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Character Motivation Thesaurus: Mending a Broken Relationship

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What does your character want? This is an important question to answer because it determines what your protagonist hopes to achieve by the story’s end. If the goal, or outer motivation, is written well, readers will identify fairly quickly what the overall story goal’s going to be and they’ll know what to root for. But how do you know what outer motivation to choose?

If you read enough books, you’ll see the same goals being used for different characters in new scenarios. This thesaurus explores common outer motivations so you can see your options and what those goals might look like on a deeper level.

Goal (Outer Motivation): 
Mending a Broken Relationship

Forms This Might Take: Relationships founder for many reasons, leaving our characters in a position of trying to put them back together. Your character might find themselves needing to mend a less-than-satisfactory relationship with

  • an estranged sibling
  • a caregiver whose parenting left something to be desired, leading to distance in the relationship
  • children they don’t know as well as they want to (due to a long-term absence, divorce, a drug problem, etc.)
  • a childhood friend they grew apart from after an argument…

Human Need Driving the Goal (Inner Motivation): Love and Belonging

How the Character May Prepare for This Goal: 

  • Setting up a meeting with the person
  • Calling them on the phone
  • Moving nearer to that person
  • Showing the person the character’s determination by giving up something important that once stood in the way of the relationship (a job, a hobby, another relationship, etc.)
  • Reaching out to them on social media…

Possible Sacrifices or Costs Associated With This Goal: 

  • Pride taking a hit when the character truly looks at the part they played in the broken relationship
  • Moving closer to the estranged person and leaving their job or friends behind
  • Other relationships becoming strained if the people don’t understand why the character is reaching out to this person (if the estranged relationship is due to past abuse, for instance)…

Roadblocks Which Could Prevent This Goal from Being Achieved: 

  • People in the person’s life who don’t want to see them hurt again
  • People in the character’s life who don’t want to see them hurt again
  • Selfishness
  • Falling into old habits that sabotage the new relationship
  • The other person’s fear, resentment, or anger…

Talents & Skills That Will Help the Character Achieve This Goal: Being a good listener, Empathy, Reading people…

Possible Fallout For the Protagonist if This Goal Is Not Met:

  • Unfulfilled relationships
  • The character doubting their ability to be a good parent/spouse/sibling/etc.
  • Giving up and regressing into destructive habits…

Clichés to Avoid: The big city girl/boy returning to their small home town to make amends with someone..

We hope you’ve found this sample useful. To access the complete entry and our full range of thesauruses, head over to One Stop for Writers.

What does your character want, and how far will they go to achieve it?

On the surface, the protagonist’s goal seems to be the most important, but the inner motivation driving your character toward this goal (despite pain, suffering, fear, setbacks, and sacrifice) is what really draws readers in. Understanding the four cornerstones of character arc and how they frame a story is paramount for today’s writers. To help with this, we have integrated this Character Motivation Thesaurus into our online library at One Stop For Writers.

Each entry has been enhanced to provide even more information about your character’s motivation and is cross-referenced with our other thesauruses for easy searchability. We’ve also included a must-see tutorial on Character Motivation.

Interested in seeing these expanded entries? Head on over and take advantage of our FREE TRIAL!

Reader Interactions

Comments

  3. Bill Buchanan says

    You might consider including an emotionally charged, compelling class of setting (Secret or Top Secret) in your Urban/Rural Setting thesaurus. It may have been overlooked, or excluded because it’s specialized and of limited appeal. These settings are compelling because they are secret and carry enormous emotional burden and responsibility for anyone trapped there. When things go wrong, it’s about fear. This top secret world is a special world, foreign to many, difficult to understand, explain, or believe. These secret settings are important because without secure conference rooms approved for classified meetings, top secret development facilities and test labs, aircraft hangars, antenna farms, and missile test ranges used by black development programs, many stories–mine included–would not ring true.
    It’s the feelings these secret places convey that’s important in story. Isolation, anxiety, loneliness, and fear dominate secret territory. Emotionally, this secret environment is loaded.
    BTW: Please don’t read my suggestion above as critical of your work in any way. Your Emotion, Trait, and Setting eBooks are awesome. I use them every writing day.

    • BECCA PUGLISI says

      Thanks for this suggestion, Bill. We had such a huge variety of settings to choose from that we ended up having to cut a bunch (like your ideas) that were more genre-specific. We’ve toyed with the idea of one day adding more of these entries to the Setting Thesaurus at One Stop For Writers, so we really appreciate your input. And I’m so glad you’re finding our thesauruses to be useful!

  4. Mona AlvaradoFrazier says

    This entry came right on time! I’m currently revising my WIP and your thesaurus entry is handy for me to use to review my draft and ask ‘Did I hit most of these points or not?’
    Thanks again for such great resources.

  5. Robin E. Mason says

    I got another one for your list, a grown child who is holding a grudge against the parent(s) for taking action he or she disagrees with. ask me how I know this one…