Free Creating Characters: How to Build Story People by Dwight V. Swain Page B

Moshe Wolf’s son, Irving, marries Patrick’s daughter, Mary? It’s Old World attitudes in the parents, confronted with New World attitudes in the children.
    Further, a dominant attitude quite possibly may be modified by other coexisting—and quite possibly conflicting—attitudes, for few of us are all of a piece. The example that comes to mind concerns a friend of mine, a United Auto Workers official. He was outspoken in his belief in racial equality. Only a trip with him to the Pacific Northwest, where he grew up, revealed that while equality for Blacks was fine, Filipinos were another matter!
    In other words, circumstances alter cases, so be sure you’ve considered all pertinent angles before you slap on labels. Thus, acharacter may have one dominant attitude in one story—that is, one particular set of circumstances. But another, different situation may bring a different attitude into focus.
    Note too that this business of character dynamics, what goes on inside a given story person’s head, is not necessarily revealed to readers save in terms of the way the character behaves. You, in contrast, must know Character’s thought patterns and propelling forces in that story, if the story is to make sense. Hemingway offers some brilliant examples. Or reread Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon . At no point are you given any hint of what Sam Spade is thinking, save in terms of speech and action. But clearly, Hammett as the author had to know.
HOW MUCH DO MOTIVES MATTER?
    Meet Pam. She’s a lovely girl.
    Her boyfriend, Terry, is the be-all and end-all of her existence. And as she’ll tell you, with or without provocation, her life’s ambition is to marry him.
    So far, so good. Pam has a goal-motivated drive, a purpose. That’s a big step forward in equipping her to become a major character in a story.
    Next question: What about her private world, the world inside her head?
    Or, to capture it in a word, what’s her motivation?
    It’s at this point that I take a somewhat different track than do most analysts of fiction. Because I tend to draw a line between motive and purpose.
    Purpose, as I see it, is what a character wants to do: kiss a girl, take a trip, go to church, rob a bank, rescue a baby from a burning building. In brief, purpose is something you can take action to accomplish.
    Motive, on the other hand, is why Character wants to do something. And often, not even the person himself understands the reason or reasons behind it, as witness the old line about “the devil made me do it.” Or, to put it another way, more often than not, motive is rationalization .
    Thus, Pam. Her purpose: to marry Terry.
    Her motive? Ah, now, that’s a different matter! Maybe she wants to marry him because she loves him. Or maybe it’s becausehe makes good money, or because he’s a neat dancer, or because she wants a child, or because she’s pregnant, or because she’s now thirty-one and her mother keeps nagging her about spinsterhood, or because she fears people will find out she’s a closet lesbian, or because she’s developed a warped notion that the insignificant bump on her nose (hereditary with her dead father’s people, her mother tells her) makes her unattractive to acceptable men. (Actually, they’re not even aware of it.) Thing is, no one, not even Pam, will ever really know her motives. Not for sure.
    The point to all this is that purpose is external-oriented, action-oriented, “to do”-oriented. It’s born of direction and drive and attitude.
    Motive, in contrast, is an internal, private world, rationalization kind of thing.
    For you as a writer, the key issue is to be sure that any major character has a goal, a purpose, no matter how far out in left field it may be, so long as it seems logical to Character at the time. After which, you reach inside Character’s head and select an appropriate excuse for her having it (motive, right?) and endow her with properly compelling pressures that force her to