Nobody wakes up wanting to save the world.
People wake up annoyed. Their brother got the better job. The neighbor parks too close. An old teacher said they’d never amount to anything, and twenty years later they still hear it. Real people carry a pocketful of small grievances everywhere they go, and a surprising amount of what they do comes out of that pocket.
Fiction forgets this all the time. Heroes get noble causes, villains get grand schemes, and everybody’s reasons are large, clean and suitable for a movie poster.
Then readers shrug, because the characters feel like costumes.
A post went around a big fantasy gaming page this week with a cosplayer explaining her character’s motivation: she’s going on an adventure because Kevin said she wouldn’t.
Hundreds of people piled into the comments with their own. A paladin out for vengeance because his wife left him for a rival political faction. A bard who wants every tavern in the land to play his songs so his ex can never escape them. A warrior who went after a dragon on a bet. A farmer’s son who became an adventurer because he didn’t want to get up early to milk the cows. Gamers already know something a lot of novelists miss. Petty is real, and real is what readers believe.
Why do petty motivations make characters believable?
Because everybody has them, and everybody recognizes them.
Very few readers have tried to overthrow an empire. Every reader has done something stupid to prove a point. They’ve stayed in a job a year too long because quitting would mean their father was right. They’ve worked twice as hard on a project because a coworker smirked. When a character does the same, the reader thinks, I know that feeling, and from then on the character is a person.
My characters are human beings, or aliens, or animals, and they have all the usual things living beings have. That includes the small, ugly, petty things. I don’t add them as decoration. They’re just there, the way they’re there in everyone I’ve ever met.
A noble motive tells the reader what the character wants. A petty motive tells the reader who the character is.
What counts as a petty motivation?
Anything small that a character treats as big.
Spite is the classic. So is envy, and its cousin, the need to be seen as better than someone in particular. A grudge over a slight nobody else remembers. Wounded pride. Wanting the last word in an argument. Wanting to be thanked. Wanting the bigger house, the nicer car or the better seat at the table. Wanting a particular person to finally admit they were wrong.
The key word is particular. A petty motive comes with a name attached. The character isn’t trying to prove that people are wrong about her. She’s trying to prove that Kevin is wrong about her. The specificity rings true, and it hands you, the writer, someone to bring back later. Kevin can show up in chapter twenty. Abstract injustice can’t.
A noble motive tells the reader what a character wants. A petty motive tells the reader who the character is. Give your characters a grudge as well as a cause. – Richard LoweShare on X
Do great villains have petty motivations?
Many of the best ones do. The small grievance is the frightening part.
Shakespeare’s Iago destroys Othello, Desdemona and nearly everyone around them, and his stated grievance at the start of the play is that he got passed over for a promotion. Another man got the lieutenant’s job he wanted. An office grudge, and it ends in a pile of bodies.
In Amadeus, Salieri wars on Mozart out of envy. He’s a successful court composer and he can’t stand that a vulgar young man has more talent than he does. In Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent curses an infant because she wasn’t invited to the christening. Somebody in that thread put it perfectly: you didn’t invite me to the baby shower, so I’ll have to doom the child.
A villain with a petty motive is scarier than a villain with a grand plan, because you can see how an ordinary person gets there. Almost nobody wants to rule the world. Plenty of people have felt passed over, outshone or left off the guest list. The reader recognizes the feeling and then watches it grow into something monstrous. I’ve written before about why villain motivations fall apart, and the most common failure is a villain whose reasons are too big and too abstract to feel. Shrink them, and they get stronger.
Can a hero have a petty motivation?
Yes, and the hero gets more interesting for it. The young woman who sets out on an adventure because Kevin said she wouldn’t is a hero. She just isn’t a saint. She’ll still fight the monster and save the village. Her reason for being on the road in the first place is that she was annoyed. That tells you something about her stubbornness that a speech about destiny never could.
Mixed motives are the sweet spot.
A character who wants to save her town and also wants to be the one who gets credit for it is far more believable than a character who only wants the town saved. The noble reason gets her out of bed. The petty one decides how she behaves when nobody’s watching.
