Would it be possible to create a character without substantial motivation?
The character I describe is in fact reflective of somebody I know in real life--a kind of nihilist who finds all pursuits and goals "hollow and ridiculous", as the person says. This inevitably implies that the person in question live day by day on trivial concerns--the pursuit of food, shelter and idle comfort, as opposed to the long-term-goal-oriented efforts of most others. (e.g.: go to school to learn a skill; earn money with skill; use money to buy a house and live happily ever after etc.)
I wonder if it would be possible to re-create such a person in fiction; my intuition is that it will be difficult to see consistently comprehensible actions from such a character, in other words, such a character will not perform series of actions that are all constituent of the same goal. Instead, such a character would only react to the happenings of any plot, and would thus only be suitable as a secondary character whom the main characters observe externally.
However, my understanding of literature is limited, and there might be precedents of such characters being successfully portrayed in other roles.
Addendum:
This person whom I know in real-life developed their nihilistic attitude from religious/philosophical disillusionment, as they describe. Unlike the typical hedonistic stereotype of a nihilist, this person is in fact abstinent and holds many socially progressive views and principles. However, they said that there is no rational justification for these behaviours, and that they don't see these actions to be morally superior to "depravities" including violence and substance abuse on an intellectual level.
Beside these, this person also has talents in programming and art, and often create things in these media, but they said that while these exercises are interesting or beautiful, they are not meaningful in any way.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/27495. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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What you describe is a person who denies the value of anything, and yet creates things. This is a contradiction. If nothing has value or meaning, there is no point in creating anything, and, for that matter, no point in trying to convince anybody of anything, including nihilism.
And yet this person creates software and art and formulates an expresses an nihilist philosophy. There is a conflict there, and conflict is the meat of story.
So, what drives this person to create the things they create and to say the things they say. All acts are motivated. This person denies motivation, and yet they act. Why is their expressed philosophy of life at odds with their actions? Is it a pose? Are they deceiving themselves or seeking to deceive others, or both?
What could challenge their actions or their philosophy? What event could force them to confront this contradiction, make them deny their words or change their actions?
The thing about stories is, they are about life as it is lived. They are not about the rightness or wrongness of the character's weltanschauung, they are about the nature of living with that weltanschauung and its consequences in the life lived day to day in the real world.
Lots of people express nihilism. No one lives the logic of nihilism. Your belly won't let you. Essays may leave out the belly, and its ambitions. Stories don't. this person has a story whether they like it or not.
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The point of a story is to have a conflict on the road to a goal.
In your case, your goal is to have a nihilistic life, and therefore a conflict to this would be situations that clearly attempt to flip this upside down. Does he absolutely not want to be famous, so he somehow accidentally becomes famous? Does he get mixed up into something?
Otherwise, maybe there's an internal conflict that you want to develop, or a conflict with other characters. Refer to these conflict types. Of course however, you're not limited to just one type of conflict. There are stories that expand through all of them, or just a select few.
Generally, think around the lines of this: What is the main character's goal, and what stands in the way of their goal?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27496. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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