Motivation is one of those intangibles that makes the world go around. Examine any great book that you've ever read and consider the motivation of each of the main characters. What motivated Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird? What motivated the old fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea? What motivated Elmer Gantry?
Now add another dimension to it. What motivated other characters in those same novels? When you have several people interacting, perhaps all seeking the same thing but with different motivations, you've got the makings of a pretty good story.
Charles Bowden wrote a profile of a man who lost both legs and one arm in Vietnam. His story starts out with Max getting out of bed in the morning. "His day starts with his arm," wrote Bowden, "the one he has left. Using it to brace himself, he rolls off the bed and into his wheelchair as sunlight peeks through the window."
That's a case where it took motivation for the man just to get up in the morning - and for what?
Abraham Lincoln was motivated one night to relax from the stress of a long war and go to the theater with his wife. John Wilkes Booth was motivated to find a time and place where he could sneak up on the president and kill him.
Sometimes, when two motivations come together, history is made.
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Motivation can come from non-fiction characters too. I am reading Kitchen Confidential right now by Anthony Bourdain. He talks about his motivation for becoming a chef. He was lost in life being a trouble maker basically and he saw that chef's in the 80's were rock stars. It started that way but then he found he was motivated to connect with his French heritage through his cooking and he found a community to believe in.
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