Create strong characters in your stories by giving them a powerful driving force.

In order for any character to engage with the dramatic situation — and with each other — they must be propelled by an inner driving force. Each character in the drama is moved by their own force; and it’s this distinctive force that gives each their own personality, their own agenda to pursue, and their own style of being and behaving. It’s almost as if each character is ‘taken over’ by their force, and everything about them is a living embodiment of that force: the way they move, the things they say, the choices they make, the way they see the world — all dictated by their inner driving force.

By identifying a driving force for each character, even before starting the first draft, you give them energy to engage with the story and drive it forwards. And characters with opposing forces generate conflict and drama.

The range of forces is probably limitless — some strong, some subtle. To give you an idea, these are some common personalities reduced to their most basic and primitive forces:

• Force for Freedom — a character driven to create freedom in the world.
• Force for Control or Subjugation — a character driven to control and subjugate others and everything else in their universe.
• Force of Greed — a character with a driving need to have and possess and consume everything around them.
• Force for Discovery — a character driven to discover and understand everything there is to know in their world.
• Force for Honesty or Moral Behaviour — a character driven to uphold the highest standards of honesty and moral behaviour. Sometimes they direct this imperative upon themselves, and sometimes they try to force everyone to live up to their own perfect standards.
• Force for Personal Advancement — a character driven to pursue their own personal improvement and advantage, regardless of the damage caused to anyone else.
• Force for Social Order — a character driven to preserve order in society, or perhaps to impose order on others.
• Force for Anarchy — a character driven by a compelling need to create chaos and anarchy.
• Force of Obsession — a character who becomes totally obsessed with another person, object, inner fantasy or plan. (In a way, all characters driven by a force are obsessive; but other characters have a more generalised obsession, whereas a character driven by the force of Obsession itself is focused on a specific plan or person.)
• Force of Fear or Secrecy — a character driven by their fear of the world around them, or their need to hide things and keep secrets.
• Force for Alliance — a character driven to create and maintain alliances between people.
• Force of the Natural World — a character who is a creature of the wild, and lives completely according to their natural ways.
• Force of Satiety — a character driven to overwhelm themselves with sensory experiences.
• Force of Fate — sometimes Fate itself can become a player in the story, either working through a character or as an unseen force controlling events.

And so the list goes on. If you just watch a couple of good TV dramas or sitcoms, you’ll begin to see how the most dramatic characters are each driven in one of these ways (or in a different but equally powerful way).

Players driven by powerful personal forces are acting in a world of their own. The driving force becomes the lens through which they see the world and themselves. It colours and distorts everything they see. It’s as though they live in a bubble completely dominated their own inner force. For example, a character driven by the force for Discovery, sees everything around them as an opportunity for discovery (or an obstacle preventing them from discovering). This gives each character a strong personality and a powerful agenda to pursue. (Even if their force is submissive, this dominates their every thought, and drives them to more and more submissive actions.)

A driving force gives a character strength, but it can also be negative trait, because it limits and restricts them. In a sympathetic character this provides an opportunity for growth; but a tragic character realises their limitations too late.

The more primitive and basic forces, like those above, will tend to result in simple, archetypal stories. More realistic stories turn on characters with a driving force which is closer to their existing lives. Driving forces of this kind appear as everyday desires or needs, such as:

• desire to have children
• desire for outstanding personal success
• desire to be loved and taken care of
• desire for revenge
• desire to escape
• desire to relive past success

and so on. These everyday desires push the characters forward, but keep the story realistic.

Characters can sometimes surprise us by revealing an unexpected aspect. It springs from the same driving force but takes a different form, sometimes a completely contrasting form. So a perfectionist police detective may construct the most delicate models of ships in bottles as a pastime — putting the same perfectionism to a different end. This kind of unexpected behaviour can provide a refreshing counterpoint to their dominant behaviour.

A writer usually only discovers these counterpoints in the process of writing; and it may be that, for some characters, even the driving force itself only emerges during the writing. But eventually this force needs to be identified for each character, and clearly differentiated from all the other characters. It’s this range and variety of forces among the different characters which gives the whole story a broad emotional palette.

Giving each character a driving, dominating force may help you turn turn a weak character into strong, forceful player. It may also help you turn someone you have observed in real life into a dramatic character. Real people from everyday life often lack the dramatic energy needed in a powerful story, but if you can identify an inner driving force, and allow this to dominate, you may find that they suddenly spring to life.