Matthew Limpede, the editor helping me structure my novel, talks a lot about character motivation. He pushes me to think about who the character is as a person— what the character is feeling—and why the character is doing what he/she is doing.

I seem to resist this aspect of novel writing. Instead, I want to write only dialogue and action and keep things light and cheery and funny. But if my readers are going to connect with my characters, I need to delve into the reasons my characters say and do certain things.

For instance, I’m currently writing the middle section of my novel, and the main character, Teddy, and a woman named Lucinda have just arrived at a Greyhound Bus station in a gritty section of Nashville, Tennessee.

Teddy needs to go to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, and I want Lucinda to go with him. But why would Lucinda, a thirty-year old woman, want to go to a bar with a thirteen-year old boy she’d met only the day before?

By having done a character sketch on Lucinda, I know she’s an orphan, and she’s now standing at a bus station with a boy whom she thinks is also an orphan. But what next?

I went searching for some resources to help.

I thought this post was helpful.

I could use the first sheet on the left to find some reasons. In fact, for Lucinda in this scene, I’d pick loyalty, self-preservation, past trauma, and repaying a debt as motivations.

And the new-age part of myself loved this interesting post using Enneagrams as a way to find character motivation.

Here’s what I’ve come up with for now…Lucinda would like to ditch Teddy, but something tugs on her to stay. She can’t bring herself to leave a kid with no money wandering the streets of Nashville, because it brings up abandonment issues she felt every time she left one foster family to go to yet another one.

I shall see if the scene stays like that!