Why do characters, or people in general for that matter, do what they do?  Simple enough question right?  Tough to answer.

I've been to dozens of workshops on motivation, and have gone to Debra Dixon's presentation on GMC twice now.  I know that my stories are primarily plot-driven.  That's the easy part for me, even the editors who reject my manuscripts say so.  But what makes a good book, what editors and readers want, are character- driven books.  I've tried to learn to let my characters lead versus the events.  Not an easy shift. 

Until I started writing non-fiction, I never quite understood motivation.  I knew it was there, and yes, I could comprehend its purpose.  What no one ever told me is that just like there are two types of conflict (internal and external) there are two types of motivation.  For lack of an easier term, let's call them conscious and subconscious.

Let me illustrate.

I've started working on a family history biography.  My main character is my great-great uncle, Sam Strong.  One of Cripple Creek, Colorado's notorious millionaires, he died at the age of 37 in a saloon from a gunshot blast.  He left a widow and two children behind.  He also left behind an ex-wife and a string of former lovers, not to mention a $2 million fortune.

Sam has intrigued me since I was a child.  Most of the family comments about him have been pretty derogatory.  My great-grandfather hated him and we all grew up knowing him as "that damn Sam."  Most of the stories I heard about him were stories of ladies he wined and dined, and how those ladies sued him for breach of promise--and won--when he married 18-year-old Regina Neville in 1900.  (He was 36 at the time.)

What does this have to do with character motivation?  Let's ask some questions, just as we would a fictional character.

Why would a man from a successful family in Ohio abandon everything to go to Colorado and dig where no one else ever thought to dig for gold?  Why did he flaunt his money?  Why wasn't he more careful that night at the Newport Saloon when he knew he had a wife and family waiting for him?

The first answer that comes to mind is greed.  Good, old-fashioned, familiar greed.  It works.  It's probably something he'd even admit to.  The argument that precipitated his death was over gambling.  Yep, that was it, greed.  I had my answers.  The family accepted those answers.  Maybe some of my readers would accept those answers, too, especially with the events laid out in glorious detail like I like to write.  Imagine the smoke-filled bar, the clacking sound of the roulette wheel, the laughter in the background.  I can see Sam's angry stare and Grand Crumley's reddened face as Sam threatens him.  The sound of Crumley's shotgun is deafening still.  It's clear to me what happened and those descriptions are already on paper.  I love that scene.

One scene does not make a book.  Sigh.  Back to my research.

I started to dig back into Sam's past.  The family got interested and asked me to write the rest of his life story.  They'd even pay me--novel concept there.  Now, the pressure was really on.

There are few details of Sam's life I don't know.  (Remember, I'm a plot-driven writer.)  Only two years of his entire 37 years of life are incomplete on my time line.  I know everything he did, where he did it and with whom.  This should be a great book, right?

I wish.  It read like a travel log.  Yawn.

Frustration as MY motivation, I headed to the library.  Surely someone had written a book like this before.  I brought home twenty plus books.  My husband and kids thought I was nuts.  Out of that stack, only one book came close to my idea.  I read that first--and last--and twice in between.  Even my critique group got to see it.  "This is what I want to write," I said, though I didn't really know what THIS was.

The book, Empire on the Platte by Richard Crabb tells the story of Isam Prentice Olive, a cattleman from Texas who moved to Nebraska.  He was one of Sam's contemporaries in the late 1800s.  A pretty decent guy--who murdered a man for killing his brother.  He made nearly as many headlines in Nebraska as Sam did in Colorado.

The author told every detail of Olive's life from the time he was born until he died.  There's a spark in this book that brought Olive to life.  A spark I couldn't pin down for Sam.

Why is it that great ideas only come in the middle of the night following sleep deprivation?  There, next to an open copy of Empire, next to Sam's pictures--staring me in the face--was Sam's mother's death certificate dated January 12, 1874.  The day after Sam's tenth birthday.  My son was ten at the time and my heart was touched for the little boy.  Suddenly, everything fell into place.  The story started writing itself.

I'd found Sam's unconscious motivation.  Something my book lacked, something my fiction characters lack.  Yes, greed drove him to seek out riches, but what drove him to be greedy was a need for acceptance.  What made him seek out so many women, to collect them just as he did gold nuggets?  That need for acceptance, a need for the love he lost at such an important time in his life.

Click, click, click, the wheels turned in my head.  I grabbed the book, Empire and on page 63, found it.  The subconscious motivation.  "In these months when depression and desperation often closed in on him completely, Olive formed many of the attitudes that would govern his actions all the rest of his life...the only way, he concluded, to keep from being constantly victimized was never to trust anyone completely."  And on page 66 the future was set.  "It was natural that his younger brother would notice the six-shooters; he always had one of them within reach."

Motivation is what makes a book character-driven.  We know the conscious motivation but in order to give a character depth, take that motivation and say, "Okay, then what event or trigger caused that motivation?"  Something your character's probably totally unaware of in that aspect.  See what you come up with.  I'll bet you find a stronger character and story.  Something editors and readers are looking for.