Everyone has goals, and so must your characters. Without goals there can be no motivation. Nor can there be road blocks for your characters to overcome.

It’s not enough for your character to simply want something. There must be emotional motivation pushing his or her desires. The more emotion you can attach to a character’s primary goal, the more potential your story will have to captivate your audience. But what makes for strong motivation? What should be the central driving force for your character that will cause your audience to emotionally identify with his or her decisions?

Let’s say your character wants a million dollars and will do anything to acquire it. Most people can relate to that desire; we all want to be financially comfortable, don’t we? Of course we do. Security and financial stability are basic needs that every person seeks.

Last issue we presented the Screenwriter’s Bag of Tricks (Part One), which provided a collection of useful techniques for writing scripts. This issue, we’ll offer up another collection just for the writer of novels.

As before, these tips are provided in no particular order, are intentionally kept short and to the point, and cover a wide range of topics, from inspiration to development to business concerns.

Some are geared to the beginning novelist, others to the expert. But regardless of your experience level, you’re likely to find a few keepers.

Novels Aren’t Stories

A novel can be extremely free form. Some are simply narratives about a fictional experience. Others are a collection of several stories that may or may not be intertwined.

There’s no way around it. Unless a screenwriter is writing about one-minute section of life where other sexes do not enter, or a world filled with one sex that practices asexual reproduction, men are going to write about women, and women are going to write about men. But can they do so successfully?

This question has been argued for years, flowing through discussions about literature and female-centric moving media. Regardless of theme, men rule the typewriter, and I would venture to say that it’s most pronounced in Hollywood. It is palpable every time the screenwriter credit pops on the screen, when Oscar nominees are announced, and even on the picket line, as USA Today pointed out back in 2008. (A post which also notes that women make up less than a quarter of the screenwriters in Hollywood.)

As noted in the previous session, emotions are at the heart of every good film. Whatever emotional struggle you are attempting to dramatize–whatever your premise–your story must bleed out of your characters’ psyches. The most successful screenplays are character-driven, even those with complex plots. In solid, character-driven scripts, all action, or plot, is organic; that is, it flows logically from the characters’ needs and desires.

Every good script starts with a protagonist, or pivotal character. According to Egri, the protagonist “is the one who creates conflict and makes the play move forward…A pivotal character must not merely desire something. He must want it so badly that he will destroy or be destroyed in the effort to attain his goal.” For example, in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), Maximus is driven to exact revenge on the ruler Commodus for the death of his family. Although he is captured and enslaved, he never loses sight of his goal, pursuing it with measured determination until the end. Willfulness, the ability to make decisions and take actions, is a necessary attribute of the protagonist. Without it, the protagonist will be weak, his or her actions will seem inconsequential and the audience will lose interest in both the character and your story.