Character motto?

I was listening to some of the Tropical Storm Isaac coverage, and they said the convention in Tampa was postponed a day: "Better safe than sorry!" they said. And I thought about my dh's grandmother, whose motto, he said, was "You can never be too careful."

These "character mottoes" tell something about the person-- in this case, that safety is of paramount concern, but what's under that-- a persistent pessimism that you can't trust fate, that you have to be careful?

How about let's come up with mottoes for our own characters? Here's an article (scroll down) by Susan Gable which lists some of her characters' mottoes:

• The glass is always half-full.
• Do unto others before they do unto you. (Imagine how different that person would be than the one who believed the "right way"-- Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.)
• Life’s short; eat dessert first.
• Trust no one.
• If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.
• Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,

 So what about your characters?  If they were to give a life philosophy, or a motto by which they live (and they were honest, which of course we can't assume), what would the motto be? To make this fun, let's use a proverb or slogan in common usage that everyone will recognize.

Examples, and as you read them, imagine what actions, motivations, and conflicts this character would have:

Grab all the gusto you can in life.
Love is all you need.
Family first.
Women and children first.
It takes a village.
Where's the beef?
Curiosity killed the cat.
A secret shared is a secret revealed.
 A man's home is his castle.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
A prophet is not recognized in his own land.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
A rolling stone gathers no moss.
Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Don't burn your bridges behind you.
Half a loaf is better than no bread at all.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
Seeing is believing.

What are your characters' mottoes? And what do they mean? How does that internal motto manifest in action?

For example, I have a character who thinks,  "You can never be too careful." That doesn't mean she's a stick-in-the-mud. She's actually had an exciting life. But at every stage, she is very cautious. She's always trying to control the situation by taking great care. She never acts spontaneously or thoughtlessly. So when someone from her past appears and is going to tell her secrets, she acts to shut him up. She first diverts her lover-to-be by making him a lover-in-fact. Then she bribes the man from the past to leave. Everything in her life is done with care and thought... because otherwise, the dire forces will overwhelm her.

Her lover, however, is a rational man who believes that everything can be figured out: "It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness." Whenever there's a mystery or a secret, he wants to find out the truth. For him, "knowledge is power." "The truth shall set you free." So of course he's drawn to the woman who keeps so much of herself secret. But he does this by "lighting a candle" rather than, say, trying to force her to be open with him. He doesn't want her to -tell- him. He wants to figure it out. So he's trying to gather clues (as well as solve the murder of the man from her past).

Your turn! What's your character's motto, and how does that manifest in his/her actions?

Alicia

Meaningless motivations

It occasionally would happen that we would read a synopsis or pitch with sentences like this:

Martha wants a new career because life as a dental technician isn't all she'd hoped it would be.

Goal: new career
Motivation: Current career is unsatisfying.

So far, so good. But then the problem would come in when this entire goal and motivation failed to translate into action. Not once in the course of the story would Martha do anything to get a new job. Not one action would be taken in furtherance of that goal. She might whine a lot about her current job, but other than annoying the other characters (and probably the reader), her career status would have no bearing on the development of the plot.

In romance, this can appear as a phantom romantic conflict.

Martha finds Pete sexy, but his lifestyle is unstable and even wild.

When I see sentences like this in a synopsis, I immediately start checking for events that prove this statement. Events. Things that happen in real story time. If Pete's an accountant who never misses a day of work and turns in at exactly 10:35 p.m. each night, then the reader might be wondering if Martha is talking about a different Pete. But if he rappels naked down her high-rise office building to get her attention, well, now we might be getting a little wild.

Sometimes, these meaningless motivations are explained with backstory.

Martha resists Pete because he served two years in the Navy straight out of high school and she protested the war in 2002.

Okay, but what does that have to do with the plot? If these other things happened ten or more years before the present day, does it matter now? HOW does it matter now? What EVENTS make this long-ago disparity relevant now, in the current plot?

All of which is to say -- the motivations have to become activated somehow in the real-time plot. Otherwise, they're meaningless.

Theresa

Abstract from concrete

Was watching the waves collide and crash today. (Yes, at beach. Lovely.) And I remembered how mathematicians and physicists extrapolated all sorts of complex stuff from ocean waves. They looked at the concrete, real, or natural, and came up with something abstract.

