative emotions pass through me, one of them being guilt.  Foremost guilt of not turning back to get that medicine and seeing my son suffer, and second of leaving my siblings early.  I felt like I had let them down, something I don't think I've ever felt about my family that way.

I realized soon after that this was one of the main motivations for my MC.  He doesn't want to disappoint his family, most especially his mother, whom he is taken away from.  This will probably be his biggest drive throughout the trilogy, and it will be interesting to see how it develops.  It was a huge epiphany for me in regards to this trilogy, as I had had a hard time consciously understanding this character.

To me, a character is defined by such motivations.  Characters have different facets, from personality to physical attributes.  However, their every action is derived from motivation.  What makes them have that personality?  What drives them to be good or evil?  What drives them to save their family, or to hide and cower while the world around them burns?

Sometimes Sabra almost loses sight of
her motivations, but will come back to
what she knows to be true.

Along the lines of what Stengl addresses in her articles, when a character has a motivation, it makes them an honest character, honest to the author and to the reader.  A motivation helps a character leap off the page and into the imagination, helps make the character's world that more real.  When my imagination clicked for my current MC, I looked back on some characters in the manuscript I'm editing, Incarnate Dream, and realized this is what I had going for them all along.

Sabra the Incarnate is motivated by her desire to please her gods and help her loved ones; her whole life revolves around those factors.

Deborah is motivated by the desire to save her family and people, and will travel the world to do it.

The Molouk soldier Jagger is motivated by the desire to save his military unit and bring them back home to Ramirra.

The Adejite Molouk Zentag is motivated by anger and revenge against the villain, but at the same time love for Sabra and a desire to please her and the gods.

Amazing how things will just click into place, isn't it?  I am grateful to my Heavenly Father for such inspiration!

What sort of things have clicked for you in writing or other creative projects?  Have personal motivations ever moved from you heart and into the characters on the page?