I’m taking a murder mystery class right now (will post about key things I learned when it’s done in a few weeks!) and the one place that me and my classmates tend to get stuck on or fall short of is motive.
Motive can be tricky because in order for the story to story the characters need to make mistakes and choose interesting and dramatic things, which means that their motive needs to be strong enough to justify those choices.
For a motive to be strong, it needs to relate to your readers on a deep level. We just won’t believe someone’s motive if we’ve never felt what they have before (even if what they’re feeling is being taken to the extreme). For this reason, you want to base your motives in instinctual human desires such as:
- Acceptance—to feel loved, appreciated, and like you belong
- Curiosity—to learn, explore, understand
- Family/Community—to lean on others and have them lean on you, to care for others
- Honor—to be loyal to your values, group, or traditions
- Idealism—to improve the world or affect change
- Independence/agency—to be able to choose for yourself, freedom, autonomy, direction
- Order/tranquility—to have stability, predictability, organization, the ability to rest, security
- Power—to influence or lead others, to protect, to mentor
- Intimacy/love—emotional and/or physical intimacy
- Status—to be respected, recognized, and/or admired, to compete and win
- Vengeance—to defend yourself or loved ones, to stand up for your beliefs
- Survival—to live, to eat, to continue moving
While I might not relate to a character who kills out of jealousy, I can relate to their need to feel appreciated (acceptance), or recognized (status), or special to one person (intimacy), or even to right a wrong (idealism). That’s how I’d follow along with a character who makes decisions I would not make, but for reasons that I can relate to.
But note--desires are the jumping off point. Their reasons should be grounded in their backstory and specific to them--they need to feel appreciated because they have 5 siblings and their accomplishments have always gone unnoticed, for example.
The other thing that can kill a motive is if the action or solution the character comes up with gets too extreme, too fast. If there are solutions that are an easier step, we’re going to wonder why we aren’t taking that step instead of the more extreme decision we did take. There’re two steps to fix this:
1. Show your character considering and/or trying and failing those easier steps
In an example from my class, one of my classmates had the wife killing her husband over a trip he wanted them to go on, because if they left, she wouldn’t get to submit and win the town fair for the 15th year in a row. You can convince me that’s important to the wife, but we were all stuck with the same questions: well why doesn’t she just stay home while he goes on the trip? Why doesn’t she talk to him about it?
These easier solutions are going to make the motive for murder (to stay home and win the fair) fall flat. So, to build up to the murder, we need to see the wife trying just about everything under the sun: she asks to stay home, he says absolutely not! She talks to him about how important the fair is to her, he laughs her off. She pretends to be sick so she can’t go, he’s going to make her go anyway.
I want to see every action she takes peel back another possibility, forcing her to become more and more desperate, to consider worse and worse things, until she’s at the end of her rope and the only way she can stay home is to kill her husband. In this case, I would say her motivation isn’t even to win the fair, but it’s to have agency over herself. Which leads right into point 2…
2. There are deeper forces at work here
Using our example, the fact that those early possibilities didn’t succeed is because the husband is bullying and controlling his wife—he doesn’t take her interests or desires seriously, and is instead thinking about himself and what he wants. Adding layers to your motives are going to make them more believable.
A rational person would not kill another person over someone cheating on them. When we start to go through the obvious next steps, A talks to B about it—well, B just keeps denying, so then A follows B from work and confronts them with C, that doesn’t stop it either, so then A breaks up with B… and that ends it, you can see how just the motive of being accepted might not hold up. But if we layer motives, if we put to play a deeper force—Character A has a flawed worldview surrounding B and they believe it’s their job to control or “protect” B (power)—then we can justify more extreme actions.
For extreme/morally reprehensible actions like murder, you may need to use both techniques to convince us that this decision was believable and justified.
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