That made me think about-- yes, even on a beach, I am thinking about things to blog :)-- how in fiction, the abstract also grows out of the real.  I'm thinking of motivation and conflict here.  We start with something concrete and external, and then as the story goes on and we get to know the character, the abstract is revealed. But the external/concrete is a clue to the internal/abstract.

This is one thing, I think, that distinguishes popular fiction-- the external plot is a way to manifest the internal problem. Example-- Well, let's say I'm thinking of this protagonist and I know that his major internal motivation is a fear of failure.  That's abstract-- it's real in that it exists, but it's not obvious and probably not something he would be able to articulate.  "I have an outsized fear of failure:" no, he probably wouldn't say that.

But we can show something real like the ocean wave, crashing into his life and making him act. So maybe he's got some big job promotion coming up, and he suddenly quits the job so he never gets promoted. The question the reader will have is "why? Why quit just when you're about to achieve so much?" The answer is more abstract and will be revealed later-- he is afraid (if only subconsciously) that the promotion will launch him into a job he can't do, and will fail at. His act of quitting was an early, concrete representation of his fear of failure.

So... try that. Real/concrete/external early. Manifests the  internal/abstract which is revealed later.
Alicia

Exploiting Orphans

Jenny and I got into a discussion once about how so many historical novels use "helping orphans" as a shorthand technique to supposedly make a jerky hero sympathetic. I always had a mental image of rakish looking hunks lining up outside an orphanage door,  checkbooks in hand. Anyway, I don't think that works!  I think that readers sympathize with interesting character confronted with interesting conflicts.  That is, "doing nice things to poor benighted orphans" isn't necessarily going to make him sympathetic. (And why is sympathy the reaction we want anyway? I do think "reader involvement" might more important, and allows for characters who are more or less than sympathetic.)

What I think I’m discovering is that character development sort of depends on these particular circumstances (the opening situation and then the plot events) causing a change in his behavior. If your hero already supports a dozen orphans because he's just such a doggone good guy, then his taking care of this new orphan is not only effortless (he’s got the whole system set up already), but also, in a way, nothing special. He always does that. All you’ll end up doing is showing that he’s a wonderful, charitable guy—and always has been.

Consider what would happen if he has no history of supporting orphans, and this kid shows up, claiming to be the orphan of the hero's former girlfriend. And... worst possible time... he's about to marry the beautiful and moralistic daughter of his wealthy boss, and she's righteous and jealous and boss is the Old Testament type. So the arrival of this orphan kid is a catastrophe, a conflict, not just the latest in a long line of orphans Hero has helped, but a problem he doesn’t know how to solve, but has to solve anyway. In other words, dealing with this orphan makes him grow, in compassion or empathy or generosity—doesn’t just display those virtues for all to see.

And if he’s embarrassed and mad at himself for doing the right thing, If he’s not sure it’s the right thing, and if doing it gets him into trouble, all the better.

What do you think? Maybe I’m misreading the attitude of the reading public, but I think a bit of curmudgeonly spirit, when coupled with eventually good actions, really does increase the sympathy factor.

The fault, dear Brutus... personal issues manifest as writing issues

I did a guest blog at Denny's place, and Carlene asked if we ever manage to learn enough from our mistakes in drafting so that we don't keep making them in subsequent books. She identified as an example POV issues that might keep recurring in an author's first drafts. So I took this as an opportunity to go off on the dark confluence of deep psychological issues and writing issues:

I suspect there are two kinds of "opportunities for revision." The first we'll learn our way out of as we get more experienced. Like I've been working a lot on scene endings, and I think I've learned (forever maybe!) to end a scene on conflict and never (except at the end of the book, of course) on resolution, so that the story (and reader) are always propelled into the next scene.

But there are the other issues which are more intrinsically bound to who we are and what we are and what issues matter to us in life and art. And those, I think, we won't learn our way out of in our fiction until we learn our way out of them in life. We keep "making the same mistake" or encountering the same issue because we're subconsciously seeking to revisit it, to worry it, to debate it.

For example, I'm revising much of my backlist preparatory to offering it on Kindle and Smashwords. I'm editing a lot, partly because of course I want the stories to be the best they can be, but also because I want to make enough change that I can justify new copyrights. (Note to self, look up the rules on this.)

Anyway, here I am, confronted with the product of my 1992 self, you know? The one who felt helpless and overwhelmed (little kids, sudden career success, major decisions to make but no real power to make them with, all that young mother time trouble). And I realize that I have several incidents of heroine action where she acts impulsively and perhaps recklessly, for no real purpose.

