Thanks, and I totally appreciate the effort you’ve put into this. I’ve bookmarked it and will be scouring over the site.

The point I was trying to make is that with my character I’m looking for what drives her into the bad habits to begin with. While the protagonist is on a positive character arc, hers is negative.

Teens go through lots of drama and many experiment with alcohol and sex. My goal is to realistically depict how my character slides from what might be casual into destructive behavior, where she’s using these to medicate herself.

I’ve picked a personality type for her where she is happy if she thinks she’s pleasing him. She then becomes self conscious and insecure. If he’s looking at another girl or otherwise not responding as she expects she’ll blame herself first. As time goes on she drinks more.

Hi, Joe. What we’ve discovered while studying story structure is that most times, the outer story goal (outer motivation) is a representation of something that’s missing internally. This inner motivation is almost always tied to a basic human need that the character is lacking. One of the reasons why we chose to do a thesaurus was to explore that connection between the outer and inner motivations. Depending on the character and his/her circumstances, there can be more than one need for some motivations. Pursuing education, for example. For one character, the missing need driving this motivation could be safety and security; due to life circumstances, she’s always lived on the edge of poverty and has never been able to do much about it. But she has an opportunity to pursue a degree or skill that will help her get a better job and provide an elevated level of safety for her family. So safety and security is the need driving this goal for her. But for someone else, it could be self-actualization that’s missing. They’ve always wanted to pursue higher education, but for various reasons they’ve never been able to. Doing so now, the character is fulfilling the need that’s been missing to better himself, to learn and grow in knowledge. While each goal could have more than one motivation, only one of those needs is going to be driving each character. Which is why we only include one inner motivation for each outer motivation in this thesaurus.

The roadblocks for a given goal will be largely the same regardless of which need is driving it, so that’s why we’ve got a lot of different options under that field.

Best of luck with your story. Sounds like you’re making good headway.

My leading lady (the protagonist’s love interest with an important character arc of her own) is a 14 year old freshman in high school who through her brother and boyfriend ends up socializing with much older “kids.” I need her to follow a story-long journey to get to the climax, which involves getting introduced to and then falling prey to alcohol and sex. I can check off about half of your “Roadblocks” that I’ve used to get her into trouble as well as keeping her from escaping.

I’m nearly finished with a multi-chapter story arc that has her depressed after being disrespected by her mother which causes her to progress from social drinks to coming home drunk and getting grounded; the bickering with her boyfriend; and other things that set the precedent for her “medicating” herself with drink. Of course, the triggers will only get worse later on and she’ll still have unrealistic expectations and a lack of a support system.