Help with character plot motivation.... Please help.

[CastoffCaptain]

All righty, guys. I'm writing a story in which a character learns that her father is not who she thought he was.

Rather, she believes that he left her and her mother when she was about 11 years old. She doesn't know why, but her mother has always talked about him (when she does, which isn't much at all) in bad terms, saying it was HIS fault, that HE abandoned them, etc.

But it's not true. It's the MOTHER who has left, being the 'bad guy' in the situation, as it were, and the father's actually a pretty good guy, so my character is left in a total reversal of what she's thought of her parents her whole life.

HOWEVER. Why would the mother have left? What could she have done that my character will be able to find out by going through her dead father's things? I'm looking to start out with a vague, "Hey, Character, it wasn't your DAD that was bad, it was your MOM, but you don't get to know why until you go through his stuff."

So the problems are:
a) she'd need to find out SOMETHING so that she'd be willing to come and go through his things to begin with, because up until this point, she's hated him
b) what can she uncover that's going to be an "OH MY GOD" moment for her?

Can anyone help with ideas? I thought at first simply an affair, but that's just not quite... good enough, I think.

[Kairi Nightingale]

Try developing the characters a little more. That should help. Setting too.

Think about why the mom would lie to her daughter. What about her is 'bad'? Was she always 'bad'? Or did something happen to change her? If so, when did it happen? How does she think? What is she like? What was her marriage like for her? What is her relationship with her daughter? Does the mother truly believe she's right or is she lying to escape some kind of truth about herself? Or does she lie so that the daughter would be on 'her side' or otherwise wouldn't think badly of her? How does she normally act around the daughter versus how she truly is?

Which one of the parents worked and what did they do? Maybe they worked together at first, but a disagreement arose between them that ended with the falling out. Where do they live? That could affect what they did for a living, then and now.

What about the father? What kind of person was he? What was the marriage like for him? What was his relationship with the main character before he 'left'? What could have caused his death? What could he have done to make the mother leave? Or, if he didn't do anything, maybe it was something the mother thought he was doing. Or maybe the mother just got fed up with the father because he wasn't doing something she wanted. When did he die? Does the mother and daughter know that he died? What did they do upon his death? Was their a funeral? Did they go? Why or why not? Maybe it was his death that triggers the daughters interest in knowing her father more and what he did to her mother to make her so upset.

What about the main character? How old is she now? How was her childhood up until eleven. She would obviously have her own feelings toward her parents and a relationship with them at that age so what did she experience around the time the mom/dad left? How did the mom make it seem like the father left is she was the one that actually left with the daughter? Did she ever demand more of an answer as to what happened from her mother? Maybe that's how her suspicions start.

Some random ideas:

Maybe the mom actually kidnapped their daughter in some way. Maybe there actually was an affair, or maybe the mother thought there was one that led to some sort of conflict, like her leaving.

Or maybe there was some sort of misunderstanding between the mother and father? Maybe the father was doing something the mother didn't like and she ended up doing something that inadvertantly led to his death. Maybe because she didn't want to face the truth of her actions, she explained it away as being all the dad's fault and actually began believing it.

I don't know if that's any good but I hope that me asking questions at least got you thinking. What she finds in her father's things, and what she finds even before that spurs her investigation, is directly related to what had happened in the first place. So start from there. Develop the characters and try to find out what happened between the parents. Then coming up with a sequence of events for the character to follow in the story will be much easier.

Developing the father and mother more as characters could definitely help figure out some conflict between them, figuring into the events that happened that the protag finds out about.