Why? What does this say about ME? What issue would have had me-- the back-then me-- continually having a heroine who would behave without the sort of right-there immediate motivation that I would counsel other writers to show?

Well, I don't want to get too personal-- I'm still married to the same guy, still have the same kids, still even-- I am so boring-- teaching (again, actually, not still) at the same school, so I probably ought not to remind myself of all that stuff back then. But let me just say that back then, I never behaved heedlessly. I never did anything I thought maybe I'd regret later. I spent those years being really, really careful.

And it showed paradoxically in my creation of a few heroines who did behave recklessly, who acted spontaneously without regard for consequence, who jumped out of airplanes without a parachute (figuratively... these took place in like 1815 :). IOW, they could afford to be stupid when I couldn't.

This was an issue in my life that came out in my writing. And I wasn't going to resolve it in my writing without resolving it in my life in one way or another.

So here it is, jeez, 20 years later, and I've given up that need to control, or at least that dire suspicion that if I said the wrong word or opened the wrong door, terrible things would happen and It Would All Be My Fault and I Can't Let That Happen.

I also-- age does this to women, thank goodness-- gave up on any real aspiration to be so adorably cute and unexpected like a kitten and decided to be a grown-up at some point.

Anyway, for whatever reason, that issue seems to have mostly resolved in my life, and I can look at my earlier book and see not a heroine who is insufficiently adorable (so that I must up the madcap-heiress ratio, which is what I'd have done back then), but rather insufficiently motivated to act and thus I must give her a good reason to do that madcap-heiress cute thing. (That is, I'm keeping the cute action, just giving her more reason to commit it.)  Here's how I did it.

1992 heroine, too stupid to live, too adorable to resist, is with hero in enemy territory, at the market fair of a French coastal town, across the Channel from Dorset (where he lives).  They are trying to get past the big contingent of French soldiers who are patrolling the docks to slip onto the smuggling sloop which by arrangement is going to sneak them out of France and back home.  Heroine espies Cute Plot Trick (a hot air balloon) and takes off in that direction and adorably madcappedly ends up in the air over the Channel with hero. (Their passage is in contravention, btw, of the whole prevailing winds issue, but that I dealt with mainly by having the hero marvel that, given the usual prevailing winds, the gods had favored them and sent northerly winds.)

This gives the hero a chance to Sternly Chastise Her and her a chance to be Suitably Adorably "sulky" (I swear, I'm going to do a Control-F and find every "sulk" in there and excise it, and "pout" beside… really, there's a limit to how adorable a non-kitten should be). But it doesn't make much sense, because they're in great danger, she's not actually that stupid, and the sloop they'd arranged is captained by his very own brother, of whom they're both pretty fond, and I don't think they'd put him in graver danger if they could help it.  Here's how I resolved it—I gave her a reason to do what she does, a reason beyond "I am so cute I can get away with being an idiot! In fact, the bigger idiot I am, the more proof it is that I'm adorable!"  Once I'd identified the 'need,' (that is, for more immediate external motivation), I had the answer just like that:

Michael (hero) is cognizant above all that his duty is to protect this princess he's bringing to England to marry a prince and cement an alliance. (It's a Lancelot-Guinevere story, natch.) And he knows his bro and knows that John, ever resourceful, tends to find a way out of bad situations. So he's more trusting than Tatiana (heroine) that they just have to get over there to the sloop and all will be well. Tatiana is, in her adorable way, less trusting of fate and less aware of how John has always managed to squirm out of every dilemma ever. So… here's the big change. They get close to the sloop and the military commander isn't just hassling John. He's about to ARREST John now. And so Tatiana runs off to steal the balloon (set up as an attraction for the fair—okay, dumb, but it's not HER dumbness at least ) to act as a diversion so that the military is drawn away from the sloop.  Might not be Wellingtonesque in its strategic brilliance, but hey, effective—she gets on the balloon, Michael, cursing, follows her to try and get her off, she gets it to ascend in order to have everyone down there (including military people) turn to gaze up at the balloon.  John takes advantage of the distraction to heave the military commander into the harbor, and he raises anchor and scoots out into the Channel.

There! Her adorable action is now to some purpose! 

