Character Motivation Entry: Escaping Invaders

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): Escaping Invaders

Forms This Might Take:

• A foreign army seeking to claim territory where the character lives
• An alien invasion
• A group of people or animals being controlled in some way (via a drug, implant, mind control, a virus, etc.) who pose a immediate threat…

Human Need Driving the Goal (Inner Motivation): Safety and Security

How the Character May Prepare for This Goal: 

• Scouting escape routes
• Monitoring the enemy’s movements and patterns to determine the best opportunity to escape
• Arranging for transport (paying, stealing, or acquiring what’s needed)
• Capturing and questioning an invader to obtain valuable information
• Gathering survival gear and medical supplies…

Possible Sacrifices or Costs Associated With This Goal: 

• Being injured
• A family member being captured during the escape
• Leaving behind friends, property, a job, etc.
• Having to leave a loved one behind because they’ve been captured and are beyond rescue, they refuse to leave, etc.)
• The character having to live with the knowledge of what they did to survive (killing people, sacrificing others to live, failing to help others out of self-preservation, etc.)…

Roadblocks Which Could Prevent This Goal from Being Achieved: 

• The character’s source of transportation being destroyed
• Experiencing danger while trying to escape (a cave-in within a tunnel network, a bridge collapse, a train derailment, a capsized boat, etc.)
• The character finding a weakness and planning to exploit it, but it being fortified before an escape can be attempted…

Talents & Skills That Will Help the Character Achieve This Goal: A Knack for Languages, A Way with Animals, Archery, Astral Projection, Basic First Aid, Good Listening Skills, …

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

• Losing their home, property, and assets
• Being captured and killed
• Enslavement…

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!