Motive goes to the heart of who were are — what made us, our intent, and every story we tell ourselves is awash in a mix of overt, obscure, and false motives. It’s no wonder that motive is so difficult to discover.

And yet motive is so necessary to our sense of a person. Someone without any apparent motive is immediately suspect. In life, we think such a person is disingenuous; in a story, a character seems mechanical, artificial, and unbelievable. We intuitively know that no one is unmotivated.

There’s a range of ways to approach the concept of motive, different levels of analysis. A good starting point is a definition: “the cause, purpose, and reason of an action or behavior.” The definition isn’t redundant; cause, purpose, and reason each get at different impetuses to act.

A “cause of an action or behavior” is a preceding act or event that results in another act. Let’s make it more concrete: take The Count of Monte Cristo. Why does Edmond Dantes exact vengeance on Mondego, Danglars, and Villefort? Because they are responsible for his unjust imprisonment and torment. Their acts cause Dantes torment and moral debasement, which in turn sets him on a path of vengeance. They act; he reacts. A causal motive follows a “why/because” logic. Why does Dantes exact revenge? Because they caused him great pain.

A “purpose of an action or behavior” is the goal of the act. Most obviously, a purpose is forward-looking while a cause is backward-looking. Likewise, purpose follows a ‘why/in-order-to’ logic instead of the ‘why/because’ of a causal motive. In this sense, why does Edmond Dantes exact vengeance? Well, purpose gets messy, because a purpose is more subjective, more internal to the character, than a cause. Perhaps Dantes is looking for justice or perhaps he finds sadistic pleasure in the destruction of his enemies. Perhaps he starts with one purpose and turns to another as the story unfolds, or perhaps he has more than one purpose all along. Already we see that there’s a great deal of complexity in purpose. It might be obvious or not, honest or not, changing or not.

A “reason for an action or behavior” is even more difficult. In a superficial sense, we can use it generically for both cause and purpose, but that’s not interesting because it’s both ambiguous and redundant. Why include “reason” in the definition if it only repeats the other two kinds of motivation? There must be something unique to a reason.

Edmond Dantes gives his reason for revenge, saying that he is only meting out proper justice. His motives, he implies, are pure. In the end, most of us are convinced that Dantes is not motivated by moral principles but by the satisfaction he gets from the complete destruction of his enemies. His reason, righteous justice, contradicts his other motives which are revealed by the narrative, both the causes and purposes of his action. Indeed, a reason might be a lie.

Then again, a character’s reason can be accurate. Villefort condemns Dantes to Chateau d’If because he’s afraid of the political consequences of Dantes’s freedom. We’re explicitly told this in the narrative. His reason for acting is revealed, then Villefort equivocates in order to justify himself, and finally he gives a public reason for the condemnation which is blatantly false. Not only can reasons be true or false, they can also be simple or multi-layered, revealed by degrees, consistent or contradictory, manipulated, and invented on the spot.

When considering a character’s motivation, we would do well to remember the variety involved. A character of realistic complexity and subtlety will not act or behave in a vacuum. There are always prior influencing causes. Likewise, a character acts with purpose, even if that purpose is only partly known or revealed. And finally, a character will have reasons. What they do with those reasons bare strongly on the course of a character’s development.

There’s a lot more to be said about each type of motivation, not only what they are, but the many ways we can use and manipulate motive to develop our characters. In the future I’ll write posts elaborating each. You could say the topic of motive motivates me, and crafting better character motives is my purpose in planning more posts on the topic. It’s my stated purpose, at least, but whether I have other, underlying motives for writing more on this topic, rather than writing a story that makes use of motive, well that is another question altogether.