Character Motivation

What is character motivation?

Character motivation is the reason a character does what they do - what they want, what they are afraid of, and what they are trying to get or avoid. It is not the same as what they are like. A character can be kind and still betray someone, if what they want badly enough sits on the other side of it, and that gap is where most good stories live.

In the English National Curriculum it appears in the Years 3–6 reading comprehension requirements as drawing inferences "such as inferring characters' feelings, thoughts and motives from their actions", and in the US it maps onto the Reading Literature standards on describing characters and explaining how their actions contribute to the sequence of events.

What is the difference between a character trait and a motive?

A trait is what a character is like: brave, secretive, loyal. A motive is what they want: to be believed, to get home, to stop his brother finding out. Traits are adjectives; motives are verbs with an object.

This distinction is worth teaching explicitly, because children default to traits - ask "why did she do that?" and you get "because she's mean". A trait answer closes the conversation down. A motive answer opens it, because you can then ask why does she want that? and get somewhere. The activity above enforces it structurally: you cannot label a line with an adjective and have it make sense.

How do you teach character motivation to primary children?

Start with the two characters who cause each other the most trouble, agree that they matter to each other before arguing about how, and insist on one sentence frame: [A] wants [B] to… That frame is what keeps children out of adjectives. Five steps:

1. Start with two characters, not the whole cast. Pick the pair who cause each other the most trouble.
2. Draw the line before you label it. Agree that these two matter to each other, then argue about how.
3. Insist on the sentence frame: [A] wants [B] to … This is what keeps them out of adjectives.
4. Label both directions. What A wants from B is almost never what B wants from A, and noticing the mismatch is where the conflict is.
5. Add characters one at a time, and only if they change something. A character nobody wants anything from is not on the map.

How do you find evidence for a character's motive?

Motives are rarely stated, which is what makes this inference rather than retrieval. Four places to look, and they are worth putting on the wall:

• What they choose when it costs them something. Easy choices reveal nothing.
• What they lie about. People lie to protect what they want.
• What they keep coming back to in dialogue, even when it is off the subject.
• What they do that surprises us - a surprising action is nearly always a motive we have not spotted yet.

Character motivation examples from books children know

The best books for this have a pair whose wants are clearly mismatched, so the two labels on the line cannot be the same. Four that reliably produce a good map, and the pair worth mapping in each:

Book	The pair worth mapping	Why it works
Holes	Stanley and Zero	What each wants from the other changes completely across the book, so the labels have to be rewritten.
The Boy at the Back of the Class	Alexa and Ahmet	Alexa's motive is generous and also partly about herself, which is a sophisticated thing for children to notice.
Fantastic Mr Fox	Mr Fox and Boggis, Bunce and Bean	Very clear motives on both sides - a good first map.
Varjak Paw	Varjak and the Elder Paw	The motive is passed on rather than shared, which introduces the idea of inherited purpose.

How do you make it harder or easier?

Keep to three characters at first and accept simple wants - wants him to go away is a perfectly good label. To push it further, ask for motives the character would not admit to, and have the same pair re-labelled at the start and the end of the book. That final move - comparing the map you made in chapter two with the one you make at the end - is the strongest version of this activity, and it needs nothing but a second printed sheet.