Character Stakes: Finding Your Character’s Why When Your Story Isn’t Working
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Are you stuck in your draft? Does plotting feel like it’s taking you in circles rather than showing you the way through?
Stories get stuck from time to time. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that you don’t know what your character should be doing. Your protagonist rolls up to a decision, a pivotal scene, or the end of a chapter, and bam. You realize I have no idea what comes next. Again, there are many reasons for this—and there are certainly times when you think I have no idea what comes next in breathless excitement after stumbling into an unexpectedly great creative twist. However, this level of story confusion oftentimes points to a character who doesn’t have a why driving their actions. In many ways, you can think of a why as the personal stakes for your character—the motivation that drives them.
First, we’ll talk about how to know if your main character is the problem, and then we’ll walk through three questions you can ask to discover your character’s why and keep the book moving forward.
Is My Main Character the Problem?
If you’re wrestling with a draft that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, it might be your main character who’s to blame. In the same way that you as an author need a why that helps you overcome obstacles and keep going, your protagonist does, too. The sticky point is, if you don’t know why your character does what they do, that character won’t know either.
Some authors believe dropping their characters into different situations is a good way to figure them out. While this can be helpful to see other sides of your character, at the end of the day, throwing your protagonist into a pit of snakes just to see what they’ll do is unlikely to give you the answers you’re looking for, especially not answers that will help you see where your story needs to go next (and extra especially if your story doesn’t have a snake pit). If your story is stalling because you’re not sure what should happen next, it’s because your main character doesn’t have a strong enough why to move forward. Their personal stakes are unclear.
Questions to Get Unstuck
Below are three questions you can ask yourself to uncover what’s driving your protagonist. We often use these questions with authors to help them establish stakes, and we’ll use them here to talk about your protagonist’s why—their personal stakes—as well. All stakes and whys should inspire characters to take active, interesting actions that have consequences rather than leaving them to simply react to what’s happening to them.
What does your character want?
This deceptively simple question is essential to answer. You might see this as your character’s why, but going deeper into this question is where riches can be found. For example, your protagonist might want to win state for basketball. But what’s driving that desire?
Let’s go deeper. Why do they want to win state? Do they want to be popular or to win a scholarship?
Let’s go deeper again. Why do they want to be popular or win a scholarship? Are they lonely or struggling with a sense of worth? Where did those feelings come from, and how does achieving the goal resonate with that why?
The deeper you go, the closer you get to your character’s why. That answer determines not only how they respond to setbacks and obstacles, but it also determines how they’re proactive in pursuing what they want. Using our previous example, a protagonist wanting to win state for the popularity might be trying harder to get into the cool kid circle rather than actually shooting hoops alone after homework is done.
Is something keeping them from getting it?
Another way to discover your protagonist’s why and personal stakes is to look at the antagonistic forces in the story. Is there anything standing in the way of your character getting what they want? Sometimes a story is stuck because the path to achieving the protagonist’s goal is too simple, and they simply just need to do it or go there to achieve it, meaning the story is spinning its wheels until the climax. On the flip side, if your character is easily put off or overwhelmed by obstacles and doesn’t seem inclined to fight for what they want, that can be another sign that you haven’t found your character’s driving motivation yet. Remember, the why should be pushing your character to act rather than just react.
The antagonistic force keeping your character from getting what they want might also be too big or abstract to truly be in your protagonist’s way.
What will happen if they don’t get it?
Again, this is a great stakes question, but it’s also helpful to uncover that deeper layer of motivation for your protagonist. If their why is denied, what will happen to them? How will that impact their life from that point on?
In the short-term of the story itself, consider how your character deals with setbacks. What do their actions say about what they really want? When they encounter obstacles, do we see what’s at stake for them?
Finding the Why and Keep Going
When you have the deepest understanding of your character—why they do what they do—you may not immediately find yourself miraculously out of the quicksand of your current draft, but you’ll now have a solid grip on a rope to pull yourself out. Take the time to get to know your protagonist well, and you’ll have a way to keep moving forward with your draft.
Thanks to Immo Wegmann on Unsplash for the photo!
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