Twenty-One
Motivating Behavior

Goooooaaal!!

As we’ve seen, three of the essential qualities every effective character must possess are GOODNESS, APPROPRIATENESS, and LIKENESS. Or put another way, someone we can care about, with characteristics that serve the story, and that make them identifiably real.

If you’ve completed the assignment from the previous chapter, you’ve gone a long way to accomplishing these dictates.

Still, it’s one thing to fill out a worksheet and construct a bio, it’s another to make use of those decisions in the actual crafting of your story. So, for all the choices we’ve made, the question arises, how do we reveal and utilize them in the narrative?

Well, we reveal character in very specific ways: by how they look (which we’ll discuss at greater length in our chapter on DESCRIPTION), by what they say (which we’ll cover in our chapters on DIALOGUE), by what others say about them (again, stay tuned for those dialogue chapters, I’ve been hearing good things), but most importantly—by what they do.

As Aristotle stresses, while story remains paramount, it is the characters’ ACTIONS that move that story forward. Therefore, it is essential that a character’s actions not only take the story where it needs to go, but also always remain believable.

Which is why the fourth quality that all effective characters must possess is CONSISTENCY.

By that term, Aristotle isn’t simply stating that their traits must have continuity. Of course they do. Unless they’re in a Mel Brooks movie, that hump on their right side better stay on their right side. Rather, Aristotle means that an effective character must ACT with consistent behavior.

Keep in mind our essential precept that all the decisions you make about a character are always in the service of the story. But just as critical, characters must never appear simply functional.

For there may be no greater danger to disrupting the believability of a story than to have your characters react or respond based purely upon what you, the writer, need them to do at a particular moment to keep the story moving forward, rather than upon what they’d credibly do given the character you’ve set up.

Now that doesn’t mean characters can’t surprise us or do things we aren’t expecting. Of course they can. They better. It means that whatever they do must be grounded in all the choices you reveal about them.

We must believe that any action the character makes is precisely how this character with these qualities would behave in this given circumstance.

Sounds simple enough, right? But how do we know how they would act, and not simply how we want them to act?

Well, certainly knowing them inside and out, backwards and forwards, as you would after completing the last assignment, helps. But according to Aristotle, there’s more to it than that.

As the quote that begins this chapter emphasizes, a character’s behavior moves the story forward, and since events must succeed one another according to the laws of probability and necessity, a character must also behave according to those same laws.

And circling back to the very beginning of our character conversation, a character acts according to the laws of probability and necessity whenever their actions appear motivated by their moral disposition and thought—in other words, provoked from within, by who they are and how they perceive the situation.

Now that may be all well and good from a theoretical standpoint, but what does it mean for us as screenwriters? How do we utilize our understanding of goodness, appropriateness, likeness, and consistency, of probability and necessity, moral disposition and thought to determine in practical terms how our characters will behave in a given circumstance?

To answer that, let’s examine an effective movie character, how that character is revealed, and what ultimately determines their actions.

I often screen a few character introduction scenes in class and ask my students to write down every time they discover a new characteristic about them. And I ask them to think about how they learned it.

So let’s look at one such introduction, when we meet Marge Gunderson about forty minutes into the Coen brothers’ Fargo. If you inexplicably don’t have the movie on hand, here’s what happens:

After a pan across painted birds on the bedroom wall, we see Marge sound asleep at 4 a.m., her husband Norm’s arm stretched comfortingly across her.

Then the phone rings, startling her awake. She answers. There’s been a murder and she’s needed at the scene. She starts to get up, revealing her pregnant belly. Her husband offers to make her eggs. She declines. He insists.

What do we know about her job by how she talks on the phone? She’s in law enforcement, sure. But listen to how calm and professional she is when hearing the news, how quick she is to jump from sleep to business. What do those things tell us about her as a character?

At breakfast, they eat their eggs in complete silence.

But it’s a comfortable silence, not the least awkward. What does that tell us about their marriage? About how long they’ve been together?

So without anyone ever talking about what kind of person Marge is, we’ve learned: She’s married. She’s pregnant. She’s a cop. She wears the pants in the family. She’s professional, good at her job, unflappable, calm and cool, and in a sturdy relationship.

These elements of her physical presence, persona, psyche, and personality are all things we SEE. They are revealed by how she answers the phone, how she eats breakfast, how she treats her husband, how she gets her Prowler started. We aren’t told anything about her, but rather shown who she is by what she does and how she does it.

