Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Every once in a while I remember that, during the last round of workshopping people’s writing in my fiction class, I got into a fight with my teacher and the rest of the class about whether or not motive mattered in writing.  This one story was about this guy who was a serial killer and his girlfriend who…evidently knew he was a serial killer for months if not years and did nothing and the last scene was her murdering him with poison in his food.  (There were a lot of really heavy rape-y abusive overtones and I was kind of like…sweetheart, have you considered therapy rather than exorcising your issues onto all of us.)  And I made what I thought was the totally valid remark of “Well, it’s not clear what makes her snap and murder him; like, she’s known for a while, generally people don’t just suddenly DECIDE to kill their significant other who they’ve shown no violent inclinations toward in the past without some sort of prompting, and like you don’t need to get into the motive much in the story but maybe hint at it?  Because murder?”

And the whole class basically sat around talking about how motive doesn’t matter and it’s fine that she just kills him for no apparent reason and how in writing it’s fine if there’s no motive because the characters do what they need to for the writer’s plot to work and I was just like “Wow, that’s right, this is why I fight with most of you about writing so much, it’s because in order for a plot to function, motives need to…like…exist.”

Like, if your character goes to get a smoothie, it matters if they’re getting it because they’ve had a bad day and smoothies are a fave, or because they’re on a health kick and they’d rather have a milkshake, or because they’re meeting someone there, or whatever.  It changes the character’s backstory and behavior.  Am I crazy?