Characters You Can't Get Enough of Part 3

We talked about being able to identify with a character and admire them. What else makes a character near and dear to our hearts? My answer...

3. Motivated.

A character is nothing without motivation. What does he/she want? That is the entire forward direction of the story (ie the plot, but we'll get to that later...).

In The Kite Runner, Amir desperately wants his father's approval, and later, also to atone for the sins of his past. Mattie of Jennifer Donnely's A Northern Light longs to be a great writer. It's that forward motivation that drives the story and keeps us reading. Will he/she get to that end goal? How will he/she handle the obstacles that inevitably spring up along the way?

Give me someone that I admire and identify with and then tell me what they want and why... and I'm all yours forever. Well, for the next three hundred pages, anyway.

*****

Apologies on the late posting. It's been an unusually busy week. I'll post my review tomorrow. Happy writing/reading/Friday nighting!