credible motivation

 I’m reaching the end of my novel re-write this week. I’ve dealt with the Supreme Ordeal, and now it’s just a case of wrapping up the narrative’s loose ends.

In the original version of this book, the one that’s over thirty years old, I have five villains, and not a clue what the motivation some of them was for making mischief.  Some of the changes I’ve made in this rewrite have been about getting rid of that mess.

Now I’m down to two villains.  I made both of them from the same species.  A century ago they lost a major war against humans.  The humans have moved on to work with the enemy since then, but the aliens still bear a major grudge.  Many of them are still very angry at humans for winning that war.

This provides the motivation for the set-piece destruction scene at the end of the book.  The centenary of the end of that war is coming up, and them aliens are planning a large revenge attack against humans.  The aliens worm their way into a sinister religious sect and recruit many humans to their faith.  They pose as priests in order to carry out their attack.

I’ve kept the original destruction scenes from the original draft, but it plays out rather differently this time.  My main characters have already checked out the huge room where the ceremony takes place.  They’ve found no bugs or traps there, so the damage had to be done in a different way.  Cue wheeling in a disguised altar to blast out the hulk with.

In the first book I had lots of people killed, but I don’t  really like doing that in my fiction.  There’s enough of that horror in the real world.  So a little research around decompression in space provided me with the answer.  People near the breached wall would get sucked out into space, the the further away from the breach you are, the more the airflow falls off.  So if I sent my people to the far walls of the long room, most are not going to get sucked out.

The air is still escaping though, so I had to set up that I’d arranged for a repair crew to be on site, ready to plug the breach from the outside and stop the atmosphere escaping.  And thus the priests’ desire to massacre humans was thwarted.

In a second scene I have another alien spacing a human for daring to leave the cult.  This reinforces how sinister they are, and the motivation for that attack ties in neatly with that for the big attack.

Getting clear on motivations - and greatly simplifying them - has made the action of the story flow better too.  The reasons for the antagonists’ actions are now credible, and rooted in the story which I’ve already told.  I’m happy with this aspect of the novel now.



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