And this actually solves another issue, a coincidence (groan) I'd forgotten about.  This town actually is directly across the Channel from his own estate. This isn't the coincidence part.  He and John have arranged to meet here because as boys (before the war) they used to sail down here to pick up chicks, or whatever boys did back then (they probably still picked up chicks, or tried to), and know it well.  The coincidence is that the balloon is going to end up crashing into his own land 32 miles north, direct hit, no action needed. Well, now, duh, I have John escaping from custody and sailing out into the Channel, and above are Michael and Tatiana. So John could point the sloop in the right direction, kind of like an arrow, and Michael can follow that and figure out a bit how to maneuver the craft (he's an experienced sailor, so understands winds). And with John's example below, he doesn't just happen onto his own land, but aims for it because he knows he can land in an open field there and not on the brow of a cliff.

So much more purposeful and directed, but without that terrible fear and insecurity I had  when I first wrote it!

I really don't think I could have resolved that so quickly  back then. Oh, maybe I could have done it deliberately, like if the editor pointed it out and suggested how to fix it. But I really don't know if I would have identified it as an issue. And I certainly wouldn't effortlessly-- as I just did-- have come up with the right solution, or at least a workable one. I guess I'm saying I had to grow up. :)

So... armchair diagnosis here, or at least armchair speculation. If I were having POV issues that I couldn't learn my way out of, well, I probably wouldn't know what the problem is. But as an outsider, and if YOU were having that recurrent issue, I might ask if there was some identity issue going on-- POV is -usually- about identity. For example, and we're just using this and "you" as examples, okay? I'm not actually trying to delve into your personality . Do you think maybe you have a bit of trouble "escaping the surly bounds of self," maybe, and "becoming" someone else? (Due to, perhaps, too much encroachment by family, or too little regard earlier in life for your own feelings so now you are more careful to assert "what is me and what I value".) This could result in shallow POV, the inability to get too deep into a character.

Or is a recurrent POV issue more a problem with too quick identification with others, too much empathy almost? That can lead to headhopping, maybe, because everyone's opinion seems equally important in this scene.

Just a thought. This isn't therapy, but it might be interesting to look at the issues that keep arising in our stories and speculate about what IN US might cause them. That is... the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our plotting, but in ourselves. :)

What do you think?

Alicia

He who hesitates is found

Does everyone know about Project Gutenberg? It was the first attempt to digitize the major works of literature, and it's still my first destination when I decide to read the classics I somehow managed to avoid in college. I'm not saying this project came about because of me (because, well, that would be a lie :), but I remember in 1989 or some dark-ages year being on a usenet list for Shakespeare profs (I didn't qualify, but I was teaching Hamlet that year in my freshman lit class, and needed help), they were discussing how this could be done-- all the works of Shakespeare digitized. Eventually it just grew and grew, and while of course there is now Kindle and Googlebooks and all that, none of those new-fangled projects would have happened without this one. So if you've begun the year with a surplus, give some love to this labor of love.

Anyway, I'm reading The Aeneid there, and once again I marvel at how even the earliest (great) authors understood the need for motivation, but also the importance of hesitation. Here's the very end, where Aeneas has his enemy on the ground before him, begging for mercy:

Lifting up beseechingly his humbled eyes and suppliant hand: 'I have deserved it,' Turnus says, 'nor do I ask for mercy; use thy fortune. If an unhappy parent's distress may at all touch thee, this I pray; even such a father was Anchises to thee; pity Daunus' old age, and restore to my kindred which thou wilt, me or my body bereft of day. Thou art conqueror, and Ausonia hath seen me stretch conquered hands. Lavinia is thine in marriage; press not thy hatred farther.'

Aeneas stood wrathful in arms, with rolling eyes, and lowered his hand; and now and now yet more the speech began to bend him to waver: when high on Turnus's shoulder appeared the sword-belt with the shining bosses that Aeneas knew, the luckless belt of the boy Pallas, whom Turnus had struck down with mastering wound, and now he wore on his shoulders the fatal ornament. As his eyes drank in the plundered record of his fierce grief, Aeneas kindles to fury, and cries terrible in anger: 'Mayest thou, thou clad in the spoils of my dearest, escape mine hands? Pallas it is, Pallas who now strikes the sacrifice, and exacts vengeance in thy guilty blood.' So saying, he fiercely plunges the steel full in his breast. But his limbs grow slack and chill, and the life with a moan flies indignantly into the dark.

