Character motivations facing death?
Would it be boring/unrealistic/silly/cliché if most characters only had this main motivation for most of a story: saving humanity/their country/their familly/themselves.
The setting is medieval fantasy, a war starts with an immortal being that cannot be reasoned with. It is like a genocide that only ends when the last human is dead, and the characters are aware of it. They know that in a few days, weeks or months at most they will all be dead. There is no way to survive this. How would people react after their world collapsed suddenly, facing certain death in a near future?
In my story some characters just give up and let themselves die. Some hide in small groups. And the main majority of the humans decide to stick together and fight, even though this is futile and that they are doomed. My main heroes are part of the group of characters which decided to hold on as long as possible. My problem is that I feel that they lack defining traits because they all have the same goal and the same motivation: they want to survive, they want to save the world. Money, power, revenge... none of those things matter anymore. It is all about surviving.
I have a pretty precise outline of the events from the beginning to the end of the story, and the actions of my heroes always seem logical, but what I feel I miss is character arcs/motivations. The differences between characters have been diminished because they are in a perpetual life-or-death situation. What they cared about before does not matter much anymore to them. They lack secondary motivations apart from saving themselves/the human world.
Would such a lack of secondary motivations be a problem and if yes, how to fix it?
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Self-preservation is an instinct we all understand, so that works. Readers will accept it. But it's ultimately self-focused if you leave it at that. Most people have more tangible reasons for why they want to survive, outside of fear for themselves:
- You don't want to say goodbye to the ones you love.
- You still have something to offer the world. Something is unfinished.
- You think there might be a chance. We haven't exhausted all options.
Each character might have a different motivation, so dig into those. That's where you'll find conflict: when one person decides to hoard food in case he miraculously makes it through, and another just wants to feed her family.
The question you need to ask each of your characters is this: what are you living for? Only in the face of death will they know the true answer.
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Well, I'd say that if the character is human, saving humanity is kind of in their best interests.
It's not a motivation that's unique to him as a character, but it's certainly believable. If the villain is a threat to humanity, the hero knows he is, and the hero enjoys being alive, human, and amongst other humans, then sure, he'd be plenty motivated.
The issue you have to face then is why he's the hero and not, well, everyone else in the novel that happens to be human and enjoying life.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38031. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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At the core of every story, there is a moral choice. That is, a choice between values. Circumstances force the protagonist to the point where that choice must be faced and made and lived with. Such choices can obviously end well or badly, and can involve triumph or sacrifice or defeat for the main character. But always there is the choice to be faced.
But your scenario does not seem to leave a lot of room for a meaningful choice. Death is certain, not just for the character, but for everybody the character cares about. How can one have a choice of values in a situation in which all values are about to be extinguished?
Certainly, if you are going to find one in such a situation, you will have to look inward. Perhaps the protagonist has been feuding with his father and he decides to overcome his resentment, swallow his pride, and make peace before they both die. But if you want this to be a story, not merely a history of destruction or a nihilist character study, there needs to be that element of choice at the heart of the narrative.
To put it another way, all stories are in some sense redemptive. They are a rebellion against the apparent meaningless of the universe in which we are all bound to die and the material universe itself is doomed to burn out and fade to black. Stories assert that there is actually a shape and a purpose and a dignity in our lives and in the life of the universe. They stick a thumb in the eye of nihilism and despair and say, no, this all means something, it has purpose, it has value. All stories are a rage against the dying of the light, and since yours is a tale of the dying of the light, you will need to find that rage, that hope, that belief in order and meaning, if you want your reader to feel there is a story here worth reading.
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Yes, it is realistic. Other motivations may be out there, like mating and having children, acquiring wealth and/or fame, acquiring power -- but some of these are 'artificial' in the sense that early hunter-gatherers with our same mental capacity did not really have wealth or fame to acquire, they barely knew any strangers, and their lives were indeed focused on survival: Food, safety, and family. That is indeed where the human psyche should go (or revert to) in times of any apocalypse. Even sex, romance or having more children will take a back seat to avoiding death, starvation, enslavement by other humans, etc.
Life first. Fun second. I don't see a problem with that.
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