Then we cut to the crime scene.

Her deputy stands in the distance, holding her coffee while she examines the wrecked car and the dead bodies inside. Considering the evidence, she surmises the events that must surely have happened the night before.

From her dialogue we might learn some exposition about the incident, but more importantly, we learn just how good she is at her job. Because we see her being good at her job. And we see others respecting her for it.

And when she looks at the dead traffic cop and says, “Looks like a nice enough fella,” we get a sense that she is sensitive. Maternal even. Would a cop like Dirty Harry or John McClane have that response to a dead body? Not a chance. Their responses would reveal different moral dispositions and reasoning. Her comment about the dead cop isn’t revealing anything significant about the dead cop, but it sure is revealing a lot about her.

At one point, after looking at a particularly grisly corpse, Marge bends over, complaining, “I’m gonna barf.” An honest reaction to such a situation. She is a woman, after all, and woman get queasy when looking at a corpse, right? Appropriateness. But au contraire. She immediately stands back up and says, “That passed. Now I’m hungry again.” It wasn’t the sight of the body that made her sick. It was morning sickness. A delightful surprise, but completely consistent with the stalwart character we’ve seen up to this point.

Then, before getting into the squad car with her deputy, Marge dumps out the coffee he’d brought her. But interestingly, she first waits until his back is turned. Why? The coffee was obviously making her ill, yet she didn’t want to hurt his feelings by jettisoning it in front of him. What does that say about her as a character?

As they drive, the deputy tries to impress her by showing her his deductive skills. But he’s made a faulty assumption about what the dead officer had written in his notebook. It wasn’t a license plate number, it was a dealer plate identification.

She corrects him. “Oh,” he says, realizing he’d made a dumb mistake.

And then what does Marge do? Does she scold him? Tell him not to do it again? Does she dismiss him? Laugh at him? Or do they just drive on in awkward silence? ANY of those behaviors would have revealed something about her.

But she doesn’t do any of them.

Instead, she tells a joke.

Why? Because the writers want to show she has a good sense of humor? Because they’d heard a good joke and wanted an excuse to cram it in?

No. Marge tells a joke because she’d made her deputy feel bad after correcting his police work. And because she’s sensitive and caring, and she sees that he’s upset and embarrassed, she wants to make him feel better, to lighten the mood. Her moral disposition coupled with her judgment of the situation motivates her behavior—to tell a joke.

Notice how this whole sequence illustrates how events are made up of actions that are connected causally through necessity or probability. There was a crime, she was called in, she investigated, her deputy offered an observation, she corrected him, he felt bad, she tried to lighten the mood. Everything is built upon what came before and causes what follows.

And notice how these actions reveal character. Everything Marge says or does demonstrates some truth about her, peels back a layer of the onion that is her very real and fully dimensional character. If Marge had a different moral disposition or reasoning, she would have reacted differently. So given a character with her specific traits, this is how she acts.

What other pattern is evident? Marge shows up at this location because she wants to solve the crime. She tosses the coffee when the deputy isn’t looking because she wants to spare his feelings. She tells a joke because she feels bad after correcting him and so wants to cheer him up.

What word do I keep repeating over and over again with each of Marge’s actions?

Yeah, we’ve played this game before.

Marge behaves because of who she is and because of how she judges the circumstances, her moral disposition and thought. And the interaction of these two crucial character elements creates—a WANT. And the ensuing behavior is an action intended to accomplish that goal.

That point is so important, that I’m compelled, due to my moral disposition and reasoning, to repeat it.

The intersection of a character’s moral disposition and thought creates an immediate, clear and specific GOAL.

And it should be no surprise that this truth leads us to Aristotle’s Guiding Precept #14:

Characters don’t reveal themselves by simply articulating their attributes or traits. Rather, they endeavor to achieve something they WANT at any given moment.

And the behavior they employ to accomplish that goal reveals those qualities, just as it moves the story forward.

Now those goals can change. They always do, as the circumstances themselves change. But they are always present. Marge wants to solve the crime, and through how she goes about it, we learn she’s capable, calm, cool, and collected. Later her goal is to make her underling feel better, and by how she goes about accomplishing that, we learn she’s sensitive and caring.

And as we shall soon see, the different ways in which a character approaches their changing goals during the course of the story provide the primary indicator of how they are changing throughout it.

And that will help us break down the story’s proper structure even more.