Now what has happened is Turnus has challenged Aeneas to single combat, and lost. And Aeneas is about to kill him, but hesitates when T begs for mercy and mentions his soon-to-be-bereaved father. This plea almost works-- Aeneas also had a beloved father (Anchises-- notice that Turnus mentions him).

Hesitation:
The hesitation is what tells us what matters to Aeneas enough to still his vengeful hand-- the mention of his father. Without that hesitation, we would not have gotten that glimpse of what he values more even than victory.

The hesitation is important, as it shows him in conflict-- his empathy gets in the way of his goal. When there's conflict, it should come out in the narrative somehow, maybe in his inner thoughts (as here), but also in his actions (he lowers his hand).

I think this is an important lesson we should learn-- it's the hesitation that tells the reader there's conflict. The hesitation indicates there's a choice that must be made, but there wouldn't be a choice at all if there was no conflict (Aeneas would just kill him without considering an alternative, if there was no conflict). It's important to SHOW the hesitation when there's a conflict.

And it's important to give characters choices. It's only through making choices that they grow, and it's only through seeing those choices that the reader knows the character (this character values family more than vengeance; this character cares more about money than his daughter -- "my daughter! my ducats!"). The hesitation tells us that it takes some thought to choose.

Remotivation:
But just as there's something that happens externally in the scene that shows motivation for the hesitation (Turnus's plea), there should be something external that motivates the action that shows what really matters.

In Aeneas's case, his gaze falls on the belt that he knows once belonged to Pallas (his protege), killed by Turnus. Turnus is wearing the belt as a trophy of war, which isn't outrageous, given the customs of the times, but still is enough to remind A of why Turnus should be killed-- he is the enemy, and he gave no mercy to young Pallas.

That belt is the external manifestation of his motivation (it's important that it's external-- real, powerful, concrete, not just in his head), and serves to remotivate him. In fact, it actually intensifies his motivation to the point that no plea is going to make him waver. Notice how neatly the remotivation fits with Aeneas's values AND Turnus's plea. It's all about fatherhood! Turnus begs him to consider "my aged father" and mentions Aeneas's own late beloved father. But Aeneas is a father too, a surrogate father to Pallas-- he promised Pallas's own father that "I will treat him as a son." So Turnus's plea is about fatherhood, a father's grief, and Aeneas hesitates because he thinks of his own father. And the remotivation is also about fatherhood-- a father's vengeance. This of course amplifies the cultural subtext (Virgil was writing to Romans, presenting Aeneas as the "father" of Rome).

So both steps here-- the hesitation and the remotivated action-- are linked because they each show (in different ways) what Aeneas really values.

I notice that Aeneas's intended action actually gets fulfilled, that is, before the plea he intended to kill Turnus, and after the remotivation, he does kill him. So in a way, that passage of hesitation and remotivation changes nothing-- Turnus still ends up dead at Aeneas's hand. But see how much more interesting the scene becomes when the new conflict (pity) is introduced. And it also serves to deepen the characterization of Aeneas, as we see that he is more than just a single-minded warrior.

Usually a scene changes or obstructs a character's agenda, because it's that sort of interference that really changes the character and impels the plot forward. (I mean, if Mary starts out the scene planning to get out of work on time so that she can meet her buddies for happy hour, you would usually make things happen that mean she can't get out of work on time.) That's pretty standard scene design, and usually works well by focusing on change.

However, sometimes the scene protagonist's agenda just has to be fulfilled. (This is especially true in the last two scenes of the book, because you are aiming at resolution there!) Who this person is and what he wants -- his agenda-- might, sometimes, have to be fulfilled, just because, well, that's necessary for the story. However, as Virgil shows in fulfilling Aeneas's agenda of killing his enemy, the scene doesn't have to show a straight line between plan and fulfillment. You can put obstacles in the way to make the scene more active and dramatic-- and to make the character work for whatever he wants. AND, if you challenge yourself, you can even come up with obstacles that are external, but also reveal something about the character and also amplify the story's themes. :)

Alicia

Deepening Your Characters

There are a number of methods for deepening your characters, but today we'll look at just one: Identification of dominant needs.

