Coherent motivation

I'm a science fiction writer and not a crime writer, but I'm surrounded by crime writer friends whose work I know well.  And over the years a little of their modus operandi has rubbed off on me.

This week I've been quite grateful for the insights into the crime writer's mind.  I'm rewriting an old novel that has lots of crimes in it, but the original draft was all over the place.  Not surprising, I suppose, because that draft is over fifteen years old.

I know that, in real life, police deal with lots of crimes that are committed by lots of different people. And in reality, a large orbital shipyard like the one I'm writing about would have the same variety of crime too.  And as in real life, Darius would have its pickpockets out on the leisure deck every evening, and I'm sure the shipyard's scammers would be out in force too, selling their equivalent of snake oil to the gullible.

But these people and their everyday crimes don't give enough drama and danger to hold the book together.  I'm mindful of the fact that I need a supreme ordeal at the end of the book, a big, dramatic event.  But to get that event to work and not look gratuitous it needs to be rooted in the events which go before it.

And this is where coherent motivation comes in. The original first draft of the book was written back in the days when I was still a pantser.  It has a lot of viewpoints, and a lot of interesting action, but the action is rather unfocused.  It's different people committing different crimes for different reasons.  I had to do a table to figure out who was the perpetrator of each and why.  And if I couldn't remember who did what and why certainly the reader wouldn't.  I needed to pull them all together.

Enter the motive of revenge.  Over a very long timescale.  Revenge of one species for another massacring them in a war a century ago.  That overarching motive then trickled down into the Oriellish hating Hyam Scwanberger for his family's involvement in that war.  Which then ties in to the destruction  of his ships, and by a twisted logic, with the attempts on Jian Kabana's life.

Now I have my coherent motivation, a logical thread that ties all the various crimes together.  And with that coherent motivation I'm confident that I can write an ending that works.