Pinned
basically I think that if your protagonist doesn’t want to fuck someone so bad it makes them look stupid, then there probably isn’t enough energy in your story. “Fuck someone” isn’t literal btw—they can want to uncover the secrets of their parent’s death, they can want to prove their worth, they can want a donut from one particular bakery—it can be anything so long as they want it so bad that they’ll make decisions that make any sane person go “are you a moron??”, with little to no forethought, or even tons of forethought and this is still the option they chose. Because they want to fuck that thing so bad.
wait isn’t that just giving your characters a motivation???
- You’d be surprised at how many people fail to give their characters motivation, and so write a story that’s less good than it could be.
- It’s surprisingly easy to come up with an incredibly cool plot and characters without giving the characters enough motivation to make it actually compelling enough to read or even write. If you have a cool af idea that you somehow just can’t bring yourself to write, ask yourself what the main character wants, and how is that driving their decisions?
- They need to want it so bad that it makes them look stupid. They need to impulse-buy a half-broken spaceship by mortgaging radioactive land, because they’re just that desperate to prove themselves more than a discarded scrap of a far greater history. They need to want their home and their people safe so much that they’ll risk their own soul to march across hundreds of miles of unknown and terrible danger to throw a cursed ring into a volcano. They need to love someone so much, and need them to know it, that they’ll blurt it out in the middle of a press conference or royal ball, or surrounded by enemies with a garrote at their throat or about to be frozen in carbonite or in the middle of a storm-tossed sea battle between pirates, British Navy, and the undead—or, they need to love someone so much that they’ll swear fealty to an evil emperor and kill a bunch of friends and children for the power to save them. They need to be so balls-to-the-wall insane in at least one regard that the plot isn’t just happening to them, they are in some way causing the plot.
- Also keep in mind! When it comes to character development, “WANT” is NOT the same as “NEED”! Sometimes a character knows what’s good for them, what will truly often make them happy, but more often they don’t. They want the acclaim and adoration of the crowds, but really they need the recognition, acceptance or love of one particular person—and maybe that person is their own self. They want to avenge the loss of their loved one, but really they need to accept the loss and move on. A refusal to accept what they need is usually going to get in the way of what they want—and sometimes they figure it out just in time to go forward and climactically achieve their goal, or maybe they double down on their character flaws in a classic display of Greek tragedy!
"Fuck someone” isn’t literal btw
As an Aro-Ace who was very uncomfortable with your post until this point: THANK YOU!
Also, one caveat: there is one rare type of story where the protagonist cannot become stupid over what they're after. This is the detective story where their character is in many ways a placeholder for the audience to try to solve the puzzle (as opposed to more thrilery types of detective story) and the detective's internal motivations are basically irrelevant because they are in many ways a framing device.
Ironically, ACD Sherlock Holmes, who most people would immediatley think of for this sort of always detached detective, does not always fit this caveat protag type. He can and has done stupid.
This is because a lot of detective stories have the detective as a sort of framing device, examining the motives of everyone else in the story. The absence of the main character's fuck-stupid-drive is more than compensated for in terms of everyone else having an outsized one.
Same rule also applies to things like video game stories where the protagonist is more of a proxy character & lens for the player to examine the world, while the rest of the cast has motivation to spare. Basically, you can have a protagonist who is relatively normal about things if you make up for it by having everyone else pick up the slack (and then some).
Also you don't need to start out with your protagonist's motivation being at 11, you can start a bit sooner and then use whatever event dials it up and breaks off the knob as your opening climax. For instance, at the start of Star Wars, Luke's motivation to go travel and rescue Leia is pretty strong but it's not strong enough to override his loyalty to his aunt and uncle. It's only when they are dramatically killed that his drive becomes powerful enough for him to follow some old guy he barely knows to booking a shady smuggler's ship off-planet and go try and punch an interstellar empire in the nuts.