Typically, genre fiction writers think in terms of goals and motivations. "Johnny wants to ace his finals because it will help him get into med school."
Goal = good grades.
Motivation = acceptance into med school

This is fine, and you can build a sturdy plot this way, but you might end up with slightly flat characters. We don't know anything about Johnny's core characteristics at this point. You might be thinking that we can extrapolate certain characteristics from the core facts, but can we? Johnny might want to ace his finals, but he might also want to watch the ball game. Is it safe to assume he has the self-discipline and focus necessary to study simply because he "wants" good grades? Or is it possible that is competing desires might be stronger? The truth is that although a person's goals do say something about that person, they might not say enough to be accurate predictors of behavior.

The way to get around this is by digging deeper into the motivation to find the dominant emotional needs. You're probably already doing this on some level. If you find yourself asking "Why?" frequently when examining your characters, you're trying to dig past the wants and into the needs. But this can also lead to flat and even circular reasoning. If you've spent much time in writers' brainstorming groups, you've probably run into conversations something like this:

Why does Johnny want to go to med school?
To become a doctor.

Why does Johnny want to be a doctor?
He wants a stable job with good pay and benefits.

Why does he want this kind of job?
Uh, doesn't everyone? Beats the hell out of living under a bridge.


We're getting nowhere because we're focusing on externals. It may be true that people want good pay in general, but that doesn't tell us much about Johnny in specific. As a character he may be an expression of universal human tendencies, but that doesn't mean he can be generic. So how do we get past this generic or universal external desire and into the gears of Johnny's unique mechanism?

Try taking the external goal away, and see where it gets you. Johnny wants to go to medical school so he can become a doctor and have a good job. What if somehow Johnny is precluded from attending medical school? Is he still the same character, or do the changed externals change his personality, too? Or, to put it another way,


Why does he choose medicine over some other stable profession, like law or big business?
When he was a kid, he heard someone say, "Don't be a plain Mister Jones when you can be a Doctor Jones." It stuck with him.


Aha! Now we're getting somewhere. The money might be a good rationale for this profession, but there's also a deeper emotional need at play. Johnny wants status. Money is an external symbol of that status, but other things are, too. How else would Johnny express his need for status? Clothing, housing, designer luggage, expensive haircuts -- all these status symbols might be deeply important to Johnny.

Johnny might be the kind of guy with an expensive car, too, but it's not because he's a risk-taker. He doesn't speed. He pauses at intersections and lets people get a good look at him in the driver's seat. And unlike the guy who buys the exact same car out of some need for attention, Johnny won't squeal his wheels when the light turns green.

I want to pause a moment and consider what we've just done. We started with an external fact or goal, worked inward to the core emotional need, and are now turning it around to work back out. We're examining that emotional need for other ways it might express itself in Johnny's life. Johnny buys that car because of what it says about his status. By identifying the core need expressed by his car, we can also figure out how he drives it.

By doing this inside-out analysis, we might also identify some self-contradictory behavior. Let's think about Johnny's lady for a moment. Notice that when Johnny first started explaining why he'd chosen medical school, he referenced stability as a goal. If his core emotional need was for stability, he might choose his spouse early in life and then make darn sure their marriage was a contented one.

But if his dominant need is for status rather than stability, and stability is merely the need he's willing to cop to in public, then will Johnny marry young? Maybe not. Not unless he manages to snag a supermodel or the sorority president. And even if he does land a girl like that, he might also go for some side action as an expression of status. Because that's the rumor: high-status males get more nookie.

So now what we have is a status-seeking male who claims to value stability (and who might, in fact, value it to some extent, especially in financial matters) who undermines the stability of his personal life by joining the girl-of-the-week club and/or cheating on his wife.

We can complicate this further. If his need for financial stability is greater than his tolerance for personal instability, Johnny might avoid cheating because he doesn't want to lose his house in a divorce. So instead taking his side nookie to a nightclub, he'll go to the same club on date night with his spouse and flirt with the waitresses, but he'll only dance with his wife. Now he's satisfying multiple emotional needs: He has the status-symbol wife on his arm, the status-enhancing flirtation, and the stability of a public display of loyalty to his wife. Plus, at the end of the night, there's little risk that his wife will take half of everything.

So, now we understand that mining a character's emotional needs can help us understand why they do the things they do. They might even help us predict how a character will behave in a given situation. Next time, we'll look at how a writer can use all this to exploit conflicts.

Any questions? If not, I have one for you. Does Johnny study for his finals or watch the game with his friends?

Theresa