Motivations

I mentioned motivations in passing, when talking about Iron Man vs. Batman.

When I first started writing, every character I wrote had to have a crystal clear, logical motivation for what they did. They rationalized, and I helped them. They knew who they were. They an absolute sense of identity.

Do I even need to point out how completely unrealistic and unreadable that is?

If I want to read a story about somebody with a complete and realized identity I'll read a Dirk Pitt novel. And I won't enjoy it very much, either. There's no character growth possible. There's not even anything interesting about Dirk Pitt. There wasn't anything interesting about my early characters, either.

Name your favorite story, and think about the identity and motivations of the main character. Say... Star Wars. The original, not the prequels. Think about Luke Skywalker, and the way his motives and identity changed. How his moral certainty was broken down, and he had to find a new way. How the man he was in the end had almost nothing in common with the whiny farmboy.

So, as I enter in my however-many-years of writing, I try to write more complex characters. Characters driven by motives that may not even be clear to them. Characters rejected by their parents. Characters who lost their parents. Emotional characters. Illogical characters.

In short, real people.

It's both harder, and more rewarding.

More on this later.