“The Secret of Effective Motivation”

A guest post from my colleague and friend Tom Benedek:

In approaching character development and story, we are always dividing things between the internal and external motivations of our characters. The protagonist deals with an external conflict AND an internal conflict. Generally, plot elements are in front. In constructing a story, it may be the plot that pops into our heads first. BUT, the motivation of our characters, the internal “Whys?” of what the plot means to them, will drive the story. Scott Myers and yours truly will keep repeating that character drives plot. We can use many examples from fine film stories, movies, scripts to make this point clear.

But, now we have some actual science on this. Yes, scientists have proved this in a set of experiments. In a study of cadets at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy, they found that more ultimately succeeded if they were internally engaged in the work they were doing for its own sake than if they were more concerned with just the result of their success. The scientists are calling them internal and instrumental motives.

Here is a small excerpt from the July 4, 2014 New York Times:

THE SECRET OF EFFECTIVE MOTIVATION

Here are two kinds of motive for engaging in any activity: internal and instrumental. If a scientist conducts research because she wants to discover important facts about the world, that’s an internal motive, since discovering facts is inherently related to the activity of research. If she conducts research because she wants to achieve scholarly renown, that’s an instrumental motive, since the relation between fame and research is not so inherent. Often, people have both internal and instrumental motives for doing what they do.

What mix of motives — internal or instrumental or both — is most conducive to success? You might suppose that a scientist motivated by a desire to discover facts and by a desire to achieve renown will do better work than a scientist motivated by just one of those desires. Surely two motives are better than one. But as we and our colleagues argue in a paper newly published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, instrumental motives are not always an asset and can actually be counterproductive to success.

We analyzed data drawn from 11,320 cadets in nine entering classes at the United States Military Academy at West Point, all of whom rated how much each of a set of motives influenced their decision to attend the academy. The motives included things like a desire to get a good job later in life (an instrumental motive) and a desire to be trained as a leader in the United States Army (an internal motive).

How did the cadets fare, years later? And how did their progress relate to their original motives for attending West Point?

We found, unsurprisingly, that the stronger their internal reasons were to attend West Point, the more likely cadets were to graduate and become commissioned officers.

Also unsurprisingly, cadets with internal motives did better in the military (as evidenced by early promotion recommendations) than did those without internal motives and were also more likely
to stay in the military after their five years of mandatory service — unless (and this is the surprising part) they also had strong instrumental motives.

So, scientific research seems to prove that character is more important than plot. Our readers/ audiences won’t stop caring about plot. But those twists and turns of story must be driven by strong internal character stories. Our characters need real and concrete reasons for how they behave within the constraints of the stories we spin. That’s what keeps people watching/reading. The other interesting thing that leaps out for me from this study — what we write must matter to us personally. Calculating what ought to work in the marketplace is not enough. We have to be internally motivated to write what we write. This is at the heart of the best storytelling.

No better way to grapple with all this, tell the story that you must tell and develop, of course, a solid story outline with great character hooks than the six-week Screenwritingmasterclass.com Prep: From Concept To Outline class. The next one starts next week: Wednesday, July 16.

I am looking forward to working fellow writers through this great curriculum this summer. You can have a solid story outline to start writing this Fall through the writing exercises in this class.

For more information on the Prep workshop, go here.

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