#kinng

Tyler Kinng 1// SIMPLE SIMPLE EP ON THE WAY

Okay,so, I’m answering this as part of my initiative to actually answer thehundred-million asks I have in my inbox. And no, your questions made perfect sense! :)

This is certainly farpast when you would have figured it out on your own, but I’m going to answer itanyway in case someone else is having the same problem.

Ithink it helps to step back from motivation and focus instead on backstory. Ifyou could come up with a backstory for the king, then you might come across asituation where he would come to distrust witches.

Perhapsthink of what he was like as a prince. Maybe he was arrogant and made a betwith a witch—and lost. Then the witch took her prize, and the prince decidedshe was evil, so now he thinks all witches are scammers.

Or awitch killed a beloved family member or friend. What if his mother was a witch,and he blamed a coven for taking her away?

So it’snot about motivation—it’s about who the king is as a character and what he’sexperienced to make him that way.

It’sgenerally a bit simplistic to go “Okay, so the king doesn’t like witches. Ummm,sure, it’s because he thinks witches are ugly.” And that can be fine, but what’sthe root of it? Not liking witches because he thinks they’re ugly is fairly2-dimensional, because there are too many factors that could bring intoquestion what exactly “ugly” means.

Soinstead of starting in the middle and building around it, start from thebeginning and let it develop naturally. In the case of the king, for example,maybe his dislike of witches starts off simple, but more and more things happento him that put witches in an unfavorable light. So if he vaguely dislikes themat age 10, he could easily despise their existence by age 25. It depends on howcommonplace witches are and if he would have had opportunities to interact withthem.

Focuson the core of the character and leave the surface-level “motivations” for copshows. (That’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, for those of you that like cop shows.)

It gets better.

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