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):
Overcoming Addiction
Forms This Might Take: Addiction can be tricky to define because it’s similar in some ways to other kinds of compulsion disorders. For the purpose of this entry, behavioral addiction is defined as the overuse of a substance or practice that increases over time, continues despite negative consequences, and is incredibly difficult for …
Human Need Driving the Goal (Inner Motivation): Esteem and Recognition, Safety and Security
How the Character May Prepare for This Goal:
- Taking a serious look at the addiction (tracking usage and financial expenditures, examining its negative effects in various areas of life, etc.)
- The character purging their home of the substances or items that make using easy or more tempting
- Setting goals and coming up with a game plan
- Exploring treatment options
- Finding others who have been successful and talking to them…
Possible Sacrifices or Costs Associated With This Goal:
- Experiencing grief over the loss of the activity or substance
- Losing long-term friends or loved ones who don’t support the character’s sobriety
- Financial difficulties from the cost of treatment…
Roadblocks Which Could Prevent This Goal from Being Achieved:
- Stressors and triggers that make success difficult
- Pressure from other addicts who don’t want the character to change
- Past wounds and negative emotions that become more pronounced once the character stops medicating
- Having no support system; having to go it alone
- The addiction being inadvertently replaced with another one…
Talents & Skills That Will Help the Character Achieve This Goal: Empathy, Multitasking, Reading People, …
Possible Fallout For the Protagonist if This Goal Is Not Met:
- Broken relationships
- Loved ones following in the character’s footsteps and being led astray
- Long-term health issues
- Depression and other mental health conditions
- Suicidal thoughts and attempts
- The character harming themselves or others while under the influence…
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!
Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.
You only have one entry under “Human Need Driving the Goal” but when I look at “Roadblocks Which Could Prevent This Goal from Being Achieved” I see many reasons why a person might get caught up in the first place.
My leading lady (the protagonist’s love interest with an important character arc of her own) is a 14 year old freshman in high school who through her brother and boyfriend ends up socializing with much older “kids.” I need her to follow a story-long journey to get to the climax, which involves getting introduced to and then falling prey to alcohol and sex. I can check off about half of your “Roadblocks” that I’ve used to get her into trouble as well as keeping her from escaping.
I’m nearly finished with a multi-chapter story arc that has her depressed after being disrespected by her mother which causes her to progress from social drinks to coming home drunk and getting grounded; the bickering with her boyfriend; and other things that set the precedent for her “medicating” herself with drink. Of course, the triggers will only get worse later on and she’ll still have unrealistic expectations and a lack of a support system.
Hi, Joe. What we’ve discovered while studying story structure is that most times, the outer story goal (outer motivation) is a representation of something that’s missing internally. This inner motivation is almost always tied to a basic human need that the character is lacking. One of the reasons why we chose to do a thesaurus was to explore that connection between the outer and inner motivations. Depending on the character and his/her circumstances, there can be more than one need for some motivations. Pursuing education, for example. For one character, the missing need driving this motivation could be safety and security; due to life circumstances, she’s always lived on the edge of poverty and has never been able to do much about it. But she has an opportunity to pursue a degree or skill that will help her get a better job and provide an elevated level of safety for her family. So safety and security is the need driving this goal for her. But for someone else, it could be self-actualization that’s missing. They’ve always wanted to pursue higher education, but for various reasons they’ve never been able to. Doing so now, the character is fulfilling the need that’s been missing to better himself, to learn and grow in knowledge. While each goal could have more than one motivation, only one of those needs is going to be driving each character. Which is why we only include one inner motivation for each outer motivation in this thesaurus.
The roadblocks for a given goal will be largely the same regardless of which need is driving it, so that’s why we’ve got a lot of different options under that field.
Best of luck with your story. Sounds like you’re making good headway.
Thanks, and I totally appreciate the effort you’ve put into this. I’ve bookmarked it and will be scouring over the site.
The point I was trying to make is that with my character I’m looking for what drives her into the bad habits to begin with. While the protagonist is on a positive character arc, hers is negative.
Teens go through lots of drama and many experiment with alcohol and sex. My goal is to realistically depict how my character slides from what might be casual into destructive behavior, where she’s using these to medicate herself.
I’ve picked a personality type for her where she is happy if she thinks she’s pleasing him. She then becomes self conscious and insecure. If he’s looking at another girl or otherwise not responding as she expects she’ll blame herself first. As time goes on she drinks more.