MOTIVES
When you watch the guy at the party who spills his drink and talks loudly and rudely, would you judge him the same way if you knew that he was deliberately trying to attract attention to himself to keep people from noticing something else that is going on in the room? Or what if you knew that he had been desperately hurt by the hostess only a few minutes before the party, and this was his way of getting even? You still may not approve of what he’s doing, but you won’t necessarily judge him to be an ignorant boor.
What about that friend of yours, the one who told your secret to others? Wouldn’t it make a difference if you found out that she thought you were in serious trouble and told others about it solely in order to try to help you solve the problem? You would judge her very differently, however, if you were a celebrity and you discovered that she sometimes tells your secrets to other people so they’ll think of her as the closest friend of a famous person.
And the man and the woman who met and moments later were stroking and touching each other with obvious sexual intent. You’d judge them one way if you knew that the woman, a government bureaucrat, was lonely and had a terrible self-image, while the man was an attractive flatterer who would do anything to get this woman to award his company a valuable contract. You’d judge them very differently if you knew that his wife had just left him, and the woman was rebounding from failed affair. The same acts would take on a completely different meaning if you knew that she was passing government secrets to him while they only pretended to be romantically involved.
Motives is what gives moral value to a character’s acts. What a character does, no matter how awful or how good, is never morally absolute: What seemed to be murder may turn out to have been self-defense, madness, or illusion; what seemed to be a kiss may turn out to have been betrayal, deception, or irony.
We never fully understand other people’s motives in real life. In fiction, however, we can help our
readers understand our characters’ motives with clarity, sometimes even certainty. This is one of the reasons why people read fiction—to come to some understanding of why other people act the wat they do.
A character is what he does, yes—but even more, a character is what he means to do.
CHARACTERS & VIEWPOINT by Orson Scott Card