I’ve blogged this particular teabag quote before (my tea doesn’t always get points for originality — it’s kinda like fortune cookies). And the last time I thought about it, I thought about the implications for storywriting and using Aristotle’s short checklist of human motivations to be sure that your character’s actions and reactions are believable and can be traced back to some of their primary personality traits. (Well, okay, I wasn’t that verbose, but that’s what I meant at least.)
For those of you who don’t want to click the link, Aristotle’s quote says that “all human actions have one or more of these seven causes”:
- chance
- nature
- compulsion
- habit
- reason
- passion
- desire
So this morning, when the quote showed up again, I got to thinking about it’s implications for the flipside of storywriting — acting, and being able to derive motivation from your character’s words and actions in a script. One of the very first things you’re taught when you start studying a scene is to establish what YOUR character wants out of the scene. Why is the scene important? What does your character hope to accomplish? Do they achieve their goal? And then you start breaking it down to the thought and emotion behind every line your character says, or the action they perform. And you should ideally be able to tie each of those thoughts and actions back to their primary goals. Granted, you can have multiple “beats,” or units of action within a scene, and goals can change with those beats in some cases, but they all still drive towards a goal.
Unfortunately, I can’t say every scene I’ve ever deconstructed was that easy to interpret (read: well-written). So this list struck me as a good starting point if you’re having difficulty interpreting your character’s angle, and why they’re saying/doing the things that they are.
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