In our stories, characters risk their lives, take a new path, start off on a journey, or confront villains. What motivates them? Often, it’s love…for a parent, a spouse, a friend, or a lover. Love and hate are powerful motivations in real life. They drive our characters in a believable way…if…we believe in that love.

So how do we show our readers that our main character really cares about this person? Why should he risk his life? Why should she leave her family and go off into the wilderness with him? Why should he risk his position in the Army to help this daughter of the enemy?

Well, it’s easy enough to tell the reader: He was falling head over heels in love with her. Well, do we believe you? Maybe as much as we’d believe the neighbor, or even our sister in law, if she told us about this affair. But that’s not the same as watching that magic bond form for ourselves. Then we really believe in it, we know it’s real, and we’ll read to the very end of the story, hoping that this bond survives. So how do we show it? Especially if we’re writing short fiction?

In general we care about the people we connect with…the ones who remind us of ourselves at an earlier age, of a beloved sibling, or a long lost friend whom perhaps we didn’t help. If we show the reader that moment of connection, when our Main Character finds the similarity to someone he has loved, or a childhood moment when she was in the same plight as the character, then we will see the reason this character is important, the reason that he will run into that fire, or she will let that kid into her lonely and defended life.

Any time that you want to highlight a moment in your story, you focus on the small details, you show us a close up of what is going on, much as the camera zooms in for a close-up in a movie. Then, you simply let your POV character, you main character, make the connection for us. You, the author, don’t need to say a word. So how exactly do you do this? Here’s an example. Our elderly woman, who has isolated herself for years in her perfectly manicured yard, shut away from the family that wouldn’t accept her choice of career and lover, has confronted the eleven year old girl who has been stealing her flowers. The girl, cornered, said defiantly that she was drawing the flowers, struggling to hide all traces of tears, threw them down and ran. Esther remembers her own defiant love of art and how that preoccupation with art and her love affair with an older artist drove a wedge between her and her family. But she persisted. And had some small successes with galleries, but the artist lover who never married her left, and her art was never very lucrative, so she has long felt that her dreams came to nothing. This is the ‘backstory’ to the moment of connection, when the bond is established for the reader. We find out what it is in the POV character’s life that leaves that person open to this particular connection. In this case, it’s Esther’s love of art. Her family and lover both saw her lack of sales as failure. Now, we’re ready to make the connection.

And then she saw her, hunched over a broken slab of sidewalk beneath the thick shade of an old elm whose thick shade was rotting the front of a sagging bungalow.  Slowly she walked over, the girl oblivious, her fraying braids with their grimy pink beads bobbing gently in the evening air as her hands flew across the concrete, a pile of colored chalk between her scabbed knees. Roses. Esther stared down at her glorious old Peace, its tough thorny branches, its stubborn green leaves and glorious buds come to life against that grainy sidewalk slab. A bead of dew glistened on the fat curve of the new bud she had admired last night. Dew. Created with a child’s chalk set.

So set up the character’s backstory, so that we know what it is about our ‘beloved’ that will connect. Then, in a scene with closeup details, let our POV connect to the one he or she needs to love. Let us see what it is that your POV cares about, what is valuable, loveable. I don’t need to tell you that Esther cares, and you don’t need to tell us that your character cares, when he or she connects to that other person.

The character bond is a powerful motivator and will drive your story strongly!

Never underestimate the power of love!