: Re: What Drives a Broken man? There is this story that I was working on, for an extended period of time. I have scrapped many ideas and drafts but I just could not seem to let go. The idea

@LarsenBagley300

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The most natural story about a broken man is story of how he becomes less broken

Normally, someone has a (relatively) unified sense of self, and a hierarchy of priorities. A "broken man" has lost whatever central motivation he possessed. The man who wanted raise good children, and see them live better lives than he did? His children are dead. The man who was working late, taking night classes and sacrificing weekends to get the promotion and the corner office? His reputation was ruined, and he's now stuck in a dead-end job and knows he will never be promoted. Your "broken man" has faced a critical disappointment (or a critical mass of disappointments), and has given up.

So what's left, after you've lost your reason for living? A person still gets hungry, and eats. A person still gets bored, and drinks and/or watches TV. A person might still in the habit of going to work, and maybe doing enough to not get fired. He might still hold doors open for strangers, because it was conditioned into him by his mother when he was a child. Even with no unified sense of self or driving priority, the fragmentary pieces that once made up a whole man still linger on.

If some remaining fragment of habit to help when asked lingers, and help is asked for, your broken man can eventually be moved to go through the motions. That's perfectly reasonable. But a good story will not stop there.

A very typical part of a story is to take someone to their lowest point, where disappointment appears to be overwhelming them and they have given up - and then quickly or gradually stitch them back together. A broken leg won't hold your weight - but broken legs typically heal. Even a poorly healed leg, and a limp, is more functional than a fresh break and the inability to even stand. Even if your character does not fully heal and become as great as he ever was, once some kind of attachment develops between your character and whatever convenient plot device has begun to move him, he becomes definitionally less broken, because he has a sense of purpose and direction again.

The old man whose children all died starts out by yelling at kids to get off his lawn. But when one of the kids falls down while fleeing, and he give the kid first aid, then finds out the kid doesn't have much of a home to go to and begins to take an interest in helping the kid... The formerly ambitious worker, now disgraced and just marking time, meets a younger worker, not sufficiently motivated, and decides to light a fire under him / or meets a fiery and ambitious worker cruising to make the same mistakes and face the same humiliation, sees himself, and decides to take a hand in heading off someone else's catastrophe...

A character arc is about change. The renewed and growing interest in life implied by a budding attachment to some kind of cause is change.

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