In a post on Writers in the Storm, Lynnette Burrows introduces a technique for creating scenes called the MRU: the motivation-reaction unit. Structuring your character’s motivations and reactions is key to structuring your novel. “If you get the sequence out of order, you risk confusing or completely disengaging your reader,” Burrows says.
To understand the concept, you need to understand how brains react to stimuli. We have simple, detailed, and complex responses. A reflex is our simplest response. Our body reacts without our needing to think. A more complicated stimulus requires a more complicated reaction. We might have to think a moment to realize what’s happening and then make a quick choice about our best reaction.
Other stimuli, including social stimuli, are more complicated. If someone confronts or embarrasses you in public, you might have an immediate emotional reaction, a series of response choices, and uncomfortable moments later when you remember the scene.
To try this concept, you need to first understand your character’s motivation: the stimulus. This is the outside actor influencing your character: another character, the weather, or a situation. It’s something your character must react to. “To be an effective motivating stimulus, it must be something that is significant to your focal character,” Burrows writes. “It must be significant enough that it demands your focal character react actively.” The best stimuli are pertinent to your story and set up a character choice or change. It must also make sense to the reader.
The second part of the unit – the reaction – is whatever your character feels, says, or thinks in response to the stimulus. For this to make sense for the reader, your character should feel, act, and then speak, in that order, Burrows says. Like the stimulus, the reactions should be significant, pertinent to your story, and active. The reaction is significant when it shifts the character and moves the story forward.
So, why use this technique? Burrows writes a sample scene where a character’s motivation and reaction are out of order, making the scene hard to follow. She then reorders the description so that the motivating stimulus comes first, followed by the POV character’s emotional reaction, and finally her action.
MRUs don’t have to be long. You can use them in a few paragraphs or even a few sentences. A reflexive reaction to stimuli might even be a single sentence or portion of one. “With a clear motivating stimulus, your character can react with as much feeling, action, and speech as is appropriate for that character and situation,” Burrows writes. “Using the motivation-reaction unit follows the same pattern your brain does. That pattern helps you write a story that makes sense to the reader, that compels the reader to keep reading.”
