Re-visiting inner needs, external motivation and a bunch of subconscious stuff

It’s been a long time since I revisited some of my older blog posts, although I’ve been thinking of re-doing the stuff on emotional structure. I still remember being all dead-serious with my thirty buck Post-it easel. My first and to date only in-person workshop. They’d come to hear easy tips for Nano and got some kind of weird garble--I was way too inexperienced, trying to be all academic.

But, I got a question, and I love questions...

In one of your blog posts you said something about making the character's external goal a symbol of their inner motivation (inner need) In the example you posted, you had a boy fighting for a cat (his external goal) because to him this cat represented the feeling of self-worth he got from his grandmother (who had a cat.)

…and I love this post. One of my favorites.

I love the idea of linking the characters external goal and inner need, and using that need to drive not just the external goal, but all the character's decisions actions. But in some romance novels the character's external goal seems to take them right away from fulfilling their inner need eg the hero's unconscious inner need is for a close loving family, but his external goal is to take a job travelling from place to place and avoiding all emotional entanglements.
I can't work out what is driving the character in a case like this. (apart from fear ) The character's core need is a loving family . (He won't admit it and doesn't even realise it, but this is the only thing that will make him truly happy) but he's acting as if his need is escape.

This is actually two questions, one that deals with layering the transformational arc and another that deals with core events.

What do we know about this guy? (let's call him John)

*John needs a loving family to make him happy.
*But what John really wants and is actively pursuing is a wandering-man kind of job where he can keep all his emotional entanglements shallow.

Lots of people know what’ll make them happy so why does John have this disconnect?

Depending on the sub-genre, and the kind of person John is, it can be all kinds of things so...let’s say this is a straight-up contemporary and give him some background. John grew up with a loving, wonderful family. His mom and dad finally took off last year RVing around the country. He has a brother named Cal, a great sister-in-law and a niece who just turned eight. He's well adjusted, stable and ten years into a job at the hospital where he’s an anesthesiologist--rock-solid, right up until the day he decides to go winter camping with his brother and sister-in-law.

Because of a faulty GPS they end up in a ditch. Cal and his wife die in screaming agony while their little girl and John are trapped—unable to do anything but watch. By the time they’re found, the kid is all but catatonic. John’s parents can’t cope with Cal’s death, and there’s this girl—once the apple of their eye—who just sits there.

John is carrying huge survivor’s guilt—not helped by the fact his mom blames him for Cal’s death. If you’d been the one driving, if you’d pointed out the road, if you’d been able to tear free and get everyone out of the car…Never mind he was trapped in the wreckage.

Flash forward eight months. His mom and dad put the kid in a nursing home, leave for Arizona, and John has issues. His parents can’t stand the sight of him, he’s in serious emotional pain and he’s got crippling guilt. If there’s one thing he knows, it’s that he should have died instead of Cal.

…in some romance novels the character's external goal seems to take them right away from fulfilling their inner need eg the hero's unconscious inner need is for a close loving family, but his external goal is to take a job travelling from place to place and avoiding all emotional entanglements.

John “wants” to run, can you doubt it? His parents hate him, his niece is a visible reminder of his failure, his beloved brother is gone—and it’s all his fault. He’s in pain. And when people are hurting, they try to avoid the source of that pain—which in John’s case is his family.

I can't work out what is driving the character in a case like this. (apart from fear ) The character's core need is a loving family . (He won't admit it and doesn't even realise it, but this is the only thing that will make him truly happy) but he's acting as if his need is escape.

He’s afraid to love, because love got him into this mess. No one can hurt you like a loved one. John loved his brother, but Cal died, he loved his mom and she rejected him. His niece is catatonic and with every passing day, John slips deeper into a downward spiral.

He doesn’t “want” a family, what he really wants is to get the hell out of Dodge.

People are enormously complex and have lots of motivations, many of which go back to a trigger or core event. If Cal hadn’t died, there would be no story—if John’s mom hadn’t done an Ordinary People on him, John wouldn’t be so messed up.

Deep down, John needs someone—a family or just the heroine—to accept him and give him the space to heal. It wasn’t his fault, but when the people who say they love you turn their backs on you, you don’t think logically. Right now John equates love with betrayal. He’s afraid of opening himself up to love because he’s in pain, angry at being betrayed by his parents, angry at himself for not being able to help his brother. Angry because he knows there was nothing he could do and guilty because deep down he knows he should have been able to do something. He’s not just running from the situation, he’s running from himself.

By the end of the story he'll realise what he needs to make him happy, but in planning my story do I make him motivated by escape -- or by family (his true need) ? Or maybe I should have him driven by escape until the midpoint, but then he begins to veer towards his true need (a loving family. )

It’s not that easy, and that’s the trouble with character-driven stories. They’re hard to plot because motivation isn’t always linear. John has issues only he can take care of. So it’s probably better to say his motivations are in a process of push and pull.

Internal conflict.

Although the trouble with internal conflict is that it’s often subconscious. The John Cal's death has turned him into versus the John who can accept love and become the person he was meant to be.

Which means this…

…the idea of linking the characters external goal and inner need, and using that need to drive not just the external goal, but all the character's decisions actions.

...needs to be more complex.

The kid and his cat are a fairly simple way to link external goal and inner needs, because the kid has a single motivation and there are only two layers. The kid’s external goal—getting a cat, and his inner need—the self-worth represented by the cat.

Just like the kid, John’s external goal and inner need are in sync. He wants to get away because he wants to stop the pain. Everything he does flows out of that. But he also has stuff going on that he doesn’t know about—a subconscious need for love and family complicated by the fallout of his issues, which is cool because you want your people to be multi-dimensional but the trouble is—how to show it?

By giving him a goal that represents his subconscious need.

Think one layer down. Not something that represents his inner need—which is to stop the pain, but his subconscious need, which is for love and family.

In short, he needs his niece to get better.

Remember her? In a coma, totally unresponsive—locked away by the people who should have loved her? John loves her too, and visits every week. He can’t do anything for her—but he desperately “wants” her to get better.

She’s the symbol of everything he lost and everything he can gain. Her recovery is a visible manifestation of his transformational arc. And that’s what this question was all about—how to show John’s arc.

John was never motivated to actively seek a loving family, because through the entire book his motivation was always to get away. It’s through the process of coming to know and care for that family (or heroine) that he changes enough to start the healing process, accept and return love--and at that point, the end of the book, his motivation finally changes to actively pursuing his subconscious need because it's no longer subconscious.