And petty motives give a story somewhere to go. A character who starts out driven by spite can grow past it, or can fail to. Either way, you have an arc. A character who starts out perfect has nowhere to go but down.
How petty motives show up in my own novels
They’re everywhere in my library, because my characters are people, and people are petty.
Shield of Ashes is about ordinary people trying to survive a nuclear war, and the war doesn’t make them noble. They bring every grudge and resentment they had before the bombs into the world after them. Peacekeeper is the same, with people trying to survive on a scale that runs across thousands of years. A great cause doesn’t erase small resentments. It gives them more room to do damage.
The Eternal War sends a military AI into Dante’s hell, where it recruits history’s great generals to fight a war that has run since the beginning of time. The stakes could not be bigger, and the generals still squabble over who gets credit. Patton claims Guderian’s plan is the one he already proposed, and Guderian won’t let it go: “Yours is nihilistic. Mine is tactical.”
Even Lucifer is petty. When he finds out he’s been manipulated, he throws out the people who brought him the news, along with their “insufferable machine detective.”
The Prince of Darkness shoots the messenger like any middle manager.
The Woman Who Walked Through Walls goes further. It opens with Brit scrolling through photos of a party she wasn’t invited to and chewing on one question: “Did they not tell me or did they just not think of me?” Small, and it sticks. Then she and the two other women get a device that lets them walk through walls and slip between worlds, and nothing they do ever has to be answered for. Take away consequences and you find out what was underneath.
What was underneath, in one chapter, is three women breaking up a stranger’s relationship in a hotel lobby for no reason at all. The book’s own words are “because three women had been bored on a Tuesday.” No profit. No revenge. Just pettiness with a superpower.
The Victorian Reimagined series has its share too. Eurydice: The Confession of Tom Ayrton is the story of a man who did something very bad and spent twelve years marooned on an island for it. His crimes are large. His irritations are small. After the rescue, an orangutan who sits beside him every morning sits beside someone else one day, and Ayrton is annoyed, and surprised at himself for being annoyed. Twelve years of guilt, and he’s jealous of an orangutan.
Even my children’s book has it. In The Wild Tiger and the Answer Bot, a classmate named Devon waits for the teacher to turn around. Then he holds up a sign that reads “BLAZE KNOWS EVERYTHING ABOUT NOTHING.” Later, when Blaze finally buries him in facts, she admits she was smiling so hard it blurred her vision. Nine years old, and already petty on both sides of the aisle.
I never set out to give a character a petty streak. I write them, and they take over, and somewhere along the way they show me what annoys them.
How do you give a character a petty motivation?
Ask what the character resents. Not what she wants, what she resents.
Who told her she couldn’t? Who got the thing she deserved? Whose approval does she still want, years after she should have stopped caring? Then attach a name to it.
Keep it proportionate to the story. One gamer in that thread pointed out the trouble with motives that are too big for the opening chapters. A first-level character who has to save her father from a lich right after she finds a lost goat looks ridiculous. A petty motive fits any scale. It’s urgent and enormous to the character and small to everyone else. Readers find that funny, then touching, then real.
Let it cost something. The best petty motives get characters into trouble they’d never have found otherwise. Pride keeps them from asking for help. Spite keeps them in a fight they should have left. Envy makes them take a risk to look good in front of the one person they want to impress.
And let it change, or refuse to. The woman who left home to prove Kevin wrong can return home someday and realize she stopped thinking about him years ago. Or she can find Kevin and discover she still cares. Both are good endings. Both started with a grudge.
Give them a grudge
Big causes make plots. Small grudges make people. A character who only wants to save the world is a poster. A character who wants to save the world and also wants her brother to admit she was right is somebody readers will follow for four hundred pages.
The Writing Hub has more on building characters readers remember, including why most writers get backstory wrong. If you’re writing a novel and want help making its people feel real, my book coaching works on exactly that. Start by asking each character one question. Who said you couldn’t?
