As audience members, we have to understand character motivations in order to engage with what’s going on in a story.

Ideally, most scenes are about a character trying to achieve something, where we understand what they’re trying to achieve — AND WHY — and can feel invested in the outcome they’re going for.

This means that in some prior scene(s), their desires and the reasons for them have been made clear. And hopefully not just from expositional dialogue where they’re talked about. It’s much better if you can set up what they want and why they want it through dramatic scenes where they have problems, emotions and desires that are easy to connect with, and which launch for them the objectives they will pursue in future scenes.

Even in an outline or pitch, if you just describe what characters are doing and what the audience would see on screen, but it’s unclear why people are doing what they’re doing and what they’re trying to achieve, and how they believe it will benefit them (which hopefully most audience members can relate to), it will just feel like a description of people doing things that the audience or reader has no reason to really care about.

I can anticipate a question you might want to ask, that I’ve heard from many writers I’ve mentored: “What about mystery? Isn’t it compelling for the audience to not know and want to figure out what’s behind someone’s actions?”

As I’ve written about before, mystery can be great in a script if it’s a mystery the main character is trying to solve. This puts the audience where you want them to be: in the main character’s shoes. But I think it’s best not to withhold information about why they’re doing what they’re doing. Better to reveal it and then add difficulties and complications. We love watching characters struggle. We don’t usually love trying to imagine why they’d be doing what they’re doing.

But you don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of time setting up the character motivations for eveyone in a script. I’m really talking about your main character only. In many features, there is only one main character. Everything is seen and experienced through their perspective. We need to get what that is and be engaged by the conflicts they experience as they pursue what they want. To the extent other people are in their way, we might want some understanding of what those other people want, but that’s less critical than really understanding on an emotional level what the main character wants. (Although you usually do want to avoid making others’ motivations puzzling or downright unbelievable.)

One of the reasons episodic TV writing can be harder than closed-ended stories is that series are almost always more ensemble-based, meaning that in any given episode (even pilots), you have multiple “main characters” pursuing desires, whose stories intertwine. Some movies do this but in TV it’s standard. And to the extent that we’re following one of these people as they pursue what they want and experience the slings and arrows of its difficulty — meaning they have a “story” — the audience needs to get and relate to their motivations in order to engage and be entertained by it.

As is often the case, it boils down to point-of-view. Stories work best when they’re told from a particular character’s perspective that is clear and relatable. Whether you have one story in a script or multiple, the best scenes are usually mini-stories about one aspect of them trying to pursue their larger goal, and how that works out. Usually, it doesn’t, and they only bring complications down on themselves that “change the game” of what they’re trying to do and make it harder.

The key is that the audience feels like they’re inside the scenes with a rooting interest. And that generally only happens if they clearly get what’s motivating the actions being taken. What’s behind it, why they want it, what they’re going for, how they think it will make their life better. Hopefully the audience is onboard for all of that, which allows them to enjoy the beats of them pursuing what’s motivating them, to the highest degree.