Yes. I was about to say "plausible motivation" as necessary, and that's connected to what you have here.
It doesn't have to be a motivation I share (the world is full of motivations I don't share, but I have no trouble believing that people want to be professional ballplayers, or avenge their parents' murders), but it has to be one that I can believe in. If the character's motivation is supposed to be "avenge his father's death," and he instead goes off and spends four years doing nothing but studying accounting and playing tennis on weekends, without so much as thinking about his father, no. (Hamlet spends a lot of time dithering, but it's "was my father murdered?" and "what should I do," he doesn't spend most of the play trying to start a University of Wittenberg Alumni Club.) If he's supposed to have that motivation, and spends the entire book deliberately making life easier for the person he believes to have killed his father, really no.
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Date: 2009-10-14 11:16 pm (UTC)It doesn't have to be a motivation I share (the world is full of motivations I don't share, but I have no trouble believing that people want to be professional ballplayers, or avenge their parents' murders), but it has to be one that I can believe in. If the character's motivation is supposed to be "avenge his father's death," and he instead goes off and spends four years doing nothing but studying accounting and playing tennis on weekends, without so much as thinking about his father, no. (Hamlet spends a lot of time dithering, but it's "was my father murdered?" and "what should I do," he doesn't spend most of the play trying to start a University of Wittenberg Alumni Club.) If he's supposed to have that motivation, and spends the entire book deliberately making life easier for the person he believes to have killed his father, really no.